Your first turn on the red planet presents a map of rust-coloured craters and a single habitation module. A handful of colonists wait for you to scan mineral deposits, assign a leader to prospect the northern ridge, and decide whether the settlement's early energy comes from a solar farm or a geothermal tap into dormant volcanic vents.
Juggling oxygen and rare-metal scans across domed colonies
You balance oxygen, power, housing and food across a growing network of domed cities while dispatching expedition leaders into the fog of the Martian surface. Scans reveal rare-earth metal seams and crystal-filled lava tubes; those resources feed factories that produce high-tech goods, which in turn unlock terraforming projects that slowly turn the planet green.
What large-scale terraforming options are available?
The mid-to-late game opens up planetary engineering on a grand scale. You can restart dormant volcanoes to thicken the atmosphere, position giant orbital mirrors to raise surface temperatures, and intercept ice asteroids that deliver water in a single dramatic delivery.
How does biology come into play?
Once the atmosphere and temperature stabilise, you introduce living systems. Spreading hardy bacteria across the regolith is the first step, followed by planting forests and eventually releasing adapted wildlife — bears roaming a young Martian forest are a quiet reward for hours of careful resource management.
What languages does the game support?
Skip the bottom panel with a right-click radial menu
Right-clicking a city tile opens a radial menu that skips the bottom-panel shuffle entirely — useful when you have six colonies running and every second of micro-management counts. Holding Shift while queuing a leader's movement path lets you plot a multi-turn route through canyons and crater rims without the game auto-ending the turn after each leg. The expedition screen has an unmarked filter button beside the leader portrait: clicking it sorts available missions by resource urgency, which saves you from scanning the full list every time a new mineral shortage hits.
Camera controls reward experimentation too. The middle mouse button pans across the map faster than edge-scrolling, and double-tapping a numbered city shortcut jumps the view straight to that colony's detail panel. None of these are tutorialised, but they quietly reshape how fluidly a session runs.
Send your geologist underground before chasing surface deposits
Start by sending your best geologist to the nearest lava tube system rather than the obvious surface deposits — underground crystal yields fund research unlocks that take three times as long if you delay them. Resist the urge to expand housing early; a stable population of twelve with surplus power and oxygen weathers dust storms far better than a city of forty running on thin margins.
When the first transport network prompt appears, link your two most distant outposts before connecting neighbours. The distance bonus to trade efficiency applies per tile, and that early injection of rare metals into your industrial hub sets up high-tech production a full cycle before most players reach it. Also: the geothermal tap described in the tech tree as "low output" becomes the backbone of your grid once you pair it with the thermal amplifier project three nodes deeper — a synergy the flavour text never spells out.
Dr. Léa Moreau hunts lithium inside the Elysium lava tubes
Dr. Léa Moreau lands on Mars with a mandate to find lithium and a personal obsession with the crystalline formations inside the Elysium lava tubes. Her first expedition leader — a geologist with a scanning bonus — spends four turns mapping a tube network that eventually feeds three battery factories. By cycle forty, her colonies run entirely on stored solar energy buffered by those early crystal finds, and the volcanic restart project in the northern hemisphere gets its funding from rare-earth exports she charted during the second week. The game tracks none of this as a formal story beat, but the moment her first forest tile appears on the edge of an old mining crater, the connection between a single scan decision and a patch of green becomes the kind of narrative only a strategy game can earn.
The interface and subtitles are available in Russian, English, German, Spanish, Simplified Chinese, Korean, Polish, French and Japanese.
- macOS 10.13 or later
- Intel or Apple Silicon Mac
- 1.3 GHz CPU
- 2 GB RAM
- 4 GB available storage
Questions from the booth
The installer prompts you to choose a destination; placing the folder in your Applications directory is recommended for clean access and permissions.
