Before Mars is colonized by humans, it will be colonized by robots.
This is a technological necessity but, as a human with an ego, I'm still salty about it.
(Science fiction author Corey H. Spears, blog post, 2039)
Humanity's first permanent presence on Mars sprang up on a low northern plain near the
Hecates Tholus volcano. (Don't worry, it's long extinct -- as is every volcano on the planet. Mars is geologically comatose.)
This site was rated by MHII as likely to contain plentiful deposits of subterranean mineral resources and frozen water. It was also -- though they did not realize it at the time -- prone to some of the most inhospitable weather on the planet.
A satellite's-eye view of the proposed region. This is the area map, partitioned into sectors which must be scanned one at a time to find resource deposits and science anomalies. We begin with one sector scanned, in the center north -- that blue-and-white icon signifies a concrete deposit -- and our rocket, the
Bonaventure, carries two orbital probes, which we use to auto-scan two adjacent sectors.
In the southern sectors you can see areas of permanent surface frost. That is not frozen water, it's frozen carbon dioxide.
And here's our overhead naked-eye view (well, camera view) of those scanned sectors -- including our rocket's landing site, where our first permanent installations will be built. This landscape you're looking at is where it all begins.
There are scattered surface deposits of metal -- thankfully Mars has these -- and we choose a site with as many in reach as possible.
Bonaventure touches down with its cargo of robots, pre-fabricated buildings and spare parts. Humanity has sent unmanned expeditions to Mars before, but this time, we are coming to stay.
MMHI's rockets (they currently have two,
Bonaventure and one to be named later) are reusable and run on hydrogen fuel. To get
Bonaventure back to Earth, it will be necessary to establish a fuel refinery and produce it on-site. Fortunately our cargo includes a pre-fab refinery.
First out of the rocket is our state-of-the-art remote controlled transport rover, nicknamed
Huey. Huey is our workhorse, and not only can carry a large load of cargo, but can extract materials from surface deposits. (I assume it has little robot arms for that purpose, somewhere, not shown.)
After Huey come our gang of 5
drones. Drones are how most work gets done on the Martian surface -- they can transport goods (but only 1 unit at a time), extract materials from surface deposits, and construct buildings. You'll often see them zipping about the place doing their jobs.
Drones work autonomously, but they need a central hub to operate from and recharge their batteries, and can only operate within range of their hub. Rockets can serve as a hub, and for the moment these little guys are using the
Bonaventure as theirs, but before long we'll build a few dedicated Drone Hubs for them to operate from.
A depot is established, essentially a platform where goods are stockpiled, and the drones get busy unloading the
Bonaventure. These are advanced materials (from left to right)
Machine Parts,
Electronics, and
Polymers, all of which are needed to build and maintain our installations. MHII anticipates that eventually a colony will be able to manufacture these vital resources locally. But for now, advanced resources must be shipped from Earth at the expense of the MHII budget. (Actually polymers can occasionally turn up in surface deposits, but only in small amounts.)
By evening the drones have finished their unloading, and move on to exploit a nearby metal deposit. Huey, having spent the day doing the same, trundles by with its cargo.
With components from Earth and locally harvested metals, the drones have what they need to construct the first installations: a power generator and a scanning tower. By sunrise they are finished.
The building on the left is a
Stirling generator designed for use on the Martian surface. How these function in real life I have no idea, but in game terms they are a reliable source of continuous power (though expensive to build; this initial one is a free pre-fab from Earth). They have two settings, open and closed. When closed, a Stirling generator is maintenance-free. When open, it produces additional power at the cost of being subject to dust and regular repairs.
The true enemy on Mars is dust. Although it's not coarse and rough -- it is in fact quite fine and powdery -- it is sure as hell irritating and it definitely gets everywhere. It's also electrostatic. Nearly everything operating on the Martian surface gets choked with dust and needs regular cleaning, which is performed by drones, and often requires a small amount of materials to do so. Don't overbuild lest your maintenance costs get too great to handle.
The scanner tower, on the right, increases the speed at which new sectors are scanned, and also keeps an eye out for incoming disasters such as dust storms. Like most buildings, it requires power, and you can see the white power cable connecting it to the generator.
Of crucial importance to Martian architecture is
concrete. Luckily, this too can be produced locally. Certain patches of the Martian soil are rich in sulfur, identifiable by its yellow color and "concrete is here" icon. Enter the MHII Martian Concrete Surface Extractor, more colloquially known as "the scraper". This machine excavates sulfur-rich regolith and cures it in an internal oven, producing neat cubes of concrete ready for building.
Concrete production also generates a quantity of
waste rock which is carried away by drones to a designated dumping site.
Meanwhile, back on Earth ...
Using data transmitted from the
Bonaventure, MHII scientists theorized a possible advancement in the
robotics field which might, in the future, yield benefits.
This is not actually very useful, but it's an opportunity for me to show the Research screen. For the most part I'll probably mention research only when we discover something, but just know that there are lot of techs (some of them game-changing), research is always going on, and there are things we can do such as build laboratories to improve our research speed.
Research occurs in seven categories: Terraforming, Biotech, Engineering, Robotics, Physics, Social, and Breakthroughs. Breakthrough techs are especially useful and can radically change the lives of your Martian colonists, but they must be discovered before they can be researched.
MHII's "great leap" was to advance in a mid-level tech, Factory AI, which makes factories more productive. We haven't actually learned this tech, we just gained the option to research it without having to discover all the earlier techs on the Robotics track. It's not a huge deal.
With careful monitoring from Earth, a few weeks into the mission had seen a successful beginning to the project, with a stockpile of construction material, a small power surplus, and a battery to store the excess power.
Finally, on June 8, 2040, came the data the command team had hoped for:
The confirmation of an underground frozen water deposit, just north of the
Bonaventure landing site.
As recalled by Deputy Project Leader Esha Burton in their autobiography: "This was the last ingredient in the recipe. We knew that if we could find water, we'd have the means to not only produce hydrogen fuel for the rockets, but also, of course, to support human colonists. When we got the data in June, we were celebrating. That was a late night."