Aeolis Base Field Manual

Your First Sol

1. Raise the tablet (hold Tab) and read the active alarms and task queue before touching time compression.
2. Walk the base. Find the galley, hygiene station, suit locker, airlock, storage crates, greenhouse hatch, bunks, med station and computer. Face a hotspot and use the action shown at the bottom of the HUD.
3. Check power and life support. On the computer, inspect POWER, LIFE SUPPORT and SYSTEMS; confirm generation, battery runway, cabin pressure, O₂/CO₂, temperature and water.
4. Eat, drink and choose a ration menu. Needs continue during work, sleep and fast-forward. Auto serves perishable produce first.
5. Prepare before EVA. Complete prebreathe, inspect the suit, pack the tool roll plus the exact spare or supply, then cycle the airlock. Never open a door against the wrong pressure state.
6. Use 1–6 deliberately. Begin at 1×. Warp only after the base is stable and you know which alarm will bring you back.

Flight Plan

The mission programme is the spine of a run. Mission Control baselines eight phases and uplinks them on a schedule — commissioning, storm hardening, local survey, the seismic network, regional geology, self-sufficiency, ascent-vehicle salvage, and handover preparation. Each directive carries a rationale, a due sol and a weight.

• Objectives measure real state. Litres in the tank, megabits of seismic data actually returned home, berm stages really piled up, caches really recovered. Nothing is a scripted flag, so there is no way to satisfy a directive except by doing the work.
• Tasking rides the radio link. A phase is only uplinked when the link is up, and the deadline clock starts when the message lands. A mispointed dish delays the programme; it does not penalise you.
• Deadlines compete with survival. The directive due in three sols wants the same labour-hours, power and consumables as the failing scrubber does. That choice is the game.
• Missing is not fatal. A slipped directive costs morale and books zero credit, but closing it late still earns half. Mission Control re-baselines rather than writing objectives off.
• Rewards release, they don't create. A closed directive can bring forward the beacon key for a cache that was landed before the crew arrived. No cargo appears from nowhere.
• Sol 480 is handover. The follow-on crew's lander arrives and your rotation ends with a programme evaluation out of 100 and a letter grade — weighted across the whole flight plan, so objectives you never reached count as zero. Dying seals the same evaluation at whatever you had banked.

Watch the FLIGHT PLAN panel on the tablet for the soonest-due directive; open the base computer's PROGRAM page (or type program in the shell) for the whole plan, the phase briefs, the running evaluation and the mission ledger.

Controls

On touch devices, the left stick moves, dragging the view looks, the large contextual buttons replace E/F/R, and the right rail opens the tablet, kit, light, comms and help. Push the movement stick to its rim to run.

Survival Loop

Outside light follows Mars conditions: butterscotch daylight, blue sunset scatter near the sun, and near-black dusty haze at night. A flashlight or rover lights matter after dark.

Greenhouse

The greenhouse is its own pressurised module. When the hatch is sealed, it keeps separate pressure, CO2, humidity, and temperature. Crops need warmth, pressure, light, water, nutrients, and enough CO2.

Glazing dust cuts crop light and passive solar warmth. Sunlight is measured as photosynthetic photon flux; efficient LEDs fill the deficit only during the 16-hour crop photoperiod, drawing up to several kilowatts. Harvests retain their crop-specific calories, protein, fat and micronutrients — lettuce is the vitamin crop, the grain staples barely register. The irrigation pump tops soil moisture up while powered and healthy; most root water returns to the cabin loop through transpiration. Compost crop biomass to recover part of the nutrient stream.

Galley & Nutrition

The pantry holds six kinds of meal pack — fortified breakfast, meat entrée, vegetable entrée, snack, dessert and the contingency bar — and roughly three packs make a sol of food. Each menu has its own calories, protein, fat, carbohydrates, fibre and micronutrient density, plus the potable water a freeze-dried pack takes to rehydrate. Press R at the galley (or run ration <type> in the terminal) to set the standing menu; E eats it. Auto serves fresh produce first, because produce spoils and packs don't.

