If the freeform survival mode of Surviving Mars no longer entertains you, the game has a set of “Mysteries of Mars” storylines which add additional objectives and a narrative frame to the game. The most difficult of these mysteries, Wildfire, presents the player with a deadly pandemic sweeping through both your martian colony and Earth as well. The speed at which you are required to produce a special kind of crop in the later stages of the mystery make this quite challenging without some preparation.
The wildfire mystery is two-tiered with the second phase only triggering under a specific circumstance, but we’ll get to that later. As usual, if you select this mystery the event can be triggered by scanning an anomaly, giving you some breathing room and time to prepare. The initial stages of wildfire mostly handle themselves, requiring little input from the player, after which things can quickly get out of hand. After the event is triggered, a laboratory will malfunction due to the initial outbreak. Next, a number of colonists will acquire the “infected” trait, and the disease will spread.
Now, if any infected colonists are sent back to Earth, the second phase of the event will be triggered, but not yet fired. After the disease spreads further, the Wildfire Cure research will become available. The research is very lengthy, but building additional medical buildings will add 5% speed to this particular research up to a maximum of 50%, and this is crucial as this entire mystery banks on time. Once the research is complete, you will be able to produce the aptly named “curetato” crop, which is used to heal infected colonists.
Thing is, curetato takes a long bloody time to grow and is harvested only in small batches, meaning if you triggered the second phase of the event and infected Earth, you’ll have a hard time. You’ll need to export curetato to Earth in large quantities to help them cure the population while also making sure you cure your own and also pay attention to all the other resources. As the situation on Earth deteriorates, you’ll be hit with a string of penalties increasing fees and later cutting off the import/export and the flow of new colonists. Should the worst come to pass and the extinction event occurs, at some later point small groups of survivors will emerge on Earth and gradually all Earth-related functions will be restored.
To have the best chances at getting through the wildfire epidemic, there is a specific colony configuration which works best. Before triggering the event, you need to focus on farms and comfort. Farms will be essential in the quick production of the curetato, while high comfort levels will ensure a high birthrate of colonists meaning the inevitable deaths following the spread of the infection won’t be as big an issue. Depending on how your colony is set up close to the event trigger, you might want to reinforce domes with water reclamation systems.
An alternate approach to lower colonist deaths is by structuring your colony such as you have a ‘quarantine’ dome separating the populations, thus keeping infected colonists to a minimum, however building such a complex is less efficient compared to simply letting the colonists die off while securing a backup pool of new colonists being born. The difficulty of the mystery also depends on how far you allow the pandemic to spread on Earth before sending the curetato shipments. The sooner you nip it in the bud, the easier it will be to send the required amount of crop back home to stem the tide of the deadly virus.
Even if you proceed according to these tips, the wildfire mystery is still a tough challenge to beat, but if you want to delve into the most difficult of Surviving Mars’ scenarios, you’ll need all the help you can get.
