Surviving Mars: Project Laika (DLC)

Project Laika is a content pack for Surviving Mars, the colony-builder from Haemimont Games, and its pitch is exactly what the name implies: animals on Mars. You get two new production buildings, an in-Dome Ranch for smaller species like chickens and rabbits, and an Outdoor Ranch for larger livestock such as cows, pigs, ostriches, and goats, each breed with its own water and oxygen requirements and a corresponding food yield. On top of that, 25 cosmetic pet species, cats, dogs, llamas, penguins, platypuses, and more, spawn passively inside your domes once your colony reaches sufficient maturity. If you have the Green Planet expansion running alongside this, terraforming progress eventually unlocks outdoor roaming for those pets, which is a genuinely satisfying visual payoff for a late-game colony. Now, the honest spreadsheet reading: the ranch buildings do not slot cleanly into Surviving Mars's existing tech and balance systems. The food numbers put ranches roughly on par with, or occasionally superior to, standard crop farms, but none of the research upgrades that apply to farms carry over. There is no tech tree depth here. The livestock mechanic is essentially a reskinned farm with a higher water cost and a different aesthetic. That missing systemic integration is the main reason strategy-focused players walk away feeling short-changed. The vegan colonist trait does introduce a small wrinkle, since vegan colonists take a morale hit from animal farming, which at least adds one decision node to dome population management, but it is a thin one. The 25 pet animals are entirely cosmetic. They spawn in domes without a dedicated build or research trigger, which confuses new players and creates a mild friction loop of zooming in on residences wondering where the cats went. There is no comfort or sanity bonus formally attached to pet presence in the colony simulation, so if you are optimizing a late-game resource graph, pets contribute nothing to the numbers. What they do contribute is visual warmth: a colony that was previously just domes full of stressed geologists suddenly has a dog wandering past a bio-dome airlock, and that does something for the atmosphere that raw throughput figures cannot. For a colony-sim player who has already sunk serious hours into Surviving Mars and wants more reasons to zoom in close during the mid-to-late game, Project Laika delivers exactly that, no more. It is best treated as an atmospheric add-on rather than a systems expansion. If you already own Green Planet and want the full picture of what a terraformed Martian colony looks like, the ranch buildings and roaming pet population round out that vision nicely. If you are still in early-colony firefighting mode, or if your primary interest is optimizing production chains and AI behavior, skip this and put the budget toward Space Race or Green Planet instead. Project Laika is a narrow purchase: it rewards players who are already comfortable enough with the base game to enjoy stopping and watching a llama investigate a hab module.

Diego · Scout Team

Strategy & simulation

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