Colonies

Prerequisites

Before claiming a deed on a planet that you intend to colonise, you should have already acquired (from Deep Six) the blueprints for Environmental Domes and Automated Fission Power Plants. You will also need the blueprint for the traditional Transport Grids, substantial reserves of minerals for construction, as well as Graphene and Superconducting Coils. You will also need a ship with a large passenger and cargo capacity, and a suitable Hyperdrive fitted.

Deed Placement

Before claiming a deed, ensure that the land under the deed is mostly flat, and has suitable resource levels. Colonies should not be placed on extra-hilly moons at all, and you should also avoid building on hillsides except where absolutely necessary.

Use the show mb.coresample command on various areas within a 100km radius (about 2-3 squares of a show mb.samplemapoverlay) of the intended centre of the deed. Beware that actual deposits of minerals do not correspond to the mb.samplemapoverlay. There is always some overlap. You do not want to invest your limited supplies of Graphene, Superconducting Coils, Titanium, Carbon and Aluminium on a dome when the land under the dome lacks development potential.

Dome Placement

Upon claiming a deed, you will want to place your first dome. Ensure the land it is being placed on is flat, or close to flat, and be absolutely sure that it has minerals present under substantial parts of the dome, if not the entire area.

Upon placing your dome, you will notice a structure at the centre of the dome, at ground level. This is the dome control tower. The commands you can use with the dome control tower console can be found in the latter part of this article.

Underwater Domes

On worlds with oceans the dome may be built either above or below sea level. However, the dome control systems will not work correctly if the dome is built partially underwater. Your dome should be either entirely underwater or not in the sea at all.

Note that in a H₂O-only ocean, you will have difficulty finding sufficient nitrogen for your undersea dome atmosphere. Nitrogen cannot presently be transferred from other domes on land. It must be obtained from the blue section of a Gas Giant.

Transport Grid Placement

After placing your dome and supplying its materials, the first thing you will want to build are Transport Grids. Keep them three squares apart on one axis, and combine them at least once, preferably twice, on the other axis. The three square separation allows for two squares of land to be developed inbetween each Transport Grid. The intersecting grids can be located within the dome boundary, but they do not necessarily have to be.

Energy Supply

The next thing to build are your Automated Fission Power Plants. You will need approximately 2-3 power plants before construction is finished to manage the dome's atmosphere, approximately 6 power plants for a single dome farm colony, and substantially more power plants for mining colonies.

Energy Supply Tips

As these power plants are designed for rough environments, they can and should be built outside the dome, though they must be connected using Transport Grids.

For obvious reasons there should be two independent paths for energy to reach the dome control tower from your power plants. This may mean building power plants on two sides of your colony, or by adding a transverse grid alongside the dome control tower. When deleting and adding buildings, any interruptions to supply of energy to the dome control tower (if you accidentally remove a critical transport grid section while attempting to remove a building) could have catastrophic consequences for your dome's residents.

Environmental Management

Click on the dome control tower to manage the dome's computer. You will see a console. Commands that you can use to set up your dome's atmosphere are listed below.

You will want the Radiation, Gravity and Pressure as close to 1 as possible. The Radiation and Gravity are managed in their own right. The pressure is a function of the quantities of gases present within the dome. You will need the gas amounts and water vapour (N2, O2, CO2 and H2O) to sum up to approximately 430,000 tons. They will need to be at proportions similar to Earth's atmosphere.

del

Deletes the specified command line. Each line is numbered. Syntax: del 12 (where 12 is the line to be deleted).

polarize

Sets the level of radiation shielding occurring within the roof glazing of your Environmental Dome. This prevents the radiation, where applicable, from cooking your dome's residents.

modgrav

Changes the level of gravity within the dome. Ideally this should be set to the difference between external gravity and 1.

heat

Heats the air/gases within your dome. Can and should be made conditional. All temperatures are in degrees Kelvin. This value should be the coolest you want your dome to get during the night.

cool

Cools the air/gases within your dome. Can and should be made conditional. All temperatures are in degrees Kelvin. This value should be the warmest you want your dome to get during the day.

vent

Separates and expels specified gas (including NH4 and CO2, as well as useful gases such as Nitrogen, Oxygen, Carbon Dioxide etc) out of the dome atmosphere. Can and should be made conditional, so that these gases are only expelled above your preferred upper limit for each gas.

All Carbon must be vented. The dome's computer does not do a very good job stabilising the carbon in its molecular form. The technology to achieve this is unlikely to ever be developed during our lifetimes.

