Build hexes, hull-and-berm claims, and colony lights at night

Until this week a claimed cell held one colony building. Now the ground inside a cell is a lattice of build hexes 9 m across the flats, and each building's footprint is a flower of those hexes that packs edge to edge with its neighbours. The landing pad is the exception: it takes its whole cell on its own.

What a building claims

The first pass sized each flower to the whole building model, pipe racks and masts included, which left a Luna landing pad too wide for its cell. The ruling that followed is now ratified canon: a building claims build hexes with its pressurised hull and its berm. Racks, aprons, masts and figures may overlap a neighbour's ground like shared paving. On Mars the plant house went from 6 rings to 4 and the landing pad from 12 to 9. On Luna the pad went from 15 rings to 11, which fits a Shackleton cell.

Neighbours

Touching buildings pay off. A free pressurised connector crosses every shared edge between pressurised buildings, a merged bench is charged only the cut it adds, and each finished neighbour takes 10% off a new building's on-site time, capped at 30%. Only finished neighbours count, so a throwaway building placed for the discount earns nothing while it is still under way. The adjacency numbers are still proposed and may move after playtesting.

Lights at night

By night every building used to sit in a fully lit hex. Each finished building now carries a lamp rig read from its own model: door lights, strips along the connectors, red obstruction lights on masts and towers, amber lamps on anything still under construction, and the magenta grow light through the greenhouse glazing.

A plot also stopped drawing only its first eight structures. A test plot with 48 plant houses now draws, grades and lights all of them.