Sometimes your life changes in a moment, and as much as you want to pause time and retrace your steps, the world moves on into the following hours and days, and takes you with it. This is the world builder Jan Dolski finds himself in when he is the only survivor of a crash on a mission to find the world-changing element rapidium. It’s his job now to operate the mobile base and return to Earth – and hopefully finish the mission, too. There is no time to lose: come sunrise, the intense radiation will mean game over.

A day in The Alters counts down in realtime, and can be split between performing activities on the base and exploring the region outside. Production queues can be accessed anywhere and at any time to set up tasks, from creating one-off mining outposts to rolling orders that ensure a minimum level of edible mush. Working in the workshop or kitchen will then speed up time until the queued tasks are complete – or Dolski becomes fully exhausted, at 9pm.

Outside the base is where you secure the resources required to keep your production chains running. Shallow deposits will provide enough materials to build that early mining outpost – and then it’s time to drill down into deep deposit zones and establish a network of pylons back to the base. In time, this exploration phase evolves, as the environments become more challenging to navigate. Energy-draining gates call for surplus suit batteries, shallow cave systems make a puzzle out of line-of-sight pylon placement, and highly radioactive anomalies need to be navigated around – or carefully harvested for their unique resources.