Settling a world that is trying to kill you

Every body has a severity, from benign ground you can simply walk out onto up to the kind of place that kills an unprotected person in seconds. Severity drives four separate costs at once, and it is worth being explicit about all four because they compound.

• Power. Life support is multiplied by severity to the power of 1.15 — roughly 1.0, 2.2, 3.5, 4.9, 6.4 up the ladder.
• Consumables. 0.28 Minerals a turn per point of capacity, per point of severity above benign, for ever.
• Building. Sealed habitation costs 40% more per point of severity to put up in the first place.
• Mood. 0.8 unrest per head per point of severity above the first, which never goes away.

That is why a lethal world is not five times a benign one. It is more like six times on the grid and worse on the books, and why an outpost on a bad rock is a commitment rather than a claim.

What makes it worth doing anyway

Ore. The richest seams in the game are in places nobody wants to live, and a small sealed outpost over a rich vein pays for itself where a full colony on the same rock would not. Build for the seam, not for the world.

If you only need a pair of hands on a rock, a Space Outpost costs about a third of a Habitat Dome to run and holds about a third as many. It is the cheap way to put somebody somewhere, and usually the right one.

Buying the severity down

A Climate Engine makes a world count as one step less hostile than it is while it stands and the power holds: cheaper to seal, cheaper to build on, easier to keep calm. Stop it and the cold comes back over about 6 turns. It draws more Energy than anything else you can build, which is the point.

Two peoples change this calculation entirely. The Varkesh Host treat every hostile world as one rung milder than it is, permanently and for free — a Climate Engine they never have to build. The Maketh Assembly are machines and no environment is hostile to them at all.

And the Sepharai Shoal have a problem nobody else has: dry ground is their hostile environment, so their answer is a Flooded Caisson, which turns six hexes of land into sea they can live in. Their Mantle Bore goes further and melts a frozen world into a warm one a hex at a time, over 8 turns each — and unlike a Climate Engine, that one does not thaw back.

Ground that has been fought over

Levelling a building has a 35% chance of ruining the ground under it, and wreckage does not weather away. A Remediation Plant is the only thing that undoes it, at 6 turns per tile with somebody working it — so a world fought over for long enough ends up visibly fought over, for the rest of the game.

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