outposthd:how_to_play

How To Play

OutpostHD is still a work in progress. As such, this document may on occasion be slightly out of date. If you have questions that are not answered here or if something is unclear, you are welcome to open a topic on the OutpostHD Project Forum.

Your feedback as the end-user of the game is most welcome – as the lead developer I can't make a great game without your input.

After the introductory splash screens and animations, you'll be presented with the Main Menu. From here you can start a new game, continue a previous game, set options or quit.

Unlike the original game, you won't be presented with pretentious message boxes or unskip-able cutscenes. Instead when you click New Game you'll immediately be presented with the Planet Selection Screen.

When you click on New Game, you will be presented with the Planet Selection Screen.

From here you can select your AI Gender (male or female) and choose the planet that you want to start with.

At the moment, there are only three planet types: Mercury, Mars and Ganymede types. These currently only affect number of mine locations and maximum digging depth but over time this will have an effect on other variables including amount of solar radiation, atmospheric conditions, seismic and volcanic activity (see this forum post for details and a discussion of stellar and planetary selection).

Planet Type Max Depth No. Mines
Mercury 1 10
Mars 4 30
Ganymede 2 15

After choosing a planet, the main part of the game will begin. You will be presented with the Main Game Screen which is composed of the Resource HUD, the Diamond Map, the Site Map (aka MiniMap) and the Construction Panel.

Along the top of the main game screen is the Resource HUD. These are here to give you a quick way to assess the current state of your resource production.

As your resources get to critical levels (too few or storage capacity is almost used up) the numbers will begin to throb in red to alert you to potential issues.

Refined Resources

The Refined Resources section of the HUD shows you the currently available core materials you'll need to build, operate and maintain your colony structures. These are also used to build products in your factories such as robots, road materials, medicines, clothing, etc.

Your storage capacity is to the left of the individual resource breakdown. This is shown as Currently Stored / Storage Capacity. Keep a close eye on your storage levels. Running out of storage space can quickly lead to resource starvation as your resource production facilities go idle.

Food & Power

Food storage and Power are to the right of the refined resources. Like resource storage, this is displayed as Available / Capacity.

Morale and Population

The next section shows you your current morale level and the morale trend (going up, going down, staying the same). The smiley icon gives you a general idea of the happiness of your population.

Mousing over the morale indicator will open up the Population Panel which gives you a breakdown of your population, morale and residential capacity.

System Menu

The system menu gives you the options to save/load your game and to quit. Later in development the Options menu will become available too.

In the bottom right corner of the screen is the Site Map. Mine locations are indicated with colored diamonds – Red are inactive mines, Yellow are active mines and Blue/Grey are exhausted mines.

The location of your Command Center is indicated by a white square. The communications range is shown with light blue circle.

  • outposthd/how_to_play.1549810546.txt.gz
  • Last modified: 2019/02/10 14:55
  • by leeor_net