What is Million on Mars?
Million on Mars: Land Rush is a real-time strategy game on the WAX Blockchain, where you can build up your settlement and craft items to survive on Planet Mars!
You can aquire plots of land and install buildings on the surface of the planet. Produce energy with Solar Panels to power up your other buildings to plant crops, filter water and produce materials to craft rovers for Mars expeditions.
At the start or if you don't own a piece of land you can help out other players by fulfilling paid Jobs or use the scavenging tool to search for items on Mars.
The Million on Mars economy is fully player driven with the ingame market place and the virtual currency "Dusk". Land Plots are NFTs and can be traded on Neftyblocks or AtomicHub and Dusk can be traded on exchange like Alcor.
How to start?
First of all you need a WAX Wallet where you can hold your NFTs and currencies. If you don't have a WAX Wallet you can sign up on wax.io and create one. You have to deposit a small amount of WAXP to stake for CPU to fulfill transactions (like Ressource credits on Hive) and buy some RAM as storage for you NFTs.
If you have a WAX Wallet you can visit the Million on Mars Homepage and play through the tutorial or sign up immediately. I would highly recommend to play through the tutorial because you will get some Resource tokens which you can use to buy some items in the ingame Shop.
To start playing Million on Mars it's required that you hold an Access badge in your Wallet. You can always purchase on Neftyblocks for 10$ direct from the publisher or buy a Land Rush Access Pack from the secondary Market at current price for 5 WAX (1.50$).
After opening this pack and you will also receive 1 Access badge to play the game.
If you want to invest a little bit more at the beginning you can purchase a Premium Access Pack for 20$. It's also available on Neftyblocks through publisher or on the Marketplace.
With this Pack you will receive a Common Land Deed and some buildings to get a bonus to start with the game! This pack is only for new players and only works if you are not registered and haven't linked your wallet!
Gameplay Basics
The whole econmy is player driven and the prices of different items like Ice, Water and Food are always fluctuating and therefore you can change your strateggy and production on your own needs to produce products for yourself or to sell with profit on the market.
For every task you need a certain amount of Stamina to do the work. You can see your current Stamina at the top of the screen next to the amount of power cells, Water and Food you own.
My current amount of Staming is 34 / 70. To refill Stamina you can use the Actions button and then you will get different options to chose from.
Doing different actions like "Eat Snack" or "Drink Coffee" costs you a amount of items like food / water or coffee and will give you staming depending on the action. Every Action has a cooldown so it can't be spammed and keep the stamina scarce.
As mentioned above every work requires Stamina which limits the amount of work you can do per Day by your own. Land Owners with larger facilities have the option to post Jobs for the Work for the ingame currency Dusk.
The worker who does the job will get paid with Dusk and uses his own Stamina in exchange for it. If you have no Land at the beginning you can start with doing jobs for others and earn Dusk for it.
The minimum amount of Dusk per Job is 1 Dusk per Stamina. At the current prices if you use the "Eat Snack" Action for 30 food and 10 Water you will get 16 Stamina for 0.62 Dusk each. You will end up with a profit of 0.38 Dusk per Job. With the 4h cooldown you can do this action with 8h sleep 5 times per day and get 80 Stamina. If you are doing only Jobs you can earn around 30 Dusk per Day doing this.
Every Day every player gets a "Daily Ration" for free. This can be used in the Action menu to get Stamina, but I would recommend to save up 30 Daily Rations to do the Duskworks Accomodation Action, where you get a Badge to get a Land Deed after 30 days of playing.
To compete for jobs against other players is only one of the tasks you can do as none land owner. There is also the Scavenging Tool which is used to search for items in the Mars surface.
You can get the most common resources Ice and Regolith, but also more rare items like Empty Power Cells or Rover Wires. Scavenging costs 1 Stamina and 1 Power for the Scavenging Tool. With the Daily Ration you get each day 10 Scavenging Power for free.
It's possible to play this game with a small amount of investment (Access badge), but it's required to own a land plot and wait a 14 days time period before you can withdraw your earned Dusk. This is to prevent players draining the Dusk economy without investing anything.
Land and Facilities
Land Plots have a fixed amount of space depending on their rarity and all facilities require different amount of space to be built on Land. All Land Deeds for claiming Land that are currently available are from the Generation 2 Land which has less slots than Generation 1 Land.
If you buy a Land Plot on the secondary Market you can see in the description the free space and also the facilities that are currently built on the Land.
On this Common Land Plot (Gen. 2) are installed 2pcs. Solar Panels Gen. 2 Common Lvl 1 and 2pcs. Solar Panel Gen. 2 Uncommon Lvl 1 and has 0 free space available. If you buy this you will get 4 Solar Panels, but you can't built anything else on it without dismantle the existing facility.
Buildings of Generation 2 requires 5 more space than Generation 1. It's possible to level up buildings by using shards and Dusk. With higher levels the facility can produce more tasks, lower the production time or getting access to other actions.
One of the most important thing is Energy and Power to keep your other buildings running. For the energy production are Solar Panels required to load up Power Cells. Buying empty power cells and sell the full power cells is one of the most common ways to profit from. Energy is always required and an easy way to Start with.
You can sell the Power cells on the Market for a Profit or use them to Recharge your own buildings for other productions like the Water Filter which filters Ice to Water (and Regolith). Water is required for the Stamina Actions and also for the Greenhouse to grow different seeds for food or coffee cherries. Regolith can be used to produce Soil or smelt into different materials like Iron or Aluminum.
The Recharge process uses the Full Power Cell and get an Empty Power Cell which can be recharged again at the Solar Panels. There is also a small chance to break the Cell and you will get a Broken Power Cell. This can't be recharged and must be repaired in a Chem Lab where you can produce Empty Power Cells with the broken ones. If you can't repair it by yourself sell it on the market place to another player who is willing to do it.
Conclusion
I really enjoy playing this game because I am interested in the thematic with space colonization and I love the strategy part with the player based and changing economy. I have built my own calculation sheet with the different tasks to see if it's more profitable to produce or purchase the items on the market.
I have started with the free to play version of the game by doing jobs and scavenging, but after reading the Whitepaper / Player Guide and hanging out in the Discord I have decided to invest in Land Plots and Facilities to dive deeper into the game.
Since I have started playing this game the Team has already delivered a some game updates and according to the past game updates listed in the discord they are doing a great job.
Some other games need more time for small UI changes, than the MoM team for bigger game updates.
In a future post I will go more into detail about the economy and calculations.
Below you can find some screenshots of the Game:
When you like the setup of the game and want to start playing you can use my referral Link for sign up :).
Don't forget to buy and open the Premium Access Pack before you sign up if you want to invest a bit more at the start to get a Land Plot and some starter facilities.
Thanks for reading and if you have any questions leave a comment below :)