Welcome to Aven Prime, governor.
Aven Colony is a 2017 colony building game developed by Mothership Entertainment and published by Team17 that has you building a human colony on Aven Prime, as well as looking into the history of the race that lived there before.
Aven Colony contains examples of the following tropes:
- Anti-Frustration Features:
- It's quite possible to run out of iron to mine if you dawdle or aren't strategic enough with your building (recycling tunnels and buildings only gives you back half of the nanites you used to build them), making processing more nanites impossible. Thankfully, there are a couple ways around this, such as trading for metal and growing Kelko Spores, which can be processed into a metal substitute, albeit a very poor one, since it processes into nanites 20 times slower than iron. This can be a necessity on mineral-poor maps if you don't move fast enough, such as Hyla's Crescent.
- For transportation, a "Content Drop" patch/update introduced the Hover Car stations (essentially a "sky taxi" service) that you can use to alleviate commute times.
- Apocalypse How: The Earth History Center recounts the fates of a few nations of Earth that no longer exist by the time the game takes place, due to Class 0 catastrophes:
- The United States of America fell in 2317 when the Yellowstone Caldera erupted, rendering most of the country uninhabitable. In the present day, it has been mostly forgotten, only remembered as the first nation to colonize the Moon and Mars.
- Russia fell at an unknown date, when flesh-eating zombies were accidentally brought back to Earth from their Martian colony. This devastated their population in an event known as the "Northern Extinction".
- North Korea ceased to exist sometime around 2048, though the reason why is never revealed to the player.
- Beehive Barrier: The Shield Artifact creates a giant hexagon-patterned dome over your entire colony that protects it from all external sources of damage (save for cultist ships) for half a sol.
- Death World: Downplayed. Aven Prime is a very hostile planet with many dangers. For starters, the air isn't breathable and you have to rely on sealed tunnels and buildings. Also, there are hostile lifeforms such as Creep and Plague spores that can infect or kill colonists. Then there are winters on Aven Prime with violent windstorms, lightning, and random "shard storms" that rain icy hail on your buildings and damage them. That being said, humanity came prepared with all kinds of countermeasures to deal with Aven Prime's hostile environment. There are air purifying structures, greenhouses, power plants, water pumps, lightning rods, and plasma turrets (to deal with hostile threats). Drones can build/repair buildings and "scrub" away any Creep infections. And, you can produce plague vaccines and decontamination units to deal with any plague infections. All in all, Aven Prime is a dangerous world, but living there is doable if you are diligent about it.
- Early Game Hell: Starting out your colony is kind of tough. Your first priorities are power and nanite production (mines and processors). You also need to get an Immigration Center up and running so you can have more colonists to run your industries and buildings. Without power, nanites, and workers, you will get seriously stuck. Oh, and you also have to provide housing, food, water, and clean air. However, once you get the basics up and running, the colony becomes a little easier to manage.
- Fantastic Drug: 'Enhancers'
are edible and drinkable drugs make from local plants used to encourage certain behaviours or increase health. Some don't even have side effects. - Funny Background Event
- The Earth History Center tells the history of how Luxembourg briefly became the Earth's largest empire thanks to their research in the genetic manipulation of hamsters.
- It also recounts the history of North Korea, also becoming the Earth's largest empire before its fall some time before 2048, thanks to their research in weaponizing internet memes.
- Getting Smilies Painted on Your Soul: The Unity artifact causes a massive temporary boost to morale. Collecting, researching, and activating it is a requirement for clearing the Tenari Glacier campaign, whose colony starts out with a broken air intake, low food and water stores, and mass unemployment making everybody very unhappy.
- Government Drug Enforcement: It's unclear if colonists have any choice on which 'Enhancers' they take, or even if they can opt out.
- Heroic Mime: You, the player character. It's even lampshaded at the end of the end of the introductory Vanaar mission when Vory informs Jack that you are "the silent type".
- No Bikes in the Apocalypse: There have been several apocalypses by the time the game is set and bicycles seem to have gone missing in one of them, leaving walking and sky taxis (which can only stop at other nearby sky taxi stations, akin to a miniaturized subway system) the only way for colonists to get around.
- No Biochemical Barriers: After some research at a research center, your chemical plants and mills can gain the capability to process alien plants into edible foodstuffs and even 'Enhancer' drugs for your colonists. In a subversion, Aven Prime does not have a human-breathable atmosphere, so all of your colonies are completely hermetically sealed, necessitating the usage of air filtration units, particularly near mines and power plants, to keep your colonists' air supply clean.
- Non-Entity General: You are implied to have been a past mayor of New York (although given that the US is essentially ancient history in the game's timeline, this is probably not the New York we know), but that's about all the detail you get. The other characters only ever refer to you as "Governor" or "Boss".
- The Plague: Plague spores can drift into your colony, gaining access via air intakes, geothermal power plants, and expedition parties returning from destroying plague spore nests. If your colony doesn't have enough hospitals or decontamination units and you don't have any plague vaccines or nanomedicines on hand, it can spread pretty quickly in the hermetically sealed environment of your colony, pissing off your colonists and even killing them if you don't fix it fast enough.
- Precursors: The race that lived on Aven Prime before left some interesting tech for you to discover.
- Scenery Porn: Aven Prime is a hostile world, but there's no denying that it is visually gorgeous!
- Settling the Frontier: Each one of your colonies is there to facilitate further expansion.
- Space Elevator: One of the 'mega structures'. Costing 900 nanites and requiring 44 units of power, it's the most expensive single structure you can build and one of the most expensive to power, but it gives your colony a whopping 100,000 units of offworld storage, as many as 12.5 fully upgraded Storage Depots, and can move more immigrants than four fully staffed Immigration Centers.
- Take That!: One of the shows displayed at the VR center is titled HL3 demo.
- Technicolor Toxin: Sickly green gas can emerge from geothermal vents, which is dangerous to your colonists' health if it gets into air intakes. Fortunately, you can blow the gas away by throwing wind turbines in reverse, replacing your intake fans with more expensive (and more efficient) air filters, or capping the vent with a geothermal generator to stop the gas entirely.
- Timed Mission: For the Arido Mesa campaign mission, there's an emergency situation on the colony ship and you must admit a thousand refugees from it within ten Sols, or ten Earthen weeks. The challenge is to build enough housing, food/water production, power plants, and other jobs to keep everyone fed and mollified enough to not vote you out of office before evacuation is complete, and to even move people fast enough in ten Sols requires a minimum of three fully staffed immigration centers working around the clock.
- Unwitting Test Subject: What's the best way to see what those strange alien artifacts do? Test them on your colonists, of course!
- Veganopia: The only food that can be produced within your colony or traded for is plant-based, and the only animal product seen is giant sandworm meat, scavenged from the area around the Sandy Gulch and Valley of Death maps by your expedition parties.
- What the Hell, Player?: If any colonists get killed for any reason, some of the other colonists will chew you out over it. Even if it really wasn't your fault and you did all you could, the colonists will still blame you for it simply because you're The Leader.
- You Require More Vespene Gas: To build, repair or upgrade anything, you need metal, which in turn needs to be converted into nanites. Additionally, all buildings (except power plants) require electricity, even the tunnels. Colonists require food, water, and clean air to keep them alive. Keeping them happy is another story.
