Until i get a proper wiki and youtube series done i will be posting general info in this thread. It will probably be a bit random and more like a draft for what goes in the wiki and videos.

Outline of MarsX v3 Musky Edition:

The mod is designed to be a full conversion of rimworld into a mars colony building sim, sort of like the sims on mars but a lot more grim, this means whole systems have and will be removed or replaced. The combat is limited to brawls between your colonists, research and trading are removed and are being replaced over time. Map resources like trees and hunting are replaced with hunting for water. And a bunch of other ideas that i have on the chalkboard.


So if you can't play right now or just want to read up on exactly what to expect when you boot up the mod then here is a step by step description of everything i can think of.

Choose Scenario:
When you start a new game you start with the scenario menu, for now there's 3 options all of which are just martian colony on normal easy or rough, i will be adding other scenarios later like one based on the movie the martian. You can see all of the incidents that are disabled to fit the theme of the mod, i disable buildings using code so you can't see those, if you want to change how many ships you start with in your fleet and how fast the timers run then go into edit mode and there will be a Mars Mission part, turbo timers doubles the countdown speed and you can have up to 10 starting ships, or none if you like to grind it out.

Configure Mars:
The next screen is a modified version of the difficulty selection which includes the world configuration, i removed temp range and rainfall and force them to create a Mars like planet, but you can still change the seed and the coverage, The difficulties are the same as vanilla just re-worded.

Select Landing Site:
Once Mars is generated you can select a landing site like normal, you might notice a couple of satellites in orbit, phobos, and a couple of dust storms on the surface, these storms will appear randomly and if they happen to pass over your base they will trigger dust storm conditions. The terrain types are not really any different on mars so the only thing that matters when picking a landing site is that the temperatures aren't too cold, and that you will have plenty of material to mine, but not too rocky otherwise you will limit the total amount of sand you can extract ice crystals from for your water supply. I tend to pick small or large hills around the equator with slate or sandstone for looks. Soon I’m going to update the digging system so that if you start on a map with visible ice on the ground you get a lot more water as bags of slush, so if you can manage the colder temps you could risk starting on colder tiles with more rocks.

Create Characters:
You will notice right away that the skills are all changed, All you need to know for now is that botany is growing, engineering is construction, medical science is medicine, geology is mining, and food science is cooking, so i tend to pick a botanist an engineer and a geologist as my starting crew so i can build and grow. The reason they have all been changed to sciences is because the research system that is planned is going to require specific sciences, not just generic research skill, generic research has been left in just incase you have a mod that needs it, but all vanilla rimworld research is already completed. Some like physics and chemistry don't do anything yet.

You will also see that childhood has been changed to nationality, and adulthood is the pawns general background, some backstories such as russian billionaire aren’t just a joke, they will be required for quests in future patches.


Entry phase:
Now here we are on mars, it’s quite red, and rocky, and your rocket ship will descend to the surface. Select the ship and have a look at the inspect panel in the bottom left, the default name for ships is Ares, ILAV stands for Interplanetary Landing and Ascent Vehicle, this means that the ship can take off and land from Earth and Mars multiple times, you can see it has a full battery with 4000Wd of energy, O2 N2 and H2O tanks that are full, and Liquid fuel tanks which might have a little bit of gas left in them from the descent burn.

Fleet management:
Pause the game and open the Mars tab along the bottom of the screen and you can see an overview of your fleet, in the top left you have a list of all your ships with their current status, preparing means they are preparing to launch from Earth, if they survive the launch they take 6 months to reach Mars, then they go through a short entry phase where they will be visible on the world view coming into orbit and descending to the surface. If you want to force the ship to land in a certain area in your map then you can build a landing beacon.

If you click through a couple of the ships in the list you will notice 2 different configurations, Crew and Cargo. You can change the configuration during the preparation stage but doing this adds 1 month to a ship's preparation time. The colonists are selected at random for now so you have to make do with who you get, but you can configure your cargo by clicking on the cargo graphic, the care packages and entertainment are lucky dip for now. You can also start building a new ship right away, it takes a long time to build and then it has to go through the prep phase too before it can launch, and you can only build 1 at a time. You can suspend the timer on any ships while they are in the prep phase.

Eject!
Now you understand the basics of the fleet we should probably let those poor colonists stretch their legs after being cramped in that ILAV for 6 months. Click on the ship and hit the eject button. Your crew will don their EVA suits and probably start trying to clean up the mess the rocket made when landing. If you select a colonist you will see a readout next to the draft button showing their suits current O2 CO2 and Pressure levels, CO2 is scrubbed automatically and pressure shouldn’t budge unless there’s a suit breach, but they will get through the O2 in a couple of days, colonists will consume more O2 and exhale more CO2 if they are doing physical activity like hauling and building, and they will consume less while sleeping, if a suit is getting close to empty you will hear a beeping noise as a warning.

Habitat:
Click through the cargo creates and figure which has what, hit deconstruct on the crate containing all the materials like steel and polymer. If you click the remove item button you can choose to drop 10 at a time of specific items, so i tend to drop 20 odd meals from the food crate, the hammer and drill from the tools crate, and the HAB and moxie from the starter crate. Now get your engineers to equip the hammer or power drill, these provide boosts to construction and repair speeds similar to tool benches. Click on the HAB and install it somewhere not too close to the ship so it doesn't catch fire when it finally launches, the HAB is a basic room layout with prebuilt floors and roof, and inflatable walls that are fast to build and don't require resources, it has a double airlock system to minimize air loss but these require aluminium to finish.

