Colony Moon

Colony Moon starts with a command hub, a landing pad and two people. Everything else you build yourself, tile by tile, on a crater floor of soft grey dust, old boot prints and blue ice. Sixteen kinds of module are waiting in the build menu: solar arrays that tilt to follow the sun, battery banks, habitats, a greenhouse dome with rows of lettuce glowing inside, water extractors that only work standing on an ice patch, oxygen generators, a laboratory, a workshop, a rover bay, a comms dish and a landing pad for the shuttle. Nothing works until it is connected, so you drag a tube from one module to the next and watch the cable and the pipe run along beside it.

Four networks keep the colony alive: power, oxygen, water and food. Each one shows its supply and its demand live at the top of the screen, and each one is worked out per network, so a module left off the end of a tube has nothing at all. The day and night cycle runs about four minutes. In daylight the arrays carry the base and charge the batteries; at night the whole place runs off what you stored, lit only by earthlight and the warm windows of the habitats. Run out and the lowest-priority modules go dark, a red beacon starts blinking above them, and the crew get unhappy enough to ask for a seat on the next shuttle home.

Colonists arrive by shuttle whenever there is a bed and the life support is comfortably ahead of demand, and each one takes a trade: engineer, botanist, scientist, medic or technician. They bounce between modules in chunky white suits while a rover trundles out to patch whatever the last meteor shower cracked. Dust storms cut solar output, solar flares knock out your comms, and a supply capsule occasionally drops in with a pile of parts. Twelve research nodes make everything better — thinner panels, deeper cells, hydroponics, deeper drills, reclaimed water, bigger habitats — and the goal ladder asks for ten, then twenty-five, then fifty colonists thriving, which means every network in surplus for a whole day and night. It plays with a thumb on a phone and with the keyboard on a desktop, and it saves itself as you go.