Rush hour on Mars

As your colony grows to stretch across the red expanse of Mars, newly built roads will expand your reach and workers will diligently travel to and fro building, scrapping, and transporting materials. Each time your base expands, you’ll need more roads and eventually even more workers to keep everything working perfectly. While the worker hub acts as your worker’s base of operations, you’ll find that the service area limit isn’t strict. Sometimes your workers will cross the boundary to grab or deposit a tantalizing resource that’s on the other side. This can help in unique cases where you need just a little extra help before setting up a new worker hub.



In Per Aspera, efficiency is paramount! To keep your colony running at top efficiency, use the traffic lens to identify which areas of your base need improvements or restructuring. This Lens will allow you to analyze how heavily loaded each Worker Hub is. The load is calculated with a combination of factors, the most important ones being the total time the worker is working (vs at rest) and the amount of pending cargo that is waiting to be ferried across to an area. If an area is heavily loaded, you will need to consider adding more Worker Hubs and partition your base in a more efficient manner.



You won’t want to have too many traffic jams on Mars! The traffic lens will also let you take a look at the individual saturation of each and every road and hyperloop. Keep an eye open to detect bottlenecks in the roads, as they are ideal candidates for upgrades.



As your colony grows, you may find that you’ve created a veritable urban sprawl and that it’s hard to focus on certain aspects. The traffic lens was designed to help you quickly determine how the roads and workers, which are the foundational building blocks of your colony, are operating. We were inspired by the different tools city planners use to determine efficiency and density such as isochrone maps and traffic heatmaps.

This is an example of a traffic heatmap analyzing rush hour in a metropolitan area.



https://store.steampowered.com/app/803050/Per_Aspera/