All surplus gases must be conditionally vented above the levels you want in your atmosphere. Where a gas is also needed for split or combine functions, make the vent command conditional at a slightly higher quantity than the condition set on the split or combine function. The technology to save and store unwanted gases from the dome into a warehouse is presently unavailable.

split

Separates out the molecular bonds between various atmospheric gases, to yield potentially useful gases. For example, you can create a conditional rule to split NH4 into Nitrogen (required for atmosphere) and Hydrogen (which cannot be stored at this time and will need to be vented or recombined into water) when your level of Nitrogen is too low, or when your level of water is too low (though not both).

combine

Recombines split gases or gases obtained using intake. For example, if you have H2 from an intake or a split command, and you have O2 from another split command, you can combine the two to make water. Can and should be made conditional.

intake

Sets the dome controls to retrieve a specific gas from the atmosphere. Can and should be made conditional.

unload

Allows a player to drop Hydrogen, Oxygen, and any other atmospheric elements, directly into the dome from your ship's cargo hold. Most domes will not use this feature as it's infinitely more efficient to intake and use gases that are present locally. You would normally only use this command if your dome is on a planet with no atmosphere or where a specific element is missing from the atmosphere. This is a one-off feature: it will not continue to raid your ship's hold for atmospheric gases the next time you visit your dome.

Sample Environmental Controls

Johneaux-19 Rocky Planet 14 has a number of colonies present.

This planet has an atmosphere of:

H2O (Water): 0.2786489
CH4 (Methane): 0.1218335
NH3 (Ammonia): 0.0965018
N (Nitrogen): 0.03136308 (Don't ask why this isn't listed as N2)
O2 (Oxygen): 0
CO2 (Carbon Dioxide): 0.4716526

Its gravity is 4.044g and its temperature (at (notional) sea level) is 1111.674k, though it has no ocean. Its external pressure is 6.117657.

While some changes may be required depending on the local placement of your dome, the following commands work to make a dome habitable at (or below) its (notional) sea level:

polarize 0.9041
modgrav -3.044
heat temp < 286
cool temp > 296
vent ch4
vent nh3
intake n2 n2 < 332000
vent n2 n2 > 334000
split co2 o2 < 92000
split h2o o2 < 92000
vent o2 o2 > 93000
intake co2 co2 < 100
vent co2 co2 > 190
intake h2o h2o < 500
vent h2o h2o > 4500
vent c
vent h

Environmental Controls - Known Issues (as at May 2014)

Dome control systems work very slowly, except under supervision. When domes first went live, they did not work at all except under supervision. While this has been fixed, the dome controls still work slower when you are not present. As such, if your dome is not making sufficient progress towards habitability, spend more time watching your colony.

Dome cooling works approximately three times faster if the cool command is unconditional. Cool is one of the few commands you can list twice, once conditional and once unconditional. Try adding an unconditional cool command to the end of your code, and then remove it later.

Colony Buildings and Colonists

You will already have blueprints for colony buildings such as Water Tower, Residential Tower, Warehouse, Entertainment Complex, Mines and Farms, if you have built successful settlements on core planets and moons. Dome colonies are larger and slightly harder to build versions of these, though dome colonies are potentially far more lucrative.

All buildings must adjoin at least one transport grid section to operate correctly.

All buildings must have workers to operate correctly. In the core there are millions of unemployed residents, and thus finding labour is not difficult. On dome colonies you will only have workers present if you transport them to the dome yourself. Unemployed refugees from the core systems may be resettled via the UNRC.

(We can only hope their presence is entirely voluntary. At present this is unclear, especially since the UNRC is paid per colonist but there is no evidence that the colonists themselves are being paid for their presence or their labour.)

You should request an allocation of colonists (by clicking Manage Settlement -> Recruit Colonists), while within 100,000km of your colony, once your dome is habitable and you have completed buildings for colonists to work, rest and play. You will be told which system you need to go to upon each allocation, and how much you will need to pay the UNRC for that allocation.

You should continue to recruit and transport more colonists until your colony has reached full employment.

Colonist Delivery - Known Issues (as at May 2014)

Colonists must be brought to within 5,000 metres of any of your domes. They will find their own way to your colony from there. This will change once sufficiently large airlocks are developed.

Starships available for use are not equipped to carry more than 60 passengers at a time, most substantially fewer than that. A typical dome full of mines or farms and a few towers will require approximately 2,000 colonists. Colonist delivery will be made easier soon, once modules are developed for ships, to sacrifice cargo space and add more passenger capacity instead.

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