As if the cruel Martian atmosphere wasn't enough, you will also have to deal with disillusioned renegades in your quest to colonise the red planet in colony-building sim Surviving Mars. At least you'll be able to build wonder domes to calm those nasty elements down. We asked lead designer Boian Spasov how it all works.

PC Gamer: Can you talk about the different types of colonists you have in Surviving Mars?

Boian Spasov: Colonists are differentiated from one another by their traits. Your little "Martians" can have several traits, ranging from useful, through detrimental to just plain weird. For example, a rugged colonist will take no penalties when eating unprepared rations or having no residence, while a melancholic will suffer increased penalties when his morale is low. There are some exceptional traits like genius or celebrity - these denote truly special people that often grant benefits to the whole colony.  PC Gamer: As the game goes on, how will you see your colonists change?  

Spasov: They will settle on Mars, gain and lose traits, have children if your colony is nice enough, live their lives, grow old and eventually die. Ideally of old age, but alas, too often from unfortunate circumstances such as suffocation, starvation or hypothermia. Nobody said that conquering Mars would be an easy task.

The current disposition of each colonist is measured by four parameters - Health, Sanity, Comfort and Morale. All of them have tangible gameplay effects. The Morale value directly affects any individual Work performance. A colonist with no remaining Health will perish. A colonist with no Sanity will go insane and may even commit suicide.  PC Gamer: What kinds of jobs can your colonists do? 

Spasov: We already talked about traits, but colonists also differ by their specializations, which allow them to perform better at certain workplaces. While it is still possible to employ untrained colonists, you will need specialists to science the shit out of stuff and gain maximal benefits.

Some jobs are perfectly fine for unskilled labourers—a bartender or a cook doesn't need any special education. Geologists perform better in mines, botanists love growing potatoes in your farms, engineers increase the production of factories, while officers can be useful for keeping any renegade elements in your society under check. 

PC Gamer: You have colonists who can revolt, right? How do you maintain order when the renegades turn against you? 

Spasov: We are not talking organized rebellions here, like the ones we had in Tropico. The renegades are disillusioned individuals that no longer believe in the ideals and vision of the mission. They are basically out for themselves. Renegades perform badly on their jobs and also can steal valuable resources or even sabotage some buildings in extreme cases.

You can counter them with additional security measures, but ideally you would want to improve the conditions in the colony and convert them back to your cause. I am sure the players will find more creative ways to deal with them, though, like stranding them in a Dome without food or water.

PC Gamer: How do wonders work in the game, and what effect do they apply to your dome?

Spasov: Wonders are grand projects that are researched with technology available very late in the game and require tons of resources. Each of them can be constructed only once and grants a major benefit not only to a single Dome, but to the entire colony. They can solve major problems for you like late-game resource depletion and generally look quite impressive.

Coincidentally, there are seven of them, but I will tell you about my favorite—the Artificial Sun. This is our pet name for a fantastic Fusion generator that provides colossal amounts of electrical power. The reaction glows so bright that it illuminates the surrounding area and powers your Solar Panels even during the Martian night, hence the name. You have to be careful to never shut the Artificial Sun down—it requires quite a lot of water to be restarted and since the colony is probably dependent on its Power it is best to ensure that you have the redundancies in place to keep it running at all times.

In Surviving Mars, you're tasked with building a colony on the red planet, a gig that requires you to keep your colonists both alive and happy, while dealing with the perils of the surrounding environment. Resources are a huge consideration in any management game, and settling on Mars creates a bunch of headaches in this regard. 

In the short video above, you'll learn a little more about resources and how they work in the game. Below, Boian Spasov, lead designer of Surviving Mars at former Tropico dev Haemimont Games, explains this system in more depth, and how you'll need more than money to keep your colony ticking along.

Can you talk about how resources work in Surviving Mars, and how that plays into the survival element of the game?

When we started working on Surviving Mars it quickly became apparent to us that a traditional city-builder resource system won't do at all. We put a concentrated effort to emphasise elements that are not common for the genre but are tightly tied to the survival aspect of the game, such as scanning for resources, deposit scarcity and transportation problems.

Our main objective was to create a rich, deep system where resources feel different from one another and are not just requirements for placing new buildings, but instead present different kinds of thematic problems. Your water towers may freeze. A metal deposit may run dry. A critical building may stop working because the electronics required to repair it is not available.

What are the different ways you can make money in the game? How do you gather resources?

First things first—on Mars money will not always solve your immediate problems. When a cable is faulty or a pipe leaks, you are not able to simply plug the hole with dollar bills.

