Hello and thank you for checking out this shiny new dev diary dedicated to the upcoming update, codenamed Sagan. While our previous update (Da Vinci) catered mostly to our players that like to focus their efforts on city-building in Creative Mode, Sagan's main feature is targeted towards our more hardcore survivalist crowd. It introduces a new game mode meant to test your colony building skills as well as your mastery of not just surviving under the alien conditions, but being fast and efficient while doing so.

Challenges
How can you measure the skills of a player in a sandbox city-builder? Even in a survival-oriented one, like Surviving Mars, the difference between a very good player and merely a competent one is often in the efficiency and game time they need to accomplish their goals. While the existing Score system tries to evaluate this to some degree, it is far from perfect, and there is really no fair way to balance it for all possible play styles and game rules.

Challenges are meant to be our answer to this problem, introducing a new way to test your skills. Each Challenge presents a single objective before you that may be as simple as "complete the Founder stage" or more complex like "research all technologies". All Challenges are time-limited, so you have to optimize your approach and be efficient to pass the test.



You can read the dev diary in full here.