How to land
Landing is the core interaction and everything else in the game is travel between landings. The good news is that the ship tells you exactly what is wrong: the indicator names one condition, and you fix that one.
The four conditions
| Condition | What it wants | How to fix it |
|---|---|---|
| PAD | You are over the paint | Bank toward the pad, then level off again. Do not chase it — small inputs. |
| SINK | You are descending slowly enough | Add throttle to arrest the fall, then trim to hover with H. |
| LEVEL | The skids will meet the ground together | Centre the stick and let the attitude settle before you commit. |
| DRIFT | You have killed your sideways motion | Tilt briefly against the slide, then level. This is the one people fail. |
Do them in this order
Arrive high and slow, not low and fast
Come over the pad with height in hand. Height is time, and time is the only thing that fixes a bad approach. Arriving low and fast leaves you nothing to trade.
Switch to the landing camera
Press 3. The landing camera looks down past the belly of the ship at the pad, which is far easier to judge alignment from than the chase view over your own shoulder.
Get PAD: put yourself over the paint
Bank gently toward the pad and level off again. Small inputs — the ship keeps whatever velocity you give it, because there is almost no air on Mars to take it back.
Get DRIFT: kill the sideways motion
This is the condition new pilots fail. Tilt briefly against the direction you are sliding, then level. If you are still moving across the pad, you are not ready to come down, no matter how good the other three look.
Get LEVEL: flatten the ship
The skids have to meet the ground together. Centre the stick and let the ship settle to level before you commit to the descent.
Get SINK: come down under the safe descent rate
Add throttle to arrest the fall, then trim with H to the hover setting for the mass you are actually carrying. A loaded ship needs more throttle to hover than the same ship did empty.
Or hand it to the autopilot
Within 50 m of the pad, under 16 m/s and not falling, G gives the approach to the autopilot. It flies the same controls through the same physics and has to meet the same tolerances — it is help, not a teleport. Once engaged it is committed and flies to touchdown.
Why DRIFT is the hard one. Mars has about a third of Earth's gravity and almost no atmosphere, so nothing takes your velocity away for you. On Earth a sideways slide bleeds off; here it does not, and a ship that looks perfectly stable over the pad can be moving at four metres a second across it. If you cannot tell, look at the ground rather than the ship.
The autopilot, and when it refuses
G hands the approach over, and a prompt across the screen tells you when it is willing to take it. The conditions are distance and speed only: within 50 m of the pad centre, under 16 m/s, and not falling faster than 9 m/s. Height is deliberately not a condition — three kilometres straight up over the pad is a fine place to hand over, and getting down is the autopilot's problem.
Once engaged it is committed: it flies to touchdown and the sticks do nothing until the skids are down. Being dropped back into a half-flown approach — off-centre, sinking, at an attitude nobody chose — is worse than either flying it or not.
When it refuses it says which condition stopped it, because "TOO FAST" is something you can act on and a greyed-out key is not. It is also not a teleport: it flies the same controls through the same physics and has to meet the same tolerances you do. A landing the autopilot cannot make is a landing that was not there.
What the approach computer buys
Fitting the approach computer widens both the bubble you can hand over inside and the state you can hand over in. A bigger circle on its own would only move the refusal from "TOO FAR" to "TOO FAST", so it buys both.
| Limit | Stock | Fully fitted |
|---|---|---|
| Engage distance | 50 m | 100 m |
| Fastest approach | 16 m/s | 22 m/s |
| Fastest sink at handover | 9 m/s | 12 m/s |
Landing at night, and in a storm
L puts the floodlights on, and at night they are the difference between a pad and a rumour — the landing floods upgrade widens and brightens them. In a dust storm the ship gets pushed around on approach, which mostly attacks DRIFT: expect to be correcting sideways the whole way down, and come in slower than you think you need to. The storm fairing takes some of that out of the ship's hands.