Surviving Mars
80 Achievements
0-1h
Cubism
Complete The Power of Three Mystery
7.5%
How to unlock the Cubism achievement in Surviving Mars - Definitive Guide
This mystery plays out mostly by itself. Cubes will start to appear around your colony. You may wish to build special statues with them (no apparent effect) or just destroy them. A new storage unit for Black Cubes will also appear in your Build menu. You can use these storage areas to have your drones automatically clear the cubes from your build area.
Eventually, you will come across an update about researching the S.H.E.P.I.D. technology. The mystery log will read, "We should research the S.H.E.P.I.D. technology to protect the colony structures from the Black Cubes." At this point, be sure to build a Concrete Extractor if you do not have one. I went heavy with Extractors in the early days of my colony so I had decommissioned all of mine due to stockpiling ridiculous amounts of concrete. However, you need at least one Extrator in order for the story to advance. Once an Extractor is destroyed by a Cube, the technology to search (and therefore advance the mystery) will appear in the Breakthrough queue.
There doesn't seem to be any way of failing this mystery, so enjoy the story as it unfolds!
Update: Just in case anyone else is having this issue, I found the following info on Steam Community that seems to work:
but if theres no wasterock around...
so thanks!
A few notes to successfully complete this mystery:
1. The black cubes require their own depots to be deconstructed by drones.
2. You will need a lot of depots to store all the black cubes. 10+.
3. Drones will only disassemble black cubes into depots that are within range.
Other than that this is a pretty easy and enjoyable mystery.
Pick “The Power of Three” mystery when you start a new game. The mystery triggers automatically after a set amount of time (approximately 30 Sols) and will culminate in 1 of 3 possible outcomes depending on your actions. The trophy unlocks no matter what the outcome. As the mystery progresses, you must complete the breakthrough research technologies “Dark Spectrometry” and “SHEPID” to proceed to the next step. To get “Dark Spectrometry” to appear in the research screen, you must have one active Concrete Extractor which will be destroyed and acts as the trigger for the next step of the mystery.
Recommendations:
1) Have a lot of drones for this mystery.
There are 3 possible outcomes depending on your choice of action in dealing with the Black Cubes appearing throughout the map – (1) Non-aggressive/Cautious: Store the black cubes in storage depots, (2) Aggressive: Destroy the black cubes, (3) Non-aggressive/Worship: Construct decorations out of Black Cubes. As far as I know, only choice (1) does not have any negative consequences.
You’ll need to build Black Cube storage depots and the drones will automatically pick up the Black Cubes within their operational zone and store in the depots. Black Cubes will spawn randomly all over the map thus hindering your colony expansion unless dealt with through any of the 3 choice mentioned above. If you choose choice (1), towards the end, your drones will automatically start to build a dome-like Black Monument on its own from the accumulated Black Cubes, and once completed you’ll be rewarded with a random technology.