Give these people air!
Now while your engineers are busy knocking together the HAB you can spend a few minutes laying out some construction jobs, the first thing you need to do is fill the hab with air, run some power conduit from the ship to the hab, pick a spot to place your moxie outside the hab, and then select the gas pipe under Env.Control architect tab and lay pipe from the ship to the moxie and then into the hab. Once the construction of the HAB is complete and it is airtight you can build an air outlet inside and connect it to the gas line, the air outlet will then start pumping o2 and n2 from the tanks in the ship into the room, if you do this before the HAB is airtight all that precious gas will get pumped outside.

Once air is being pumped into your HAB roll your mouse over a cell inside, you will notice a readout on the left side of the screen showing some percentage values, these readings will update as you move your mouse over individual cells to show you the current values in that cell, the O2 and PSI should rise steadily, PSI is a combination of O2 and N2 in each cell, if the moxie is connected the CO2 will also rise to a minimum level which is required for plants. Toxicity increases if you place a moxie or AGS inside, or if fires break out.

Moxie:
The moxie is the first piece of equipment you will use, it will process martian atmosphere to generate a slow but steady flow of O2 CO2 and N2, it contains very small tanks that act as buffers, but it will also push gasses to any other tanks that it’s connected to, so once the O2 and PSI in the HAB are maxed out the moxie will begin refilling the tanks on the ship. It only produces enough O2 to sustain 3 colonists.

Accommodation:
Now that you HAB is pressurized and your O2 reserves are building you can start hauling some essentials inside such as food, clothes and wet wipes, it might be a mild 14c outside during the day but the temperature drops rapidly at night deep into the minus numbers, so build a heater or 2 to keep it warm. Some polymer beds would make the first night's sleep a bit easier too, and at this point you might want to draw up a restriction area inside the HAB then before bedtime you can get your colonists out of their EVA suits and restrict them to the HAB so they don't go wandering outside for a spot of stargazing for 15 seconds before they die from ebullism.

More stuff coming soon...

General tips:

Plan ahead!
- Because it takes months for supplies and colonists to arrive from Earth and because you have limited air and decompressing a room at the wrong time could result in all your colonists lungs bursting from ebullism.

Prepare carefully!
- Stock up storage tanks with lots of gas and water and disconnect them, if a door blows out and a room is suddenly venting it will rapidly drain your air tanks out your front door.

Store lots of power even if you have a nuclear reactor. A 5 day super dust storm could hit you and then it takes you another day and a half to clean all the sand off of your solar panels, and then you run out of power and your heating turns off and your plants die and you can't use your EVA suits because they didn't get recharged in time then you will probably lose some fingers and toes and jeff will go mental and put some holes in mark and nina with his power drill.

Is decompression a random event, or is it caused by having a low pressure airlock? I use 4 airlock doors after my suit room as a precaution for when a door blows out so I don't know if that is causing me to have so many blown doors, or if it really is a random event.

it can happen randomly to any door exposed to the atmosphere, i just dropped the chance a little bit in the def but its the oldest code in the mod from back before air even existed so im re-writing it to be based on pressure difference instead right now.

Originally posted by Dubwise56:

it can happen randomly to any door exposed to the atmosphere, i just dropped the chance a little bit in the def but its the oldest code in the mod from back before air even existed so im re-writing it to be based on pressure difference instead right now.

Ok, thank you for the quick response. Loving the mod so far, I litterally stopped playing Rimworld just so I could wait for this mod specifically.

how can i make my colonists take off their EVA suits when they go inside/put them on before they go out? also how do I refill the oxygen in their EVA suits? its stuck at being really low for me

apljee you need EVA stations that are connected to power and oxygen through gas pipes

and you have to make a hab area
step 1: slelect an EVA station
step 2: press the "make hab area" (a new area will be generated that is the inside of the hab/whole airtight station
step 3:select at all EVA stations the new area
btw. when you select an EVA station there is a button with a helmet and multiple "z" under it says manual change it all EVA stations to Auto rest ....then all the colonists will put they're suits into a EVA station before they go sleep

I have one question : how do you smelt Iron to steel ?

What is "Toxicity", where does it come from and can it be filtered? Nice mod btw!

Toxicity is the total amount of toxic gasses in the air required to kill a colonist. Most likely it will be carbon monoxide from fires, if you place an ags or moxie inside your hab by mistake then they will also output carbon monoxide into the air.

So first make sure you put the moxie and AGS outside.

To clear toxicity rapidly you will want some storage tanks filled with enough N2 and O2 to refill your hab, then you set the flow rate on your air outlets to 0 then hold your airlocks open or open vents to the outside and flush the toxic gasses outside, with the outlets set to 0 you wont waste gasses from your storage tanks, then close the doors and turn up the flow rate on your air outlets again to quickly refill the room with clean air from storage tanks.

You can also use plants, during photosynthesis they will absorb a small amount of toxicity, the amount is based on the size of the plant, a large greenhouse like the one in my preview pictures can filter air quite quickly

how do i turn iron into steel

..

iron needs to be smelted into steel using an electric smelter

i have no resorsis left :(

i will half to re start

Thanks for your timely response. I had a door blow out and a few things burn out their components. The likely culprits. I'll have to play around with storage tanks and get a greenhouse going. Thanks again.

I'm needing help making H2O/transfering it from my ship to water tanks