How Red Planet Tycoon actually works.

The simulation tick

Everything productive in Red Planet Tycoon resolves on a 10-second wall-clock tick. Construction runs on separate one-second microticks. All quantities quoted on this page are per tick, before adjacency bonuses, upgrades, boosters and power modifiers are applied.

Within each recipe, buildings are fairly rotated, so a chain that is short on input starves evenly instead of letting the first building in the list take everything. The simulation is deterministic: the same colony state and the same elapsed time always produce the same result, which is what lets offline catch-up use the identical code path as live play.

Surveying and fog of war

Only tiles adjacent to already-revealed territory can be surveyed. Each tap spends Gold and adds survey progress; a tile is revealed once its progress is met.

Reveal cost scales with hex distance d from the Command Base as 1 + d^1.4 + 1.04^d, with an additional outer term beyond distance 6, then multiplied by terrain. Mountain Ridge costs ×2.0, Crater Rim and Volcanic Basalts ×1.5, Canyon Crevice ×1.2, and Meltwater Channel ×0.9.

Survey Strength upgrades come in three tiers and add up to +150 progress per tap. They reduce the number of taps needed, not the total Gold cost. The game also reserves 50 Gold that surveying cannot consume, so a new player can always afford their first Regolith Drill.

What surveying can find

• Deposits - the overlays that make extraction worthwhile. Density rises from 0% near the landing site to about 25% in the outer bands.
• Supply caches - from level 3, up to three on the map at once, paying twice the reveal cost, or five times on a 10% rare roll.
• Ancient ruins - unbuildable artifact tiles that pay a one-time discovery of 1,000 Gold per colony level, then passive Gold every tick (capped at 30 minutes while offline), and grant a Neighbor adjacency stack to every adjacent building.
• Rough ground - blockers from radius 21 outward that prevent construction until blasted, or occupied by a Regolith Deepbore.

Build zones and outposts

Construction normally requires a build zone. The Command Base creates one with a radius of 3. Each Outpost, unlocked at level 6, creates another with a radius of 2, and costs ×1.16 more for every outpost already built.

Each outpost can take up to two improvements: a larger radius, or a colony-wide adjacency boost applied to everything inside its circle. Normally you pick one; the Outpost Mastery prestige perk lets every outpost take both.

From level 7 you may also build extractors and outposts outside any zone at five times the normal cost. This is how you reach valuable ground early - and it is exactly what dust storms destroy.

Terrain

Twelve terrain types across eight families. Terrain decides what can be built, what can be extracted, and what a survey costs.

Deposits and depletion

Deposits are overlays sitting on compatible terrain, and they are finite. When the total is spent, the overlay is gone and the building on it stops producing.

Deposit capacity is raised by the Deposit Assessment and Regolith Reserve Mapping upgrades, and by the Deep Deposits (×2 in connected zones) and Rich Reserves (+50%) prestige perks. The Regolith Deepbore is the only extractor that never depletes - it sits on unclearable rough ground and produces slowly and forever.

Production recipes

Nineteen recipes, each per 10-second tick, before modifiers.

Extraction

Processing

Reading the ratios is the core planning skill. One Smelter consumes 3.75 Regolith per tick against a Regolith Drill's 15, so a single drill supports four smelters - until adjacency bonuses raise both sides and the arithmetic changes again.

Storage and resource tiers

Nineteen resources sit in four tiers, and storage capacity is shared across every resource in a tier rather than allocated per resource.

When a tier is full, every producer of that tier stalls. This is the main pressure that makes an idle colony require attention: you sell surplus, add warehouses, buy storage compression upgrade ranks, or throttle producers with the Finder's per-building-type slider, which pauses the least-connected buildings first.

Completed same-tier storage buildings also act as passive relay components, carrying matching-tier resources across the colony so distant buildings still count as connected for Chain adjacency.

Power

Power is a single global pool. Coverage is generation divided by consumption, and production is stepped rather than proportional.

Generation comes from Solar Arrays (+4 MW), Wind Turbines on crater rims and mountain ridges (+10 MW), Fission Reactors (+35 MW), and Battery Banks, which cost 5 MW idle but deliver +100 MW during a dust storm. Solar and wind both go offline while a storm is overhead.

One trap worth knowing: paused producers still consume power. Only demolishing a building releases its load.

Adjacency bonuses

Placement is the spatial puzzle that replaces belt routing. Two independent systems apply.

Neighbor

+10% output and input per stack. Each completed adjacent copy of the exact same production building grants one stack. Note that it raises input as well as output, so a dense cluster consumes proportionally more and can starve a chain that has not been scaled to match.

Extra stacks come from ancient ruins (one stack to each adjacent building), Boost Towers (two stacks to every eligible building within two tiles, and towers stack with each other), and outposts upgraded with the circle-boost improvement.

Chain

+20% output per distinct connected input, rising to 30% on the Shattered Highlands map. A building earns one bonus for each distinct input it actually receives from a connected supplier - either directly adjacent or relayed through same-tier storage components. A Circuit Fab fed all three of its inputs by connected suppliers therefore runs far ahead of one drawing from general stock.

