With the addition of the trigon dorito dome, I've been wondering about it's lack polymers. If it only required five or some ridiculously tiny number that would be one thing, but this makes me think of a bunker, which makes me think of actual plans for colonizing Mars. Most of them involve using the ice, a resource that isn't present in the game (unless you count cold waves) to build structural materials. So I'm proposing some additions to the resource system that turns Waste Rock into Sand and everything else into Sand given enough time.
First of all, we need one new resource. Ice. Ice along with Sand would be picked up by a new trawling harvester rover, similar to the kind that have defaced the dark side of the moon in Moon, if you've ever seen that film. A nice big machine to scar the surface of Mars with Progress(tm)! It would go out, leaving a trail of dug in textures like it was tilling the Martian soil for a new harvest. That harvest would be Ice and Sand, collected in the belly of a new roving beast and returned to a new lowest tier of resource materials.
Recyclable waste.
"Everything eventually decays into something else."
Ice would just be something that piles up around domes (there are always leaks) and outdome buildings that use water or make Water. The tracks on the Martian surface from the new rover could be covered up each new dust storm with ice being
These would all be generated upon maintenance and require their own buildings to build them back up. Let's start with my favourite:
This is all based around the idea that some Electronics are needed to run the equipment we've been using but not all electronics require stuff like gold, cobalt, platinum, and other fun stuff. While you certainly can't build a cell phone or a supercollider without Rare Metals, you definitely don't need them to just run a radio or position a radar dish. With that in mind, the first new resource!
Chips! An inbetween for metals and electronics for all those things that need to think but don't need to think so badly that you have to build clean rooms just to make the waffers so they can calculate millions of digits of pi per second. Made entirely out of Metals and Sand, (decaying into Metals) these babies offer a whopping operation per second. Can't run Sensor Towers, Casinos, Electronics Shops, Schools, Machine Parts Factories, and the brand new tier one meteorite buster without them. Why you ask? It solves the problem of never being able to handle gamblers until the mid-to-late game by letting you run those bleep-bloops as soon as you get a nice tiny 3hex factory up!
If we had two tiers of umbrellas for two tiers of meteorites, that would basically entirely solve the whole issue. Suddenly we could have map wide storms to risk sending our rovers out into or keep them at home under the Chippowered early game shooty turret. Where big meteorites would take the late game, already present, Electronicspowered lasers to smash. With a bit of game logic, you could even eliminate the incredibly tiny chance of three big meteorites in a row cracking your first dome while still keeping them an ever present threat that you simply have to deal with until the late game.
Now onto the second new resource: ExoSuits! Constructed from Polymers and Machine Parts (decaying into Polymers) these babies reduce the sanity losses from working in out-dome constructions and provide bonus performance in mines. With these loving crafted suits to help make moving around with the 40kgs of equipment to keep you alive on an alien world, it will making working outside feel less like a constant workout where any mistake means death to a walk in the park where any mistake means death!
For things I just like, the future is Ceramics. This is actually the thing MOXIE runs on in real life. Constructed from Concrete and Polymers, it represents a new tier of resources alongside Electronics. These are what we'd need to build Mega Domes, Space Elevators (can anyone say charged wire coatings), and in small quantities to build (but not maintain) some of the early game complex buildings like MOXIEs, Sensor Towers, Subsurface Heaters, and Batteries.
First of all, we need one new resource. Ice. Ice along with Sand would be picked up by a new trawling harvester rover, similar to the kind that have defaced the dark side of the moon in Moon, if you've ever seen that film. A nice big machine to scar the surface of Mars with Progress(tm)! It would go out, leaving a trail of dug in textures like it was tilling the Martian soil for a new harvest. That harvest would be Ice and Sand, collected in the belly of a new roving beast and returned to a new lowest tier of resource materials.
Recyclable waste.
"Everything eventually decays into something else."
- Machine Parts > Metals > Sand
- Electronics > Rare Metals
- Food > Biomaterials (Hopefully not in public.)
- Polymers > Nurdles
- Concrete > Sand
- Oxygen > Ice
- Water > Ice
- Fuel > Explosions
Ice would just be something that piles up around domes (there are always leaks) and outdome buildings that use water or make Water. The tracks on the Martian surface from the new rover could be covered up each new dust storm with ice being
These would all be generated upon maintenance and require their own buildings to build them back up. Let's start with my favourite:
- Pykrete Moulding: An outdome building where colonists layer Sand and Ice into new forms of Concrete.Maintenance: Metals. "While Pykrete has been made on Earth since WWII, it has many issues that prevent it from becoming a fully realized resource on planets where the local temperature regularly gets above freezing. On Mars, however, where keeping dry ice cool is a simple matter of leaving it outside, pykrete has achieved whole new heights."
- Polymer Recycling: Waste Nurdles are melted back into useful more useful Polymers. Maintenance: Metals. "The problem of plastics has always been more a worry on the environment than any true manufacturing need. On a planet which is already dead, however, the worry is much more about squeezing every last use out of polymer friends. Without an age of dinosaurs and trees buried beneath the surface, making new polymers is just as important as reusing them."
