We don’t know what we’re going to have to deal with when we arrive. The only thing we have is theoretical research and the data about planets in our own solar system. We’ve discussed the basic needs earlier in Basic needs. While designing the basic seed colony, we’ve tried to make it ready for as many scenarios as possible.

The seed colony is made of four buildings:

Command Centre

The command centre is the brain of the colony. First and foremost, it’s designed to accommodate a large group of people, providing for their basic needs for a limited amount of time; hopefully, long enough for you to manage to provide a more permanent solution. To this end, the building also keeps priority storage of water and oxygen. When the colony loses atmosphere, the colonists are moved to the command centre and anyone having to work outside is issued oxygen masks supplied from the centre. It can also store and distribute emergency food rations. The centre is designed to support up to one thousand colonists to this end - if the colony grows beyond this number, we’ll have to be prepared for any supply problems otherwise, or face the consequences.

The building also stores a small amount of other resources, functioning as a small storage tank and warehouse; unlike the dedicated buildings, its priorities can’t be set and it will always accumulate the resources in fixed proportions.

Apart from those emergency procedures, the command centre serves as a place to coordinate the well-being of the colony. It houses the command staff, tasked with monitoring all that happens in the colony. It can maintain direct control over up to ten vehicles. It also maintains communication with any satellites you might have ready in orbit and acts as a ground relay tower, ensuring clear communications over a wide area around the tower. Finally, the command centre is also equipped with a small power plant designed for prolonged use without refuelling; while it doesn’t have much power to offer, the supply is effectively infinite (the fuel should last for fifty years or more).

As an extremely important building, it’s built with protection in mind - it’s partially underground and armoured as much as possible, given the weight constraints, and designed to work even with large amount of damage, thanks to internal bulkheads and other constructs designed to localize any damage. This means it’s highly unlikely a single hazard could take it out of order entirely, which very well might doom the whole colony.

Seed Ore Processor

The ore processor is an universal processing unit designed to break various ores apart for their constituent parts. A marvellous piece of engineering, it can break down any common ores using only the power generated by its integrated passive nuclear power plant, not even requiring any workers to operate. The only problems are the limited capacity of the processor and the very limited lifetime of its power plant - we can expect it to work maybe a hundred or two days on full power, then gradually phasing out until it’s completely useless.

Seed Factory

Another marvel of the Earth-that-was, the seed factory can operate without any energy input and workers, requiring no maintenance whatsoever - just like with the ore processor, though, only for a limited time. Both the buildings were designed for the same lifetime, and can be expected to fail around the same time. Unlike the main factories we’ve designed, this one is fully automated and can only produce a few kinds of different vehicles - for any other things we’ll need to construct, we’ll have to build new factories.

Seed Power Plant

This power plant uses the same technology as the other two seed buildings to produce electricity for your colony. The power produced in this building is enough for a small colony, but bear in mind the fact that just like the other seed buildings, this one is also going to decay over time and eventually die.

The Landers

Apart from those four buildings, you will also have a landing spot for the seed lander and any other landers (colonists, cargo). The seed lander is little but a landmark; the other landers may have a (short term) purpose, though - the cargo landers can be used as temporary storage facilities, for example. Also, the buildings are connected by tubes - these join the buildings in a colony, providing resource transport - including ores, air and water, waste and personnel. Make sure you don’t get into a situation when a single meteor strike could cut half of your colony from the atmospheric generators. That would be bad.

These buildings will form the core of your new colony and in fact, if you brought enough supplies with you, should give you more than enough time to grow the colony to long term sustainment, before they inevitably fail.

The Healthy Colony

The whole of a self-sufficient colony should encompass the following:

As your colony grows, you’ll also need specialized atmospheric processors, new robotic command centres to handle more vehicles, factories and more.

Eventually, we hope to engage in large scale projects - more colonies, to give redundancy; a space program, to gather resources hard to find on the planet; a terraformation program, to change the planet into a more friendly place;