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HARWELL: Mars Industries

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HARWELL: Mars Industries

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There are no safe spaces in Harwell. Compete for resources, manipulate the Mars Trade Committee, and outbid rivals in a player-driven economy. Use diplomacy – or sabotage and the black market – to disrupt opponents. Control the rules, control the market, eliminate the competition.

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Dev Diary #1 - The Building Blocks

Jul 8

Hello, Pioneers, and welcome to the first Harwell: Mars Industries dev diary. If you're new here, hello! I’m Caleb Houlding, solo developer of Harwell: Mars Industries, along with publisher Aquila Interactive. It's great to have you here!

Today we’re looking at the building blocks of Harwell: Mars Industries, and we'll be showcasing the implementation of various buildings, along with their resources and the code that makes them run. You can find today’s dev diary in video form right here:

Before we go on, the following are still a work-in-progress and could change before the final release.

The First Step

Mining for resources is the first step to success. This means that when starting out, you’ll need to place your HQ carefully to maximise the resources available to you, but once you’ve built it, you’ll need to get started quickly to get ahead.

Let’s take a look at the buildings available and how they will work.

There are three types of buildings in Harwell: Mars Industries. These are: mining facilities for harvesting raw resources, factories for refining those resources into more advanced goods, and housing for your workers.

The Building Blocks

Mining facilities are your corporation’s backbone. In game at the moment there are six different resources dotted around the map – aluminium, carbon, copper, ice, iron and silicon – and each has its own mine you’ll need to build on each square. The closer the resources are to your HQ, the more efficient your mine will be, which is why you need to be careful about where you start.

The real levelling up comes from refining your resources further and selling them on the market. This is where factories come in. There are five different types of factory, each refining different resources into other, more complex products that can be sold on the market for more profit (depending on demand, of course). The more factories you can sustain, the faster you can sell products on the market.

Without workers, both factories and mines won’t work. Alongside setting your wages, housing can help encourage your workers to move to your corporation.

The Market

The market has been created to be as dynamic as possible - the game keeps track of supply, demand, and an elasticity factor (which controls how much demand affects the price). Each building can autonomously consume goods straight from the market, and if you don't have any goods stockpiled for them to build from, then they'll automatically buy them from the market at their current market price. If you don’t have any money, this will start racking up your debt. Don’t worry, though, there will be a button to manually disable this from happening automatically to avoid adding loads of credit against your company!

Those buildings will then produce those goods right into your inventory. What you do with them is up to you - stockpile to use them in buildings or construct new factories, or sell them at the market price.

Getting the Balance Right

You'll have to choose your industry and building placement carefully - your buildings won't run if there isn't profit to be made. Every in-game ten minutes the buildings run their calculations. Part of these calculations is net profit. The game works out the profit of the building on the fly based on the revenue it's making from the market price of the outputs minus the expenses incurred from the market price of the inputs. If the building's net profit works out to be negative, the building will temporarily halt production until it can make a profit again.

Balancing both the market, your profits, and everything else can be a lot to manage. One way this is made easier is via the tooltips. These tooltips will display live information of a building's construction cost (based on the current market prices), and its net profit shows you exactly what inputs a building takes and what it’s going to produce.

Buildings are quite literally the building blocks of Harwell: Mars Industries, and we’re excited to tell you about all the rest of it.

Join the Discord right here[aquila.now] to catch up and talk about everything Harwell: Mars Industries, and if you haven’t already, make sure you wishlist the game right here on Steam!

HARWELL: Mars Industries

Differences from Offworld Trading Company

The game looks good and very similar to Offworld Trading Company. What are the major gameplay differences between the two games?

Enrico Pallazzo

May 18 @ 3:56am

General Discussions

New Publisher Announcement!

Apr 28

Mars is open for business! Developer Caleb Houlding is partnering with publisher Aquila Interactive to announce Harwell: Mars Industries, a sci-fi economic strategy game set on Mars, coming 2027.

This is the start of an exciting journey, and we'd love for you to head to the Store page, wishlist and come along with us for the ride in our Discord[discord.gg].

What is Harwell: Mars Industries

Each corporation begins on an equal footing in Harwell, a singleplayer and multiplayer economic strategy game set on the Mars. Build your company, control production, and trade in a dynamic economy where shifting supply and demand can lead to vast riches – or drive you into bankruptcy.

Your path to victory is simple: Accumulate wealth, outmaneuver your rivals, and buy out every competitor to establish a total monopoly.

Features

A brand-new planet full of resources to plunder - mine valuable resources directly from the Martian surface, and refine raw materials into advanced goods

A dynamic market that shifts with your decisions - engage in real-time trading with other corporations

An in-depth financial system - every corporation has its own stock price. Outproduce your rivals – or buy them out and take everything they built. The choice is yours.

The Black Market - engage in diplomatic strategies or disrupt your opponents when it benefits you

For the community - development will be shaped by the community, with features like expanded moddability planned for the future.

Available to play in both singleplayer and multiplayer

When will it be released?

We're aiming for a 2027 release date, but we're hoping to have plenty of opportunities for you to get hands-on with Harwell: Mars Industries before then!

Keep Updated

Join the Discord and follow Aquila Interactive on our socials to keep updated!

Discord[aquila.now]

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Instagram[aquila.now]

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Facebook[aquila.now]

Website[aquilainteractive.io]

Reddit[aquila.now]

HARWELL: Mars Industries

v0.20.4 Patch

Apr 13

New Features

Friends system with Steam and Nakama integration — add friends, see their status (online, in-game, in-lobby), and invite them directly to games.
Beautiful Shadows toggle in Graphics settings for the new lighting pipeline.
Game end screen redesign with full-screen overlay, financial graphs (revenue, expenses, company value, profit, debt), per-resource production tables, and complete player leaderboard ranked by company value.
Spectate mode for eliminated players — watch the rest of the game without access to building, demolishing, or sabotage menus.
Expanded lobby hosting and connection flow with signal-driven status updates.

Improvements

Host migration now elects a new host automatically when the current host disconnects, with high priority notifications.
Host disconnection detection prevents players from getting stuck in zombie states.
Reconnect prompt now validates against live Nakama matches to prevent connecting to dead lobbies.
All players can now see every player's sync status, not just the host.
Building stats rebalanced for better economy flow.
Dynamic map viewport bounds computed from terrain for better rendering efficiency.
Notification panel enhanced for better event visibility.
Per-transaction price sync rate limited to prevent network flooding.
Building state flushes capped to prevent burst RPC traffic.
Stock broadcasts batched for smoother network performance.
AI will buy/sell stocks slightly more realistically, they won't just go for the cheapest company, they will invest in companies that are doing slightly better so they can benefit from dividends.
Updated the main menu background image.

Bug Fixes

Fixed lobby sometimes displaying as greyed out when joining.
Fixed players unable to join games after leaving due to version mismatch.
Fixed buying your own stock not actually costing money.
Fixed stock data resetting when a bought-out player disconnects.
Fixed manual wage not syncing in multiplayer.
Fixed long player names breaking labour tab layout.
Fixed housing texture missing in exported builds.
Fixed game won screen not showing for non-host winner.
Fixed building colours not refreshing when changing custom colour in stock menu.
Fixed bought-out and eliminated player notifications showing raw peer IDs instead of display names.
Fixed bought-out players being able to rejoin games.
Fixed SubViewport leak on map restart that was consuming memory.
Fixed disconnect calls that were crashing the networking layer.
Fixed player reconnection, requires testing but this should now allow players to reconnect if they crash or get disconnected.

HARWELL: Mars Industries

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