- Metals Foundry: Martian Sand contains many useful Metals. Maintenance: Concrete. "Sifted, sorted, smelted. Mars is famous for two things. It's rust red colour and it's rust red colour. Metals are everywhere in the Martian regolith but have the pesky problem of existing in states less than useful to us. While sand Earth can be turned into glass, a material well known for being fragile, sand on Mars is composed more of metals than silicates and makes a good backbone for any starter colony. You just need a lot of it.
- Ice Treatment: The small amounts of Water present in Martian Ice is claimed and cleaned. "Even the best ice on Mars is only about 20% water but it's enough. Even the best ice, however, is caked in dirt and sand from millions of years of storms, impacts, and the the minor marsquakes so rarely experience on the red planet. Getting the water is as easy as having someplace warm to put it, making it safe to drink requires at least one more step."
- Farms (Yeah, not a new one): This would just be a change so that soil quality is determined by the amount of biomaterials you're willing to throw at it. Since Hydroponics doesn't have soil, and I'm imagining farms never generate enough food to do great entirely on its own fertilizer, it makes for a good compliment. Needing to use both kinds of food producers to get the most out of them sounds nice to me. I like it when a game doesn't make it's old buildings obsolete. Plus it means that botanists not only get more food per food, but help keep the soil alive while they're at it.
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This is all based around the idea that some Electronics are needed to run the equipment we've been using but not all electronics require stuff like gold, cobalt, platinum, and other fun stuff. While you certainly can't build a cell phone or a supercollider without Rare Metals, you definitely don't need them to just run a radio or position a radar dish. With that in mind, the first new resource!
Chips! An inbetween for metals and electronics for all those things that need to think but don't need to think so badly that you have to build clean rooms just to make the waffers so they can calculate millions of digits of pi per second. Made entirely out of Metals and Sand, (decaying into Metals) these babies offer a whopping operation per second. Can't run Sensor Towers, Casinos, Electronics Shops, Schools, Machine Parts Factories, and the brand new tier one meteorite buster without them. Why you ask? It solves the problem of never being able to handle gamblers until the mid-to-late game by letting you run those bleep-bloops as soon as you get a nice tiny 3hex factory up!
- Chip Fab: A small in-dome factory making the bare minimum of logic chips required. Maintenance: Machine Parts. "Long ago, electronics started off simply. Gears to calculate the position of planets, vacuum tubes to dance to then new radio waves, paper punch cards to program. Advances in computing have left these all obsolete and given us the stupendous means to go to Mars in the first place. Ironically, once there, looking back became our way forward. All the old tech had one thing in common: they were easy to build out of nothing but the sand on the beach and the copper instrumental to civilization since river valleys."
If we had two tiers of umbrellas for two tiers of meteorites, that would basically entirely solve the whole issue. Suddenly we could have map wide storms to risk sending our rovers out into or keep them at home under the Chippowered early game shooty turret. Where big meteorites would take the late game, already present, Electronicspowered lasers to smash. With a bit of game logic, you could even eliminate the incredibly tiny chance of three big meteorites in a row cracking your first dome while still keeping them an ever present threat that you simply have to deal with until the late game.
Now onto the second new resource: ExoSuits! Constructed from Polymers and Machine Parts (decaying into Polymers) these babies reduce the sanity losses from working in out-dome constructions and provide bonus performance in mines. With these loving crafted suits to help make moving around with the 40kgs of equipment to keep you alive on an alien world, it will making working outside feel less like a constant workout where any mistake means death to a walk in the park where any mistake means death!
- ExoSuit Weaving: Customized fittings for outdome work are woven in beautifully here. "ExoSuits have been a dream of mankind for more than a century and while minor strides have been made (both literally and figuratively) on the blue planet they have always been a luxury. Until now. Spacesuits are notoriously the most difficult piece of clothing in the solar system; working in near vacuum inflates every joint from your knees to your fingers making even the simple act of moving anything a sweat soaking chore. When working in vacuum goes from being a monthly task to a daily one, new solutions are required. Thankfully, in 3.7ms-2 machines don't need to work as hard to be three times as effective."
For things I just like, the future is Ceramics. This is actually the thing MOXIE runs on in real life. Constructed from Concrete and Polymers, it represents a new tier of resources alongside Electronics. These are what we'd need to build Mega Domes, Space Elevators (can anyone say charged wire coatings), and in small quantities to build (but not maintain) some of the early game complex buildings like MOXIEs, Sensor Towers, Subsurface Heaters, and Batteries.
- Ceramic Assemblers: Strong, smart materials. Maintenance: Electronics. "In the past hundred thousand years, ceramics has gone from being the backbone of all human culture to the material of the future. The science takes nearly every form of materials discipline to create materials that can turn CO2 to air with the simple application of an electric charge, batteries that can be used and reused indefinitely, and materials as strong as steel with a quarter of the weight. It is the only science that promises room temperature superconductors and materials stronger than diamond."
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