I've played a few hours now on both maps. Still haven't been able to get to 20 population without any deaths but I was able to get a functioning base up with full biology/geology research done so I got one of the achievements.
Some tips/observations:
1) On your initial launch, bring a rover, astronaut, enough food/water for 60 or so days, and then max out supplies. When you first land, deploy only the rover and send it out exploring looking for water. Don't deploy the astronaut before day 60 -- it won't actually use any of the food/water until you deploy it. Once you find water, immediately build a solar power array and a water cryotank. This will let you ignore water for subsequent launches.
2) The rover can push boulders around if you click on it enough. This is likely a bug but if you have boulders in the way of your planned buildings, you can get them out of the way.
3) Initial buildings should be a four-way hallway with a greenhouse, habitat, straight hallway, and an oxygen generator. Build solar plants as needed to keep enough power. It's better to have the power beforehand because bad things happen when you start running low on power.
4) Don't build a bunch of extra buildings because there is some "cap" on the number of structures that you can have based on your population. If you go over (or your pop falls under), shit starts blowing up randomly which is f'ing annoying. If you do hit the cap while building your initial buildings, send up an astronaut on your next trip which will give you some breathing room.
5) Once you have a functioning habitat, build a launch pad and send up a big rocket with some colonists. That extra pop will give you some breathing room from the building limit cap.
6) After you send your initial colonists, you'll need to find some methane so you can refuel and send back the big spaceship to get more colonists. Use the rover to go searching for methane and build a cryotank when you find it.
7) Once you've got methane collection up, start building another habitat so you can support the next group of colonists. You need to have a pop of 8 in order to build the geology and biology labs.
8 ) Biology lab lets you build farms which start out only producing 1 food/sol but can be upgraded (using mined materials) up to 3 food/sol making them better than greenhouses. They also don't need to be connected to pressurized hallways. Once you get a single biology upgrade, you can demolish all your greenhouses and replace with farms.
9) Geology lab lets you build geothermal power plants which don't need maintenance like solar plants and produce as much power as 4 "dirty" solar power plants. Unless you like micro'ing and keeping an astronaut assigned to solar plant "cleaning duty", I'd suggest just demo'ing the solar plants and going full geothermal.
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Topic: Sol Zero - Mars Colonization Simulator (Read 11760 times)