• Calories keep you moving — run out and you starve.
• Protein holds muscle against 0.38 g atrophy and feeds tissue repair. In a protein deficit, conditioning wastes faster, exercise gains are halved, and healing slows. Meat entrées, vegetable entrées and soy harvests are the suppliers.
• Micronutrients gate healing and morale. Fresh produce is the jackpot; fortified breakfasts help; a diet of snacks and desserts will find you out in a couple of weeks.
• Menu fatigue is real: repeating the same meal erodes its morale value, so rotate the board — desserts lift spirits most when they're occasional.

Check rations in the terminal for the pantry board and food runway, and diet for your nutrition meters, recent menu and the flight surgeon's advice. The BIOMED page charts protein and micronutrient status over the last 30 sols.

Inventory

Storage is the base manifest. Your personal kit is what you can carry. It has a 12 kg cap and is intended for EVA parts, emergency supplies, and hand tools rather than a grid of loot slots. A heavy kit slightly slows movement and work.

• Open storage with I only while near the storage crates or loose tool hotspots.
• Pack portable supplies and spares before leaving the hab.
• Exterior repairs consume carried items, not storage items.
• Suit punctures require a carried suit patch kit.
• The leak detector and flashlight ride in the personal kit once picked up.
• The tool roll (2.6 kg) starts on your belt: hard machine work — repairs, maintenance, the cable splice, seal and filter swaps, dish realignment — needs it carried. Stow it to free mass for consumables, at your own risk.

Hands-on Work

Any job of roughly 25 minutes or more is a stepped procedure, not one long bar: isolate the unit, open it, pull the failed part, seat the spare (it leaves stores only when you fit it), close up and test. Press E to start each next step — a checklist under the prompt shows where you are. Rough steps can cut you, and gloves make everything clumsier. Fast-forward compresses the labour within a step; you're present at every transition.

Multiplayer

The start screen lists active games on the server — join one (some are password-locked) or found a new base. Up to four crew share a single live simulation.

• You are a real body: your own suit, vitals, dose, injuries and 12 kg kit. Two unsuited people load the scrubber twice as fast.
• Everything else is shared: air, water, food, spares, power, doors, airlock, the task list. Labour on one job stacks.
• Time is shared — it runs only while every living crew member is online (a disconnect holds the clock for everyone until they return), and any speed-up must be approved by the whole crew before it starts; dropping back to 1× is always allowed. Sleep fast-forwards only when every living crew member is in a bunk, and anyone getting up returns the base to 1×.
• Enter opens chat — and chat is radio, not telepathy. Messages travel the surface UHF net: suit-to-suit works to roughly a couple of kilometres on open ground, the hab mast's base station covers the map on a clear line of sight, and the rover carries a repeater that bridges terrain shadows (stand next to it and you talk through its big antenna). Ridges and crater rims block the link, a flat suit battery takes you off the air, an unpowered comms bus silences the base station, and dust-storm static shrinks everyone's range. Weak links garble text; your own line reports who got no copy. On EVA, the COMMS readout above the chat shows your live route back to base.
• Hold V to talk (push-to-talk; the first press asks for your microphone). Voice rides the same radio net and degrades the same way — band-limited and crackling on a marginal link, fluttering at the edge of range, gone past it — while two unhelmeted people in the same room simply hear each other. When a voice sinks into the static, fall back to the text line: its data packets survive links speech can't. The HUD shows ● TX while you transmit and names whoever is on the air.
• The roster (top of screen) shows who is aboard, where, and how they're doing.
• Empty games pause and persist on the server — rejoin later with the same crew name to reclaim your body. Death is permanent for that name; the mission ends when the whole crew is gone.

EVA

Run the prebreathe protocol before cycling from the 101 kPa mixed-gas cabin into the 29.6 kPa oxygen suit. Check suit O2, LiOH cartridge saturation, battery, coolant, patch kits, and the item needed for the work site. Science and ice sites are kilometres away; grade, slip, cargo and thermal support make rover energy a real return-to-base constraint.

The airlock has controls on every side. Repeater panels beside the inner (cabin) and outer (surface) doors command the same cycle as the chamber console, and the interlock drives any open door closed first. A crewmate left the lock at vacuum with the outer door standing open? Walk to the panel beside the locked inner door, press E, and it closes the outer door and repressurises for you. Coming home to a pressurised lock works the same from the surface-side panel: one press closes the inner door and pumps the lock down so you can enter.

