Dome picker: five hex tiles, Barrel Dome selected and glowing

About this game

Developer: Haemimont Games · Publisher: Paradox Interactive · Platform: PC (Steam) · Art style: Stylized 3D · Screen type: City & Base Management

More Surviving Mars screens in the Gallery

What to study

The dome picker reuses the main menu's exact grammar inside the game: illustrated hex tiles, labels outside the art, the chosen tile enlarged and lit. That continuity is the design lesson, a player who has seen the front menu already knows how to read the build palette, because Surviving Mars has one tile language for modes and buildings alike. The picker is also strikingly empty of numbers. Domes are the colony's defining decision, and at the moment of choosing the game shows five silhouettes and nothing else, no prices, no capacities, trusting shape and scale to carry the choice before any statistics appear. Frame at about 0:14 in Beyond Surviving Mars (Steam).

Patterns

How the screen is arranged.

overlay-menu

Components

Parts on screen.

Toolbar Menu Grid

Screen inventory

• five hexagonal tiles float in two staggered rows directly over bare Martian ground, top row Basic Dome, Barrel Dome, Passage Ramp; bottom row Micro Dome, Passage, with labels above the top row and below the bottom row, exactly as on the main menu
• the selected tile, Barrel Dome, is enlarged and ringed in a bright cyan glow with a honeycomb halo behind it: selection is shown by scale and light, with no cursor, panel or highlight box
• each tile holds a small rendered picture of its shape on a blue grid backing, the round Basic Dome, the elongated Barrel Dome, the triangular Micro Dome, so the choice reads as silhouette first
• there are no costs, resource figures or stats anywhere in the frame: at this step the player is choosing a shape, and the interface shows nothing else

Top 3 colors

#d6863b 28%#553422 23%#b0703e 18%

Top three palette colors by share. The remaining colors make up the rest.

Source and credit

© Haemimont Games / Paradox Interactive, Surviving Mars screenshot: Beyond Surviving Mars (Steam), Paradox Interactive, shown for design study and commentary. PlayCraft is an unofficial fan project, not affiliated with or endorsed by Paradox Interactive.

Source tier 2 (publisher-released) · screenshot: Steam store page · Steam page

Source details

Fetched 2026-10-25. verified 2026-10-25: scene-change extraction candidates/v1_0011.png @ 13.6s in Beyond Surviving Mars, MD5 08c48b6685a4365d5cbdab27360c1968, from the same verified-clean Steam HLS download (full decode clean), inspected visually at full resolution (1920x1080 native); the five labels Basic Dome / Barrel Dome / Passage Ramp / Micro Dome / Passage and the cyan selection glow on Barrel Dome all legible; the trailer header 'BEYOND | CURIOSITY' and a blank grey rectangle at bottom centre are present in frame and disclosed in the elements

no published policy found (checked 2026-10-25); fair-use study use, takedown honored within 48h

Rights holders: see Copyright & takedown.