Hello Colonists,

Mars conditions are a strong, natural challenge for survival, and that’s why the Red Planet is the perfect setting for Rokh. As a new player, maintaining your basic life support will take up most of your time. Fulfilling your food, water and oxygen needs depends on two things: your exploration of Mars and resource harvesting.

To help you with these two tasks, you can craft various tools and devices. They ensure many different functions: locating items, guiding exploration, mining resources, extracting gases and refining raw materials.

On the rough concept design, you can see the tools we’re working on. From left to right, we have a radio tracker, a gas reclaimer, an ore/water analyzer and a mini drill.

In today’s article, we’ll explain the functions of these tools and how we’ve imagined their design.

The Radio Tracker

This tool is your best friend for finding food. Remember, you won’t have the food growth system for early access; it will be implemented in the first big update. For food on Mars, your only current solution is to find the food caches that the previous colonization wave has left on the planet.

When activated, the radio tracker locks onto the radio beacons emitted by food caches.
This displays on the screen as a list of radio signals found with their respective strengths (0 to 100%) without directional indications. This forces the player to navigate the map while frequently using the radio tracker to determine if they are getting closer to or further from a food cache.

The Gas Reclaimer

The Mars atmosphere has a really low pressure and density compared to Earth. That’s why a specific device is necessary to gather and stock gases reclaimed from the atmosphere. The gas reclaimer helps you gather atmospheric gas from the outside and stock it for analysis.

Here’s a specific application: Players can set up an atmospheric gas reclaimer outside their habitat to stock carbon dioxide from the Mars atmosphere. Given Mars’ low atmospheric pressure, this takes a while. Using the in-game programming system, players can set an extraction frequency and quantity before the tool automatically transfers the gas collected to the rest of the circuit. This, for example, allows players to provide specific quantities of carbon dioxide to a MOXIE which turns it into oxygen.

The Ore/Water Analyzer

When you harvest resources in Rokh, you find them in an unidentified state. The analyzer turns raw materials of specific types from their unidentified states to their identified states.

Identifying a resource is essential to start refining and smelting, the first step to crafting in-game items.

For the moment, as you can see in the concept art, we’ve started to develop two versions of the analyzer: a flat one on which you insert a raw material sample for analysis and another one that looks like a metal detector. Which one do you prefer?

The Mini Drill

Also, we have started design research on another device: the mini drill. It’s a multipurpose tool.  Depending on the end cap you’re using, it offers various functions: drill, soldering iron, ice extractor, ore collector…

What’s coming up next?

With PAX East starting next week in Boston, we’ll have some great news for you, so stay tuned!

In the meantime, why don’t you check out our new videos on Youtube? If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to ping us on Facebook, Twitter or Reddit!

Have a great day!

ROKH DEV TEAM