Surviving Mars

This is a complex achievement. I'll start with the game setup and give some general tips, for those who don't want to be spoiled or handheld, but just want to be put on the right track.

GAME SETUP

I recommend making it as easy as possible on yourself. For the sponsor, choose Brazil. You can convert waste rock to rare metal, for crying out loud. For the Commander Profile, choose Inventor. This is a drone-heavy achievement, and Inventor gives you autonomous drone hubs, meaning they consume no power and don't require maintenance. For the mystery, choose "The Philosopher's Stone." It has no penalties, only benefits, and that benefit is free metals and rare metals - a lot of them. With this setup, you don't need any geologists on your surface colony and can go for a long time without importing or training any.

Here are the game rules you should pick: No events, Prefab colony, Fast rockets, Fast scanning, Increased production, More Applicants, and No Disasters. These rules, with the above profile, will give you a 100% difficulty level. You won't be doing much with Green Planet, and can disable it if you like, but it doesn't hurt to leave it enabled.

When selecting the location for your colony, first look for the entrances to the underground. They are big circular piles of rock with a big hole in the center. Proximity to one of these entrances is highly desirable. You don't need to be in the same sector, but I wouldn't get more than one sector away.

STRATEGY / TIPS

To unlock this achievement, you'll need to complete quite a few techs in the Recon & Expansion column. For this reason, This achievement stacks well with



The specific techs you need are:
Elevator
Self-sufficient lighting (highly recommended)
Micro-g landers
Low-g excavation permits
Micro-g vehicle (recommended)
Recon center
Underground dome
Underground flight school (recommended)
Micro-g mining

There are a few other Recon techs that can help you, but these are the only ones you must have. You will also need some regular techs as well, but not as many as you might think. For example, I never researched any of the regular buildings, but just bought prefabs for everything throughout the whole game. I pretty much alternated between completing one Recon tech and one regular tech for most of the game.

If you keep reading, you're going to get spoiled on the Below and Beyond DLC.

There are four possible underground wonders: the bottomless pit lab, the alien artifact, the jumbo cave, and the cave of wonders. You have two in each playthrough. The achievement to build "all the buried wonders" means both of the wonders you get in your playthrough. All of the wonders require hundreds of metal and exotic minerals. (It's 150 exotic minerals per wonder, at this writing.) Each wonder also has some specific requirements, such as electronics, machine parts, or concrete. In the most broad sense, unlocking the achievement involves four main tasks:
1. Explore the underground enough to discover the wonders.
2. Research the required technologies.
3. Mine 300 exotic minerals from asteroids and get them underground.
4. Get sufficient quantities of the other materials underground.

WALKTHROUGH

The rest of this solution is in the form of a walkthrough, for those people who want some more handholding. There are, I'm sure, plenty of other ways to go about it, but this is what I did, and it worked. I completed the second wonder by Sol 82.

You really need to go heavy on scientists and research all the way through the game. Your rare metal refineries and alien crystals from the mystery will generate ample revenue for you to import machine parts and the like while you focus on science. My first colonists were botanists, scientists, medics, and unspecialized workers exclusively. Outsource as much research as you can. Let me say it again: RESEARCH, RESEARCH, RESEARCH.

Make it an early priority to build an elevator to the underground and send an RC commander and RC explorer down to clear tunnels, explore anomalies, place drone hubs, and build light poles. When you first discover an entrance, you can choose to send an explorer down then, but I wouldn't, because they can't get far without drones. I think there are always two underground entrances per map, so find the other one, build another elevator, and send down another commander and explorer.

While you're discovering anomalies and clearing passages underground, emphasize getting your asteroid mining operation up and running, which means researching Micro-g lander, Recon center, and Micro-g mining. I had one Recon center staffed with six scientists all the time. I had three asteroid landers and often had all three of them on the same asteroid at once, with an RC explorer and commander as well. Send all of the exotic minerals you collect underground.

Before I forget, besides Research, research, research, the other key to this achievement is Drones, drones, drones. If you don't have 8 drones per underground commander and 10 per rocket, you're making it hard on yourself.

By Sol 28, I had my second elevator finished and was mining my second and third asteroids. From here until about the next 50 sols, you're going to be doing the same things over and over: completing researches, examining anomalies, collecting exotic minerals from asteroids, and moving resources underground.

When you're discovering underground anomalies related to the wonders, there are several times when you're given a choice. For example, A to tinker with the bottomless pit, or B to rope it off. A is always the faster, better choice.

By Sol 53, I had both wonders discovered and had my first habitable dome, with full life support running, ready to receive colonists. From that point on, it was all about collecting materials.

Below are some specific comments about completing the bottomless pit lab and the alien artifact, which are the two wonders I built for this achievement.

You must build an underground dome near the bottomless pit lab. It's not a requirement of the achievement that it have colonists, but I recommend that you put geologists in it to mine ordinary metal and engineers to make electronics. You need tons of both commodities for the wonder, and the more you produce underground, the less you have to transport down on the elevators. (Remember, you ought to have ample rare metals for the electronics factory because you're Brazilian and you can convert waste rock to rare metal.) If your bottomless pit dome isn't near an elevator, however, you're going to have a problem, because colonists will die of suffocation trying to get to it. What I did was build a micro-dome near an elevator so my colonists had a place to stand and breathe while waiting for a shuttle to take them to their work dome. I learned that they always started to starve the instant they got underground, though, so I built a grocery in the micro-dome and put one worker in it. A diner followed, and long story short, my micro-dome by the elevator turned into a small community on its own - a waystation, as it were, between the surface and the bottomless pit.

When you're sending colonists through an elevator, they will teleport themselves TO the elevator, but they will travel FROM the elevator to the closest dome the old-fashioned way, on foot. This is one big reason why I recommend placing your surface colony near an elevator, in case you ever need to send underground colonists back up to the surface...so they don't die of suffocation.

The alien artifact requires 5 colonists. I think they might have to have a dome to go to, but I'm not positive about that. Something will happen to them, and then you don't have to worry about them anymore. Seniors and tourists are ideal for this, with unspecialized workers your next best choice.

Of the two wonders, I would emphasize finishing the bottomless pit lab first. It allows you to convert anything that can be placed in a depot or storage area, from waste rock to rare metal to seeds, into research points. The alien artifact gives you a drone hub with unlimited range and drones that never lose power.

Please let me know in the comments if I left out anything important, or did something in an inefficient manner.