Surviving Mars News

Welcome back, Commander!

We've prepared another update for you on how we developed the new Below and Beyond project. My name is Bart Vossen, design lead on the Below and Beyond planning and development team. Nice to meet you! As my colleague already informed you about what lies beyond, today's tour is all about exploring what's below; the Underground!



Let me give you a quick overview before we dive deeper. Our RC Explorers recently started running into surprisingly deep holes, which, after some further inspection, uncovered an entire underground network of tunnels beneath our colony. You should be able to drop an RC Explorer down there for initial reconnaissance. We've also developed a new building, the Elevator, which will be able to transport everything we need between our surface colony and the underground. Reports tell us the underground contains more resources and should provide protection against all hazards from the surface. Though the darkness and any local quakes, caused by our expansion efforts, may pose their own challenges. To this end, we've developed several buildings to keep our colonists safe. Lastly, those who came back also rambled on about something they called buried wonders, which we'd advise you to investigate further.

Now you might be wondering, why the underground? Well, 99.9% of Mars's mass lies underground, and it gives us a network of tunnels to explore and expand into with completely new challenges. But mostly because Mars's underground has eluded us for centuries. As we got closer and closer to Mars, we were still only looking at its surface. Even after we landed, we were only able to scan the top layer. Now, we have an opportunity to fully discover what secrets Mars has been hiding from us.

Expansion into the underground will get us closer to resource veins and provide shelter from meteors, dust storms, and even cold waves. Though it may destabilize the area and cause local, underground quakes with occasional cave-ins. To better protect our buildings, our scientists came up with a nifty solution involving Exotic Minerals. This should make exploring and expanding into the underground a worthwhile endeavor to do while our surface colony is gradually expanding.



To realize this vision of an enigmatic yet dangerous underground, we started development on an explorable network of underground lava tubes. They should feel dark, cramped, and mysterious while you're exploring, but also have enough room to build and expand your colony. We created a network of interconnected tunnels, with rooms spread around to provide building space. But we left it in darkness to give the underground a real cramped and mysterious feel to it as if you're spelunking and placing lights along the way. Don't worry, we also equipped all buildings, RC Vehicles, and drones with plenty of lights and some emergency lights in case they break down. To really emphasize the exploration, we equipped our RC vehicles with scanning technology that will reveal any anomalies or resources they pass by. Unfortunately, these tunnels are placed at depths our orbital scanning technology is not yet able to analyze at any meaningful level.

Our goal is for players to explore the underground in parallel with expanding their colony on Mars. So we did some early simulations with test commanders to see if our underground maps worked with this goal in mind. Unfortunately, we found them going through the underground at lightning speed, losing the sense of exploration and discovery. To this end, we sprinkled some cave-ins and blocked tunnels throughout the underground. These give commanders natural moments to check up on their surface colony and Asteroid outposts. Blocked tunnels can be cleared with a new landscaping tool and unlock access to new rooms and tunnels. Cave-ins require a better understanding of the underground to remove, as the area is clearly unstable. But once you obtain that technology, you'll be able to clear cave-ins to find shortcuts between chambers and many discoveries hidden by the darkness.

The real treasure hidden in these depths are the buried wonders; ancient natural, and some unnatural, features long covered up by Mars's soil. Each with its own secrets to reveal and benefits to acquire. Once fully unlocked with Exotic Minerals, they are just as powerful as the wonders our technology can accomplish. Though not all of Mars is equal, besides different tunnel layouts and entrance locations, not all wonders can be found on each landing site. It will always be a surprise what we will find down there in the darkness.

Most buildings from the surface are still buildable in the underground, while we also have a few new ones to deal with the unique challenges found down there. While they're protected from the hazards of the surface, underground marsquakes, caused by our elevators and expansion, pose a real risk of burying our buildings beneath cave-ins. We've engineered support struts that should be able to take the bulk of the impact, and reinforced domes to at least keep our colonists safe in the underground.



Once we had this up and running, we had a series of test commanders run various simulations. This gave us many different results that allowed us to better adjust the underground layouts and risks and rewards. Though the biggest problem proved to be drone command. Our simulations showed placing a drone hub within a larger room worked perfectly, however connecting it required several drone hubs within the tunnels. To solve this problem, our engineers went playing with some Exotic Minerals and came up with Drone Hub Extenders. These buildings are able to extend a Drone Hub's signal through the entire tunnel. And theoretically, it should also work on the surface and on Asteroids.

My favourite part of the underground? After a long day, I like to just sit on the back of an RC Explorer and look around as it drives through the underground. Or maybe an RC Safari, if the tourists aren't making too much noise. There's something about the calm darkness as if you'll find a new treasure any second.

That should cover everything, so I'm going to find myself an RC Explorer right now and I'll see you around. Do make sure you come back, there'll be another tour soon. The next one will dive into our new tech tree that will make all this possible and look at a few ways we managed to improve your life. Still here? Then you might as well watch our instructional video on underground exploration. It might help give you a better bearing once you start exploring the underground yourself.

Until next time Commander, and I hope I'll see you exploring down here soon!

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Welcome, Commander!

