Interconnectiveness
The Settlement Map provides each settlement a visual overview of the whereabout of each building, settler, bot and vehicle. You can see how buildings are seamlessly interconnected via hallways or tunnels. The Settlement Info Window provides clues on how well each system is functioning behind the scene. No two settlements are alike. You can make each settlement unique by having distinguishable mission footprints and infrastructures and by ways of how settlers behaves.
Beginning version 3.1.0, each settlement has an objective– the overall development objective that certain activities such as manufacturing and food production processes tend to gear toward.
The possible objectives :
- Crop Farm
- Manufacturing
- Research Center
- Transportation Hub
- Trade Town
- Tourism
2-D blueprint of a Mars outpost with connected modules. Image courtesy of Georgi Petrov and Mars Foundation
As settlements grow and more buildings are shipped in or being constructed on site according to the needs, a diversity of specialty functions would result. It’s not difficult to imagine a settlement become an university town housing numerous laboratories attracting academically driven settlers if it heavily sponsors research studies on those disciplines. A green town may be developed to house a large number of interonnected greenhouses having a company of biologists/botanists experimenting with improving crop rotations and genetics that give better crop yield. A maker-haven is one that consists of a lot of workshops with machineries providing high industrial throughput and attracting influx of creative individuals to prototype and tinker with tools to produce new parts and equipment. Also, with more prospectors arriving on Mars, mining outposts will be the next frontier and they will sprout up everywhere along a resource-rich basin/region, fortifying the local supply chain for raw minerals.