The terrain is not flat. At the wheel, grade steals traction and amp-hours, soft pale drifted sand bogs the wheels (ease off to rock free), and taking a steep side-slope fast while turning will roll the rover — spilling ice, scattering bed gear on the ground, and stranding it until you winch it upright (F). Read the MAP contours and pick your line.

Long journeys run on mission time. From the driver's seat press F to open NAVIGATION, compare route distance, predicted energy, grade and dune exposure, then engage automatic cruise. Time warp compresses the drive; in multiplayer it uses the normal whole-crew vote. Arrival or trouble returns the mission to 1×. Press M anywhere for the full map.

Explore the wider basin. The 24 km Jezero-inspired world contains a western delta scarp, active dune corridor, abandoned weather station and a severely damaged Mars ascent vehicle. Orbital coordinates get you near them; walk up and press E to begin a 12–30 mission-minute field survey. Stay at the site until the record is complete: time, suit consumables and surface exposure all count, and moving away cancels that pass. The terrain renderer keeps only a fixed ring of detail tiles around you, so hours of driving do not accumulate memory.

The cargo bed hauls gear, not just ice. Standing at the rover on EVA, open your kit (I) to load portable items — seismometers, beacons, spare parts, the hull-patch kit — into the 90 kg bed, then take them back out one or two at a time as your 12 kg back allows. Two 5.5 kg seismometers plus the tool roll never fit your kit, so the bed is how a whole science deployment rides out in one trip. Ice and gear share the one bed.

The rover wears out. Its drivetrain (wheels, motors, suspension) and traction battery take wear for every kilometre — faster when the wheels slip, the bed bogs or you claw up a grade, and a rollover jolts the running gear. Worn far enough they fail out on the plain: fit a drivetrain module or swap in a charged traction cell at the rover (F), each needing the spare (carry it in the bed) and the tool roll in your kit. Swapping a cell also recovers a rover that ran its pack flat — carry one out and it drives home instead of leaving you a long walk. Watch the drivetrain and battery condition on the rover and driving prompts before a long run.

The rover recharges your suit in the field. Stand at the rover on EVA and press R to top up your suit O₂, cooling feedwater and heater battery from supplies the rover carries (and refills at base when parked). The O₂ fills through the suit's fill port with the breathing loop sealed — which is why it's safe out here. It's a real range extender: recharge at the worksite instead of turning back on your bottle. The CO₂ (LiOH) cartridge is the exception — swapping it means opening the sealed scrubber loop, which you can't do in vacuum, so cartridge swaps stay a locker job in a pressurised module. Carry spare cartridges out if you like, but plan the one in your pack to last the EVA.

You don't magically know where you are. On EVA the wrist nav dead-reckons and drifts without a survey-grade radio fix (the base station or a deployed beacon); out of range in a whiteout you can get lost. Carry field beacons (pack at storage, plant with B): each one relays the crew net around terrain and pins your navigation.

The status tablet (hold Tab) carries a read-only tracking map that follows you in the field — contours, surveyed locations, beacons, the rover and the crew. It's relayed from base over the radio net, so it only works while you hold a readable uplink (direct or through the rover/beacons); out of range it goes dark until you move back or plant a relay. It centres on your RF-localised position, so a good beacon field gives a tight fix and a weak one widens it. It's your wrist display; the base computer keeps the full interactive planning map.

Back at base, the computer's MAP is an interactive tracking display — scroll to zoom, drag to pan, and toggle layers (topography, radio coverage, locations, crew). There is no GPS at Mars: crew are located by RF ranging against surveyed stations (base mast, rover, beacons) and drawn with an uncertainty circle — tight with several beacons in range, rough with only the base, and not shown at all when the network can't range them. Every beacon you plant is another ranging station that sharpens the whole crew's positions.

Seismic science. Carry a seismometer out to a flagged station and deploy it. The station sits in a radio shadow, and its data only counts once the telemetry reaches base over the radio net — so relay it with a beacon chain over the rim, or its buffer fills and overwrites (science lost). Watch each station's data-return percent and telemetry state on the MAP and the instrument's status lamp; you can also download the buffer on-site (E) or recover the station (F).