Your limited funding is kind of a wildcard, allowing you to order prefab buildings, vehicles and resources from Earth. Delivery takes time though, so these may arrive too late to be of any use and you still need to be able to secure fuel for the return trips of the rockets. Funding is also kinda hard to earn—you can get it by exporting precious metals but such deposits are few and far between as by some other, more exotic methods such as pampering a celebrity in your colony.

As for the other resources, there are quite a lot of them. Construction materials such as metals and concrete are required to expand your colony and for maintenance. They are usually gathered from deposits and these deposits will eventually run out.

Advanced resources such as Polymers and Electronics are produced in factories and will be required in large quantities for more advanced buildings. Initially you will not be able to make them in the colony and will have to rely on supplies from Earth for them. Resource self-sufficiency is a huge milestone that cannot be reached trivially in the early days of your colony.

Most of your buildings require electricity to operate, which is another kind of resource to manage. Life support resources such as Oxygen, Water and Food are critical for the survival of your colonists. Each of these systems may fail in a different way, so it is always prudent to keep emergency storages and to always have a backup plan.

How important is it to pick the right spot to build your base in Surviving Mars? What other factors do you have to be aware of at the start of the game?

Even as you are setting up the game, you will be faced with several choices very relevant to the resources that you will have available later on. Where on Mars you will land? Do you prefer a dangerous location rich in metal deposits, or a relatively safer location with secured water supply? What will you take in your first rocket? Will you add additional probes to the payload, allowing you to scan more sectors before you pick your landing site?

Picking your colony location is an involved process. The first step is to customise the mission parameters. Different mission sponsors and the chosen mission commander specialisation will make certain gameplay elements much easier or harder for you.

Then you will determine the initial payload of your rocket. You can go with the default or customise it picking any prefab buildings, starting resources and vehicles up to the rocket capacity and the limits of your funding.

Next, you have to select a rough colony location anywhere on Mars. This choice will determine the topology of the map you play on. Different maps may be rich or scarce on certain deposits and will offer various environmental challenges such as Dust Storms.

Finally, you will be able to scan a limited part of the map with Probes and will have to select an exact landing site. At this stage you have to take care to plan both for nearby deposits and potential expands at this stage—the map is vast and different positions offer different advantages and challenges.

At the start of the game you land drones before your colonists arrive. How does this phase of the game shape what happens next?

The early game stage, the so-called "automated colony" is one of my favorite elements in the game. You are basically putting down the foundation of a much larger project—establishing basic infrastructure, securing essential life support, testing your tech against the dangers of the red planet for the first time and making use of the limited resources that can be exploited at this stage. This stage feels both safer, since machines are more easily replaceable than humans and incredibly crucial, because planning mistakes at this point can have far-reaching consequences.

Also, the drone workers are cute. I just love the industrious little guys and I hope they will remember this if they decide to take over my colony at some point in the future.

Can you talk about exporting, and how you can use that to make more money?

If is fairly straightforward—you can load a rocket with precious metals (one of the few things that have significant value on Earth, but a more limited use on Mars), refuel it so it can return to Earth and you get a small funding boost. Extracting precious metals and producing fuel require separate infrastructure. Precious metal deposits are scarce and require colonist workers so you can't really get to them very early in the game. Fuel is highly explosive and its production will put a strain on your very limited water supply.

Still, even if you don't discover a rich deposit of rare metals, you can get to self-sufficiency with careful planning and prudent usage of your starting funds. As I said earlier, it is not a game about money. Funding is often less important than vital little things like oxygen and power that we take for granted on Earth.

How conscious do you have to be of factors outside of your control, like meteor storms?

Disasters are a thing in the game as much as you want them to be. You can pick a very safe map, or challenge yourself with a more aggressive location, braving seasonal Dust Storms and extreme Cold Waves. Each of these disasters offers a different set of challenges—for example a Dust Storm will reduce the effectiveness of your Solar Panels, making you rely on stored power and alternative energy sources. It will also clog your structures with fine dust, forcing you to perform maintenance more often, thus putting a strain on your limited resources.

I still remember one game in which a huge meteor landed right in the middle of my initial landing site, devastating all my vehicles. I am talking about a one-in-a-million chance here, something that hasn't yet happened in any other playtest that we've made. It is as if the piece of rock decided it will be jolly good fun to screw up my colony in particular. Still, I landed a second rocket some time later and eventually managed to salvage some materials from the ruined vehicles and recover—it was definitely a very memorable playthrough!