Placing a barrel dome: gold ghost frame on the hex building grid

About this game

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

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What to study

Placement in Surviving Mars is a preview of the architecture, not an outline of it. The unbuilt barrel dome stands on the ground as a translucent gold frame at full height, so the player judges the real volume against the terrain before committing, while its footprint lights up hex by hex on the building grid, the same hex geometry the menus are tiled with. Even the limit of the buildable area is drawn in-world, as a dashed frontier of pale hexes. No panel interrupts the judgement: shape, footprint and boundary are the whole interface in this moment. Frame at about 0:15 in Beyond Surviving Mars (Steam; manual extraction, the placement shot is one slow camera move with no cut, so the scene-change pass never isolated it).

Patterns

How the screen is arranged.

grid-overlay deployment-zone

Components

Parts on screen.

Grid

Screen inventory

• a translucent gold frame of a barrel dome stands on the terrain as the placement ghost, its footprint picked out in lit hexes on a hex grid that covers the ground and fades with distance
• a boundary of pale hex tiles edged in cyan runs off both sides of the frame, the edge of the buildable area is drawn as a line of the same hexes the grid is made of
• small clusters of dark green hex chips sit at the dome's anchor points on the left and lower right; their tiny labels are not legible at trailer resolution, and no claim is made for them
• there is no HUD, panel, cursor or cost readout: every piece of placement feedback, shape, footprint, boundary, is drawn in the world itself

Top 3 colors

#d4843b 29%#451d10 24%#b26937 16%

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: manual extraction manual-dome-ghost-15.png @ ~14.6s in Beyond Surviving Mars, MD5 4595dabf8a56a4c7b2be3e3c3a7fdfe6, from the verified-clean Steam HLS download (20,683,716 B; full decode exit 0, zero error lines), inspected visually at full resolution (1920x1080 native); the gold dome ghost, lit hex footprint, cyan-edged boundary hexes and green anchor chips all clearly visible, the trailer header 'BEYOND | CURIOSITY' and the 'NEW DOME SHAPES' caption bar present and disclosed; the small text on the green anchor chips is NOT legible and is not quoted

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

Rights holders: see Copyright & takedown.