MAV Expedition & Recovery

The damaged Mars ascent vehicle is a long-range engineering campaign, not a second drivable vehicle or an instant escape sequence. Orbital reconnaissance marks its approximate position in the eastern basin. The first survey records the explicit FLIGHT NO-GO finding, then unlocks careful salvage and a demanding surface-recovery plan. Restoring useful systems does not certify the vehicle to launch.

At the wreck, leave the rover, approach the orange survey hotspot and press E. Hold position for 30 mission minutes; walking away, moving the rover or stopping the action discards that pass. In multiplayer the server independently verifies your position, suit state and elapsed mission time before accepting the record. Completion is shared and persists in the mission logbook.

Careful salvage

After the survey, carry the tool roll back to the site and recover the auxiliary service battery, pump pack and one usable PV section. The four-hour job can be split across EVA periods and leaves the tanks, engines and guidance harness untouched. The recovered assemblies appear as physical item piles beside the MAV: carry them, load them into the rover, use them at the base, or reserve them for the recovery campaign.

Five-stage surface recovery

Recovery takes 92 base labour-hours before role and condition modifiers, spread across five persistent stages: shore the failed landing frame; reseal the pressure shell; rebuild power distribution; restore thermal/cabin support; and commission the refuge/relay systems. Each stage consumes real spares and supplies. Heavy manifests can be left in the rover cargo bed while it is parked within 55 m of the MAV; you only need the tool roll on your person. Progress survives interrupted work, return trips, saves and multiplayer reconnects.

What it does not provide: flight clearance. Tank proof testing, engine acceptance, propellant production/loading, guidance validation, ascent windows and orbital rendezvous are still unresolved. The recovered pressure shell is treated as a surface field refuge and service alcove; it is not yet a pressurised, walkable second habitat.

Power

The solar field is the mission's only active generator. It feeds a finite battery through an exterior cable; Mars' eccentric orbit, night, dust, frost, storms, and cable damage all change or eliminate generation. The habitat also has a pumped coolant loop and two external radiators: useful waste heat warms the cabin first, and genuine excess is rejected outside. The load bus sheds lower-priority loads as state of charge falls.

Thermal balance. Equipment waste heat is most of your heating; the electric heaters top up the deficit and run off the battery through a storm night, so watch the THERMAL BALANCE readout (LIFE SUPPORT) and its projected battery endurance — the "heat vs. lights" call. The radiators also foul with dust like the arrays: a caked radiator can't reject heat, so a hot post-storm afternoon can overheat the cabin until you brush them down (EVA).

Base Computer

Use the comms console for weather, power, life support, system health, maps, biomedical state, navigation, records, mail and the terminal. The small AOS build number in its title bar identifies the fictional base software; the real game version is shown on the main page and at the top of this guide.

• MAP pans and zooms across the full 24 km world. Toggle contours, locations, crew and radio coverage; coverage is calculated for the current viewport, not just the base vicinity.
• NAVIGATION appears from the rover driver's secondary action and estimates grade, dunes, energy, return energy and reserve. It is a forecast, not a guarantee.
• PROGRAM is the flight plan: every phase with its brief, each directive's live measurement and due sol, the running programme evaluation and the mission ledger (work orders, reports, EVA crew-hours, rover kilometres, ice processed, produce grown).
• Terminal: program lists open directives and deadlines; plan gives an operational summary; rations and diet cover food; games offers recreation. The shell Tab-completes commands and arguments — try ration then Tab.

Saves, Persistence & Death

• Single-player creates a named browser-local mission slot immediately, autosaves every 45 seconds of real time, and saves when the page closes. Resume or delete slots from the main page. Browser storage can be cleared or blocked, so it is not a cloud backup.
• Multiplayer stores the authoritative room on the server. The world pauses when a living crewmate is offline and persists when the room empties; rejoin with the invited account to reclaim the same body.
• Unconscious is not dead. Restore breathable air, temperature and treatment; another player can drag, aid and treat the casualty. A solo casualty may have nobody able to correct the cause.
• A rotation can also end well. Reach sol 480 alive and the run closes at handover with a graded programme evaluation, recorded alongside your deaths in the permanent mission record.
• Death is permanent for the mission. A single-player slot is retired after the run is recorded. A dead multiplayer body becomes a spectator, and the room is archived when the entire crew is dead.