It seems in this game when I'm not out exploring the bulk of my time is spent working on my base. My base would slowly get to the point of chaos. It was a giant mess and the only real way to fix anything would be a major rework of everything.
My base build was anything but clean. It seems no matter how many solar panels I was adding to my base. It was just never keeping up with anything new I was adding. Things were starting to get out of hand a bit.
I ended up having rows and rows of solar panels. Each of them is followed by more power banks and ways to transfer that energy collected. At one point I was trying to clean up the wiring a bit and I ended up missing a connection.
I only realized after half a game day was gone that my base had been without power for most of the day. Even worse there was not enough time remaining to fill my ever-growing battery bank either.
The base did not even manage to last a couple of hours into the night before losing power. This ended up costing me yet another batch of potatoes. It seems I am just desisted to not be able to grow any food at this point. This is getting a bit concerning since the rations I have been finding are getting less and less as the days go by that I've been surviving on.
It did not help any I was always adding power-hungry structures into the building. Each of the teach trees has its bench for advanced skill training. I also needed to up my game when it came to trying to grow things.
There is an entire building just for growing food in. I was however not quite at that stage just yet. I’d need to go out and gather quite a few resources and break a lot of stuff down.
I also ended up discovering another reason I will be doing an entire base rebuild at one point. The ground the main part of the base is on is right on the edge of a flat basin. I have a large chunk of the flat area covered in things like solar panels. It turns out the area where I wanted to add further parts to my main building is uneven in such a way I can’t connect anything else.
After a while, I ended up getting hit by a massive sandstorm. While thankfully I was not out exploring food when that happened. This left all my solar panels covered in sand collecting a lot less energy than I was hoping.
I did end up building a tool where I could use Co2 to blow the sand right off the solar panels. The issues were hours of daylight in the game were now spent trying to get my solar power generation up to the levels it needed. I’d rather have been out collecting resources for a future base expansion.
It would not be long after that I expanded my skills enough that my struggle for resources would slowly come to an end. It turns out the giant earth mover I've been using to explore around can pick up chunks of rocks and store them.
After some further points spent in the tech tree, I'd unlock a drill as well. This made it no longer worth my time going around building and breaking things apart for basic materials. Instead, I'd just have to find the right kind of rocks to break apart.
I also ended up constructing a building where I could drop off the rocks I gathered. It would then grind them down to the basic resources. I still had to haul the materials into my base to load them into a fabricator inside there. It was quite the improvement
After a while, I had enough of my small growing operations. Along with the limitations I had on where I could even attach new modules to my base. I ended up breaking out the grinder and demolishing large chunks of my base.
This would end up being a several-day operation. Thankfully I still had my original landing pod to spend the night in when it got too cold outside to get any further work done without taking damage.
I even decided my old grinder building for resources was no longer good enough. Since I was ripping everything else up as well. I ended up going for the big grinder. This thing requires a lot of resources and power. It is at least now quite easy to offload and then build what I need on-site. It even had a fabricator so I could set it up to build the different kinds of components I'd need.
Final Thoughts
As if I needed trouble. Right after upgrading quite a few small solar panels to larger ones, my base ended up getting hit with asteroids. While I had a defense battery set up. I only had a couple dozen missiles loaded into it. While it took out quite a few of the raining asteroids. Some of them still got through.
I ended up losing quite a lot of power generation. Some of the new buildings I had just made took damage. Even worse quite a few of the wires seemed to have been damaged as well.
I went from thinking I had solved both the issue of expanding my base and having enough power. To have to deal with it all over again. It seems this game just has it out for me in trying to progress into the bigger stuff. At the very least my giant earth mover was unharmed so I can rebuild.
Information
Screenshots were taken and content was written by @Enjar about Occupy Mars: The Game.
Disclosure: A review copy of the game was received for free.
Disclosure: This game was in early access when I played it.
It looks like you got an intense base operation ongoing. Upgrading the solar panels only to face an asteroid shower, sounds brutal and I hope the new setup makes rebuilding a bit easier next time around.
Hopefully if this happens again my defenses will hold up better. It was doing fine till I ran out of missiles. It’s a shame missiles can only be looted and not crafted.