The difficulty setting affects the final score.

• A hard-core setting, which means target solar systems data only reaches you near the system, while on normal setting, you get the information as soon as all the probes are launched; this means you can choose your payload based on the planet you are targeting.
• The most of the difficulty depends on the target planet and your payload (just like in Dwarf Fortress - except unlike DF, there is no trade). ** The lowest difficulty planets may have running water, dense atmosphere (with useful gasses, like carbon dioxide, water vapour, nitrogen), good and stable temperatures (see “running water”), and low spatial environmental hazards (like solar flares etc.). This makes sustaining life a lot easier, as well as simplifying mining and of course, terraforming. ** The highest difficulty planets may have no atmosphere at all, large variations in temperature, frequent solar flares, meteoric impacts. ** In terms of equipment, you can take decent amount of resources (as a base supply), asteroid/ice mining spacecraft, prefabricated power plants (and other buildings), various satellites, ground vehicles… Or you can just try to make your way with as little equipment as you can, for extra challenge (and score).

There are three basic difficulty settings:

• Playground - Enables you to customize many of the games features - the target solar system and its planets (including sculpting the terrain, distributing resources and more, if you want to) and also turn difficulty options on and off at will (for example, you can play with or without morale, you can have unlimited mines, no air/food requirement, no catastrophes etc.). In the game proper, you also have access to something like a cheat menu, which gives abilities like conjuring catastrophes, summoning resources out of thin air or removing whole patches of mountains at will. Ideally, it should be possible to save the game as a scenario - with or without the actual colony.
• Game - The base level difficulty aims to provide reasonable challenge, without swarming the player with tons of things to go through; for example, there might be fewer types of resources.
• Simulation - This is the thing. No more “Metal A” to construct buildings. You need to mine the iron ore you find (be it iron sulphide, or iron oxide, or iron hydroxide), refine it using the proper process and join it with a plethora of other materials. Each production process has its own waste products that must be dealt with, which are often valuable in their own right for future production. Your population is no longer happy with generic “food” - they need a bunch of less plentiful materials, like calcium or potassium, to survive. Realism is the game.

However, these are really only presets (except for playground, which basically allows you to play god or create scenarios for others to play through). The actual system is built out of parts you can combine to your heart’s content, if you so will. Each game mechanism gives you an opportunity to choose between more or less difficult alternatives, or even their own set of challenges and benefits. Don’t care too much for morale? Use a simplified model, or disable it entirely.

A few examples of how this may work:

Topology

a) Map is composed of regions that are connected, but not tile-by-tile. A “colony” region has a highly detailed tile map, but exploration or mining regions are taken in aggregate. A “rough” region will be considered more expensive for infrastructure. a. A region might have flags about its resource contents and other points of interest; when the region is “connected” to the colony (by road, rail…) its resources are available for exploitation at will. All distances are calculated towards the center of a region and infrastructure is taken per-region, so a given % of transport infrastructure/mining infrastructure etc. will affect everything that happens in the region. b. A region doesn’t have its own tilemap, but it does have individual separate resource sites/POI. Infrastructure is calculated separately to each of the sites, as are distances. However, there’s still some averaging to account for shared infrastructure. b) There is one tile-by-tile map for the entire planet. Roads must find their way through the actual terrain map, and (if enabled) laid down by the player explicitly.

Transportation

Building paths:

a) Only for connecting buildings in a single colony b) Only for high-volume transport, e.g. trains c) Helpful for all transportation, but cars can still travel without roads with lower speeds (and higher fuel usage?)

Building:

a) Specify a starting point and destination, that’s it b) Select the “road level” (dozed path, asphalt road, highway, rail…), pathed and built automatically but using time, workers and other resources depending on the level, length, target throughput and terrain c) Manually design the way the path goes, but still with helpers for e.g. junctions and side-tracks d) Design every single “tile” of the path

Routing:

a) No routing necessary, resources magically spawn where they are needed and disappear from wherever they’re taken from b) Routing is automatic, takes account of distance and throughput c) Routing is manual, though still with helpers to plan the shortest/fastest route etc.