It appears you requested an update on how we developed the new Below and Beyond project. The name’s Elmer Lexmond designer on the Below and Beyond planning and development team, nice to
meet you! I’m here to give you a peek behind the curtain. On the agenda today is Mining Asteroids!
Let me start you off with a quick summary. We have developed a new building, the Recon Center which lets us track Asteroids that pass in close proximity to Mars. You can visit these tracked asteroids with our brand-new Asteroid Landers, rockets designed to land in conditions that would be impossible for our standard Supply Rockets. Once there, we have a limited amount of time to mine as many resources as possible and leave the asteroids before it is too far away from Mars to make the return trip. We will need specialized Micro-G Auto Extractors at first, but we can eventually get permits to send the personnel that can populate our more efficient Micro-G Mining Stations.




Why the asteroids you ask? First off, because 86% of colonists think asteroids are “very cool”, and
secondly because creating these short-term mining bases in an isolated location is a completely
different challenge from anything we have done on the surface of Mars so far. You will have to work
with limited resources, irregular building space, and a specific time window, but the reward is also
different. You invest resources on a mission to get access to an abundance of materials, such as the
newly discovered Exotic Minerals that are exclusive to asteroids. This makes visiting asteroids a perfect opportunity for when you are developing a project on the Martian surface that requires some time to finish.

To make our vision come true, we started by developing the asteroids themselves. Our goal was to make each asteroid feel unique. We created various asteroid types based on existing classifications of asteroids. Each type has a different spread of resources available and a different rate at which they can appear. A C-type asteroid for instance is much more common than the elusive X-Type. We also created different looks for the asteroids based on the main resources available on them. Combine this with various pre-authored maps to get a diverse mix of asteroids that require different strategies each time around.



But an asteroid on its own doesn’t get us very far. We needed to decide what new buildings we
needed and which existing ones we could reuse. For new buildings, we focused on the ones with
specialized functions such as extractors and small-scale living space for colonists that wouldn’t
require a full dome. For the existing ones we eliminated the buildings that wouldn’t function in the
micro-G environment, this meant that we had to introduce a substitute for the MOXIE if we wanted our colonists to be able to breathe, which led to the new Electrolyzer.



With all this in place, we called upon our test commanders to run simulated missions. We got a wide
range of results, but most prominent of all was the sentiment that managing multiple locations at
the same time was quite taxing for most commanders. After investigating further, we learned that
one of the biggest problems was setting up the Asteroid Landers for their trip back to Mars. To be
successful our commanders needed to update the cargo request on the Asteroid Lander frequently
to get it loaded before the time on the asteroid ran out. To remedy this, we created an AutoLoad function where commanders can set their preferences and let the rocket AI update the cargo request continuously based on the specifications and what is available on the asteroid. The second problem was the need to launch the rocket manually. To relieve some of the stress of trying to launch the rocket at the perfect moment, we gave the rocket an AI subroutine to launch automatically when the time limit on the asteroid was reached, regardless of whether the current cargo request was fully completed. You should thank our testers, commander, they saved you a lot of stress by running these simulations before we rolled the project out to you!

Do you want to know what was my favourite part of creating the asteroids? I must say I had a lot of fun working on the naming convention for them! We took cues from how they are named and classified on earth and tailored them to be more appropriate for our purposes. You will find that our team added some creative new names to the vast list of existing asteroid names already out there!

Well, I’m sure I’ve covered pretty much everything, not to mention I’m in dire need of a coffee break.
But worry not, there are more dev diaries on the horizon! According to the schedule, the next one will delve deeper into the development of the Martian Underground. I highly recommend you’ll join us again for that one, there will be some very interesting things explained there. It’ll go into further detail on why Exotic Minerals are worth all this trouble. In the meantime, please watch our instructional
video on Asteroid Mining, it might help you to not lose some of that pricy new equipment to the
dark void of space.

Until next time Commander and I hope to see you on our first real asteroid mission soon!

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If Hollywood and Doom games have taught me anything, it's that nothing good lies beneath the surface of Mars. Surviving Mars' latest expansion, Below & Beyond, it's first premium expansion since mid-2019, says otherwise...
Read more.

~Incoming transmission~

Commanders, get ready to explore the Martian depths and extract precious minerals from the elusive asteroids in this brand new DLC for Surviving Mars!
Below & Beyond pushes the limits of what is possible on the Red Planet. Expand your horizons with additional buildings, more resources, and a cavernous world full of mysteries. You can tunnel beneath the surface and construct subterranean bases below the colony and in nearby underground caves. Or you can attach rocket-propelled buildings to passing asteroids and mine exotic resources, but you’ll need to make it back to the Red Planet’s surface before the asteroid leaves orbit or else you lose your stuff and your colonists.

The DLC will launch on September 7th on all available platforms.

Key Features

• Back to the Bases - Expand your colony into caves and lava tubes under the surface. Players can use existing structures, or underground-specific buildings to build a base for exploration. Expand with caution, potential cave-ins can destroy everything.
  
• Mine Your Own Business - Players can now go below the surface and beyond the red planet for resource mining. Construct special rocket-propelled buildings to mine resources, including exotic minerals and Data Samples, on passing asteroids. Don’t stick around too long or else the Asteroid will drift away with your stuff!
  
• Branching Paths - The Recon and Expansion research tree unlock additional buildings, vehicles, upgrades, and locales. They will also unlock asteroid mining and tunnel colonization.
  

Launching alongside Below & Beyond is the Mars Lifestyle Radio. The pack includes 16 original tracks from four different artists, for 70 minutes of chill roving tunes.




Fans of Surviving Mars can check out the Surviving Mars OST Vinyl, available for preorder at vinyl.survivingmars.com until September 7.