What is driving the internal simulation

[Pops]

I'm curious about the internal simulation. What is driving the growth right now and how detailed do you plan on making it?

[JoeStrout]

Population growth is driven primarily by the services provided (currently, jobs and housing) by the buildings, and buildings in zones appear according to the population.  But there are various things that will cause people to not immigrate to your colony: wrong gravity, high radiation, low air pressure, etc.

We will certainly be adding food production too, though this may be more of a budgeting issue (the less food you grow locally, the more you have to spend to import it, and the more expensive it will be at the grocery store — and this may drive people away too to some extent).

And we already keep track of an "ambiance" level, which doesn't currently have any effect, but will at some point.

What do you think?  Are there any important effects we're missing?

[Pops]

I brought this up based on some of the squawk feedback.
"All the plant life is drying up" - How do I fix that?
"Communications are slow" - How do I fix that?

Please correct me if I am wrong but right now you can not modify your station once you build it? If I wanted to add communications capacity would I add another dish? If I didn't provide enough cooling can I add more?

I understand that it is early on and I am really thinking down the road.

Will we be able to modify an existing station? Expand it? Add more living modules, etc?

[JoeStrout]

You are right about the communications gripes; you'll hear this unless you have a big dish (or several smaller dishes, I think). And if you're getting too hot, you need more radiators. But both of those are design changes; you'll have to modify your design and build a new colony.

Same for adding more modules (or parts of any type) — we've talked about allowing you to make some limited changes to an existing station, but for now, at least, you have to build a new one.

However, the plant life turning brown is simply an indication that your CO2 levels are too low, and that's a pretty easy fix: either grow your population, or add an atmospheric regulator!