Vehicles:

a) No manual vehicle management b) Vehicles are built on order, but don’t require any fuel or maintenance c) Vehicles have an “expiration date” as a low-intensity simulation of fuel/maintenance costs d) Vehicles require fuel and maintenance, requiring extra infrastructure etc.

Resource model

Raw resources:

a) A simple model that divides resources by their use: life support, energy, common, rare b) A tiered model that has resources divided by their use, as well as multiple tiers of each. Higher tiers are used for more efficient or advanced technology, and are progressively rarer and more expensive to refine. c) Resources are found in mixed deposits, so e.g. the same site might produce both copper and gold

Resource site yield:

a) Each site has a given fixed yield. b) Each site has a starting yield that decreases over time to some minimal value. c) Each site has a given amount of resources that are extracted over time with decreasing yield; better extraction technology can increase the effective amount of resources somewhat (wasting less of the material), but mostly increases the rate of extraction, which shortens the mine “lifespan” d) Some sites require inputs to extract the resources (e.g. sulphuric acid for uranium leaching); this may depend on the mining technology used.

Resource site contents:

a) Each site has unlimited amounts of resources of a given kind. b) Each site has a limited amount of resources. Some sites may have a system that replenishes those resources over time (e.g. fish, or a river bringing more ores from the mountains, or a deep vent bringing more resources from the interior of the planet etc.). c) Some of the resources in a site are only available with increasing infrastructure (“deeper mines”); lower levels of technology and/or infrastructure mean you can’t extract everything in the resource site.

Atmospheric/oceanic resources:

a) Resource is either there or not. If it’s there, it can be used without limit anywhere on the planet. If it’s not, it isn’t going to be. b) The atmosphere is still taken as a whole, but its composition matters - there’s a difference between 1% oxygen and 20% oxygen. This means that one planet can support a primitive coal power plant, while another planet might require high levels of pre-processing of the air despite both having oxygen. c) The atmosphere has a finite amount of resources, and is both being depleted (e.g. oxygen for combustion) and replenished (e.g. carbon dioxide from combustion). d) Different regions can have different composition? Most obviously, higher locations have less atmosphere, and there may be local geological effects (e.g. volcanic emanations). For the oceanic part, the concentration of e.g. oxygen or dissolved iron/salts may depend a lot on location, temperature etc; for the atmospheric, some constituents may also be highly dependent on temperature etc. (e.g. no water vapour in sub-zero temperatures, sulphuric acid on Venus…).

Waste:

a) No waste. Every production recipe has a single output. So even if we have an ore that contains both copper and gold, you choose to refine either copper or gold. On average, this will work out to the same yields as with realistic processing, but simplifies logistics. b) Some recipes may have byproducts that need to be stored or can be further used. E.g. refining hematite will result in both metallic iron and oxygen - the oxygen can then be stored, used or disposed into the environment. Different raw resources can have the same “main” product, but different “byproducts” (e.g. siderite vs. hematite). c) All production has at least some waste. This includes both byproducts like the oxygen or gold in the previous examples, as well as e.g. waste heat.

Processing:

a) Resources are processed into their processed variants automatically given enough smelter capacity. Processing can happen either right on ore arrival, or right before processed resource use. b) Different raw resources can have different costs of processing, and higher tier resources may require higher levels of processing (“smelter level 3”) c) Some processed resources require other processed resources or multiple raw resources for production; e.g. steel can require both coke/pure carbon and processed iron. d) Low-yield/throughput smelters can handle any low-tier processing, but serious processing requires dedicated facilities. The smelter that processes copper ore of one kind cannot process another without retooling (or special equipment, standardisation preprocessing etc.), much less iron ore. Higher level smelters can have lower penalties, but for maximum yield and throughput you need to use a dedicated smelter for each resource site and output product.