Surviving Mars Below & Beyond DLC Launches Today, Here’s What’s New

The Below & Beyond DLC for Surviving Mars launched today on Steam. The DLC lets players explore and expand their colony into the caves and lava tubes of the Martian surface. Surviving Mars is a sci-fi builder about colonizing Mars and surviving the process. Mining resources and building structures are some of the many things players will have to do to ensure the survival and improvement of the Colony.

With the DLC, players will be able to go below the surface and mine resources, construct special rocket-propelled buildings, and find exotic minerals and data samples. Besides the new areas, players will now be able to unlock additional buildings, vehicles, upgrades, and locales. They will also be able to unlock asteroid mining and tunnel colonization.

Surviving Mars Below & Beyond DLC Patch Notes

Underground

• A new area to explore right beneath your colony. Uncovering what the Martian Underground has been hiding from us, perhaps we can even find something rivaling our wonders.
• Expand your colony into the Underground, providing shelter against the hazards from the surface and bringing you closer to richer deposits.
• Be careful, as there may be underground marsquakes that can lead to dangerous cave-ins.

Asteroids

• Venture to asteroids as they fly past Mars, giving you a limited window to visit them.
• Set up temporary mining outposts to extract as many rewards as you can from each asteroid.
• Bring back Exotic Minerals, a new resource exclusive to asteroids, to improve your colony on the Martian surface and its underground.
• Some asteroids may not be as they appear and have a mystery to solve while you are on them.

Expansion Tech

• Unlock multiple specialized buildings, rockets, and upgrades in the underground and on asteroids.
• Gain benefits and upgrades for your entire colony.

Free Update

New Building

• Amphitheater – a new building to comfort your colonists and increase tourists’ satisfaction.

UI Improvements

• Construction Ranges – You can now hold CTRL (Y on Xbox and Triangle on Playstation) to see dust ranges of other buildings and other relevant ranges.
• Reorder tech queue – You can now easily adjust the order of techs within your research queue.
• Leak Icons – Cable and Pipe leaks now show icons above them so you can easily locate them.
• Cycle Grids – You can now cycle through different power grids and life support grids by clicking on power or oxygen and water in the top bar.
• Extended Resource info – We expanded the Top UI tooltips with more information per resource.

More Colony Control

• Custom Colony Name – Change your colony’s name to best fit your colony.
• Dome birth limit – Besides allowing and forbidding births, you can now also allow births as long as the dome still has available living space.
• Must include Filter – Colonist filters now have an option to include all colonists with a certain trait or specialization, even if they have undesired traits.

Balance Changes

• Rebalanced the Door to Summer event.
• School Spire; reduced the odds of the genius trait being given.
• Smart Apartments; reduced resident slots and increased maintenance cost.
• Medical Post; reduced number of colonists that can use it per shift and increased service comfort.

Known issues

Asteroids

• Drones that are “busy” with transporting resources do not get added to the cargo of a Lander rocket when the asteroid moves out of range. This can occasionally cause a crash.
• After salvaging an asteroid lander, its contents are dumped on the landing pad. Any drones and RCs part of the cargo can not be used.
• Pin menu does not show incoming Asteroid Landers from Asteroids.
• There is no warning about an unloaded cargo when launching a rocket back to Earth.
• Drones occasionally try to get to the unreachable area on Asteroids to gather resources.
• The camera is out of the map if the player clicks on the Astronomer’s pin while s/he is in orbit (Dying Wish mystery).

Underground

• Even after clearing debris, the area is uneven and unbuildable.
• Some cave-ins are unreachable and therefore cannot be cleared which prevents further exploration.
• Shuttles can fly ‘too high’ vertically in the Underground.

Platform-specific

• MAC: Many UI images don’t show up in the Mac build.
• Black squares are shown instead of B&B content icons on Epic build (Mac).

The Surviving Mars Below & Beyond DLC brought some free updates for players, improving the UI, balancing some mechanics, and more, so players will have a better experience overall. If you want to read the full patch notes you can go to the official game website. There you will find all the information you need.

Surviving Mars is available now on PC, PS4, and Xbox One.