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Hi everyone!

Last time we talked about the terraforming process and what it means to turn the Red Planet Green, today we’ll take a look at two new tools to achieve this tremendous goal:

Terraforming Research and New Buildings

In Green Planet we’ve added 7 new buildings, which are dedicated to the terraforming efforts. Some of these buildings require specific planetary conditions to function properly. Three of these buildings appear much later in game and require significant research progress to even become available! They have the spatial dimensions and the construction costs of wonders but may be constructed more than once. There’s this rewarding feeling when you cover an area with huge smoking chimneys, knowing that you’re changing the planet on a large scale.

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The terraforming buildings will be added to a new category of the build menu – Terraforming. Players are in complete control of when they choose to start the terraforming progress by deciding when to research the first tech in the chain. Every step in the chain unlocks new buildings and improvements which will help in your mission to terraform Mars.


Here’s the list of the buildings you will find inside:

The Forestation Plant (or the Sprinkler, as I love to call it) spreads seeds imported from Earth, or produced on Mars, to plant wild vegetation in its range. Initially, it plants only lichen, but later grass, bushes, and trees become available as the terraforming project progresses. As some of the seeds get carried away from the colony by the winds, each Forestation Plant helps for the increase of the global vegetation.

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The GHG Factory (short for Greenhouse Gas) burns a mixture of fuel and locally extracted carbon to produce greenhouse gases, which are released into the atmosphere. Thus increasing the average temperature of the planet.

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Similar to the GHG Factory, the Carbonate Processor converts waste rock into carbon dioxide. The release of CO2 in the atmosphere improves its density and creates the necessary circumstances for oxygen-producing bacteria to thrive and for rains to occur.

The Core Heat Convector is a system of pipes that go deep into the Martian crust. It uses water to transport heat from the planetary core and improves the atmospheric temperature, while heating its immediate surroundings.

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The Magnetic Field Generator improves the magnetic field of the planet, decreasing the loss of atmospheric gasses. It has a secondary function as a science facility and generates research according to the current state of the atmosphere. As a side effect of the strong magnetic field, the MFG may trigger “marsquakes” in its immediate vicinity. So take care to place these far away from the heart of your colony.

There are several different sizes of lakes, each having different forms. Lake beds are dug up by drones and then gradually filled with water. If liquid water is not yet possible on Mars, the lake remains frozen. When the conditions allow for it, the water liquefies and the lakes start to gradually improve the global water levels through evaporation.

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The Open Farm is a huge unmanned facility which grows various edible plants away from your domes. This open-air farm spreads a mixture of water and seeds, which grow or wither according to the local soil quality and the overall terraforming progress. Once fully-grown, plants are individually harvested by drones for food.

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All terraforming buildings are unmanned and can be built as soon as you research their corresponding tech in the Terraforming field of the research UI. For those of you who intend to terraform Mars before sending the founders of the colony, we added one additional building, the Capital City.

The Capital City requires the atmosphere of Mars to be breathable and warm. It’s the most spacious dome design and it doesn’t have a cupola, or metallic frame. Instead, it’s surrounded by trees, doesn’t consume Oxygen and can be placed on rough terrain.

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I’ll be looking forward to your screenshots!

From Haemimont Games,
Ivan Grozev,
Lead Designer of Green Planet.​
 
As I mentioned before, floods are something that we try to avoid. Filling a crater would've been great if we hadn't added another feature, called landscaping. This feature makes it soo easy to cut a crater wall and flood everything, that we decided to go with artificially constructed lakes, which block the landscaping functionality. This said, we still implemented "real" water in the game and I expect a lot of mods flooding terrain.

Boo. There’s enough small craters on the maps that this would make for a very fun option.

But if its mod-able, I’m more or less satisfied. Could be fun to flood one of those canyons.
 
Will increasing atmospheric density have any impact on meteors/meteor storms? I would expect that as the atmospheric density increases meteor storms become less frequent/less severe.

What about if a dome is "hit" by a meteor after the Breathable Atmosphere threshold is reached?
 
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But if its mod-able, I’m more or less satisfied. Could be fun to flood one of those canyons.
Already made a mod to "flood" them, purely visual at the moment though.
 
A super hard mod-side question:
Could this Terraforming progress be compatible DYNAMICALLY between multiple saves in a "campaign" mod?
A mod in which the player starts new outposts on the planet retaining resources and tech somehow, forcing the player towards multiple outposts in the same "game" in order to realistically terraform the planet.
I.E. 25% cap to each parameter at game start, 25% H2O is reached, you build a second colony, raise H2O to 25% there as well, H2O cap is now 50%
 
Could we expect some changes to mars-tourism as well?
It really bothers me, going to the "reinforcement" screen, getting 20-30 rockets ready with tourists, waiting for them to arrive, then sending all the rockets back manually, because they don't serve any purpose after this.

Maybe some automatism would be great here, like:
- Designate some rockets to be just for tourism, which checks, if there is space for tourists in your colony (tourist thumbsup and free housing), bringing tourists to mars, wait to be refueled and the tourists are ready to go back to earth again - over and over again.
- Integrate a checkbox, that no tourists are allowed to stay on mars as colonists. I would love to have mars as a themepark kinda thing. ;)