Year 17 - Day 261

Still working primarily on colonies, and making progress and killing a lot of bugs along the way. I found I had designed and coded myself into a bit of a corner at one point last week, but after talking it over with a friend I finally came to a decision.

I want there to be a clear advantage to building an "Open" colony on a world that will allow Human Colonists to live without very much life support. So an Open Colony will be cheaper to construct in materials and will allow 5 Module slots per level. A Domed Colony or a Space Station will be more expensive to construct and will only allow 4 Modules per level.

The problem I ran into was that I had Five basic modules that I wanted to be in a mining outpost: Mining Module, Warehouse Module, Habitation Module, Nuclear Reactor Module, and a Landing Pad. I needed to get this down to four modules if anyone wanted to build on an airless moon or an asteroid, so I decided to get rid of the Landing Pad. This means that loading/unloading will automatically take two times as long at a colony without a Landing Pad, but it also makes some sense in game turns as well. A newly built Open outpost will also not have a landing pad, but there will already be an empty slot where one can be built if so desired.

Here's a picture of the first Domed Outpost that was built entirely within the game by a landed ship. No database manipulation was required.