Adjacency Logistics upgrade ranks add two percentage points to both systems.

Dust storms

From level 7, a dust storm arrives at the top of every real-time hour and lasts 20 seconds. During a storm:

• Solar Arrays and Wind Turbines produce nothing.
• Battery Banks each supply 100 MW.
• Every building outside a Command Base or Outpost zone is permanently destroyed with no refund.

Storms are processed once per real hour whether or not the game is open, and losses are itemised in the offline report. On the Tempest Barrens map they run for five brutal minutes every 30 minutes, starting from level 1, which makes Battery Banks the map's central mechanic rather than a convenience. On Shattered Highlands they arrive only every two hours.

The market

Every resource has an independent demand meter measured in Gold value sold, not units. Base band capacity is 3,000 Gold plus 100 per colony level, and there are four bands:

Demand recovers at 12,000 Gold of value per hour. Selling a full warehouse in one action pushes you straight into the 25% band and costs hours of recovery; drip-selling across sessions is worth substantially more. The sell interface defaults its slider to the largest quantity that still clears at the full 100% tier, precisely so that the safe play is the default one.

Capacity, recovery and price are all improvable: Market Exchange buildings (+10% capacity and recovery each, stacking), the Export Brokerage upgrade, T4 Trade Logistics, the Market Magnate perk (×2 capacity), map modifiers, and Terraform Index, which adds +10% market value per 10 points.

Contracts and boosters

Mission Control unlocks at level 8. Five offers are available at once and up to three can be active. Offers refresh every hour after a dust storm, or immediately with a Contract Reroll booster.

Contract types ask you to deliver resources, survey a number of tiles, reach a power surplus, or construct a number of a given building type. Sizes are S, M, L and Legendary - Legendary contracts use 30× the normal amounts for 3× the resource payout, and are limited to delivery and survey types. Large contracts drop reward boxes containing boosters.

The six boosters

• Contract Reroll - replaces the current offers immediately.
• Production Boost - doubles live production for two minutes. Deliberately does not apply to offline catch-up.
• Survey Boost - halves the cost of the next 50 tiles.
• Rapid Construction - instantly finishes everything currently under construction.
• Gold Supply Drop - a level-scaled lump of Gold.
• Improve Market Conditions - skips 15 minutes of market demand recovery.

Permanent upgrades

27 upgrades across 112 total ranks, unlocking by level and purchasable with Gold or Cores. They are permanent for the run and cover survey strength, extraction and processing output, per-tier storage compression, power generation, construction speed and cost, offline tick capacity, contract count, payout and Legendary odds, market sale value, and adjacency effectiveness.

Cores - the premium currency, earned from levels, milestones, contracts and in-game ads - are deliberately restricted to permanent global quality-of-life. There are no narrow per-building buffs to buy, which is what keeps the upgrade tree from turning into a power treadmill.

The 30-level campaign

Each level has an objective, a Gold cost, and requirements drawn from surveyed tile counts, specific coordinates, resource deliveries consumed on completion, buildings constructed, lifetime production, contracts completed, power surplus or surveyed biome. Six milestone levels, marked below, carry larger objectives and Core rewards.

Offline progression

When you return, the first 10 ticks run at full speed - ten real seconds each. Every tick after that represents 100 seconds of real time, up to a total cap of 100 ticks, which covers roughly two and a half hours of real absence by default.

The cap is extendable: Remote Operations adds 10 ticks per rank, Shift Handoff Protocols adds 6 full-speed ticks per rank, and the Extended Operations prestige perk doubles total capacity.

Offline simulation uses the same recipe order, fractional carry, storage limits, depletion rules and power phases as live play, so the away report is an accurate account rather than an estimate. The one exception is the Production Boost booster, which never applies offline.

The Terraform Campaign

Completing level 30 makes the run replayable. A Terraform Replay keeps your Terraform Index, up to 1,000 Cores, up to 200 Boosters and your equipped perks, and resets everything else.

Each completed run grants +10 Terraform Index, capped at 100. Index effects:

• +1% to numeric level requirements, contract sizes, contract Gold and ad rewards per point.
• −5% survey cost per 10 points, floored at half price.
• +10% market value per 10 points.
• +1 building on major project targets per 20 points.
• One perk slot per 10 points - nine perks at maximum Index.

Maps and seeds

Four maps, unlocked by Terraform Index. Each changes the strategy rather than just the scenery.

Every map except Old Channels can be generated from a six-digit seed. The first roll of a new run is free; rerolls cost 200 Cores. Generation is deterministic, so a seed is a shareable map - the same number always produces the same world.

Terrain engineering

A surveyed Mountain Ridge can be permanently flattened for 10,000 Gold: a 70% chance of clean buildable ground, otherwise a rolled resource outcome - wreckage, regolith, rough ground, volcanic carbon, ice or silica. Rough ground blockers can be blasted for 2,000 Gold, unless a Regolith Deepbore currently occupies them.