Surviving Mars: Colony Design Set (DLC)

Let's be precise about what you're buying here, because the name does some heavy lifting. Colony Design Set is not a mechanics overhaul or a gameplay expansion. Released alongside the Space Race DLC in November 2018, it adds 25 new buildings to Surviving Mars, covering living quarters, workplaces, and leisure spaces inside your domes. The headlining functional additions are scaled-down production buildings, specifically smaller variants of structures like the Electronics Factory and Machine Parts Factory. If you've ever built a mid-game colony and found the full-size factories laughably oversized for a dome running two dozen colonists, these compact versions solve a genuine layout problem. They unlock at the same research milestones as their standard counterparts, so they slot cleanly into any existing build order without relearning progression. The broader building roster leans toward aesthetic variety. Structures like the Stirling Generator and the Spacebar (yes, a bar in space) give your domes a less cookie-cutter look, and for players who min-max dome layouts on graph paper, the extra footprint options matter more than they might initially seem. Column-by-column dome planning is a real discipline in Surviving Mars, and having more building sizes to juggle means tighter, less wasteful configurations. That said, if you are indifferent to how your colony looks and only care about survival efficiency, the gameplay delta here is slim. Community reception over the years has been mixed-to-lukewarm. The most common complaint is that the DLC name suggests more transformative content than it delivers, with at least one Steam reviewer flagging the mismatch between expectation and reality. The functional additions, particularly the small factories, are genuinely appreciated by players who discovered them later in their Surviving Mars journey, often by accident while watching someone else play. That accidental discovery pattern tells you something: this is not content that announces itself. It is background utility. One important note for buyers in 2025: the Colony Design Set is bundled inside the Season Pass and is included in full in Surviving Mars: Relaunched, the remastered version of the game. If you already own either of those, you have this content. Buying it standalone only makes sense if you own the base game in isolation and want the specific building set without committing to a larger bundle. For a dedicated Surviving Mars player who spends serious time optimising dome layouts, the small factory variants alone justify the low asking price. For a casual player who throws down buildings wherever they fit, this adds little. There is no new research branch, no new sponsor mechanics, no mystery content. It is a building pack, full stop, and it is best evaluated as exactly that.

Diego · Scout Team

Strategy & simulation

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