Sol One Beginner's Guide: Your First Week on Mars

Sol One begins with a quiet fact: the ship is leaving, and you are not on it. Your crew evacuates, you are left on Mars, and the game does not give you a cutscene of the rescue that will never come. It gives you a suit, a survival meter, and a horizon with nothing on it. The goal is stated plainly — build a rocket and go home — and then the game stops explaining.

That is the point where most first runs fail, not because Mars is hard but because the priority order is invisible. This guide gives you that order. It is written for the Early Access launch build on November 13, 2026, and it deliberately avoids story spoilers beyond the premise.

The one-sentence plan

Secure air, then water, then power, then food, then a roof you can take your helmet off under.

Every system in Sol One connects to that chain, and doing them out of order is what turns a manageable survival game into a death spiral. Oxygen without power is a tank that empties. Water without storage is a walk to the ice deposit every hour. Food without a pressurized greenhouse is a garden you cannot tend without a suit.

Hour one: read the suit, not the scenery

The Early Access build added full life signs — health, hunger, thirst and rest — and a suit layer with helmet and oxygen tank handling. That means your first job is to learn where the numbers live and how fast they move.

• Oxygen drains while you are outside the habitat. The tank is a timer, not a resource to hoard.
• Thirst is usually the first meter to bite, because water production is the slowest early chain.
• Rest matters more than it looks. A tired character is a slow character, and slow traversal on a full-scale Mars is expensive.
• Health is the last line. If health is dropping, something upstream has already failed.

Do not sprint everywhere. On a map this large, stamina and oxygen are the same budget.

Hour two to four: the first sealed room

Your first construction goal is not a base. It is one room that holds pressure, with an airlock, connected to an oxygen source and a power source. Everything else is expansion.

The build order that works:

1. Foundation and floor.
2. Walls and ceiling of a single small module.
3. Airlock on the outside face.
4. Door between airlock and module.
5. Oxygen source inside or piped in.
6. Power source and a line to the oxygen source.

Then test it. Enter through the airlock, close both doors, and watch the interior atmosphere. If the room does not hold, the leak is almost always at a joint, a door frame or an unfinished ceiling tile.

The full construction logic is in the base building guide→, and the sealing rules are in pressurized bases→. Read those before you build your second room, not your first.

Day two: water and the first real loop

Water is where Sol One stops being a walking simulator. You need it for drinking, for the recycler, and later for crops. The early source is ice, and ice means a trip — either to a surface deposit or to a shallow dig site.

Two habits make the water chain tolerable:

• Build storage before you build demand. A tank and a reserve let you survive a failed trip; a recycler without a buffer just moves the failure one hour later.
• Keep the water loop close to the greenhouse. Every metre between the tank and the crops is a pipe or a walk.

Once water is stable, the base has a heartbeat. Oxygen can be produced, crops can be watered, and the recycler can run without you babysitting it.

Day three: power that survives the night

Solar is the obvious first generator and the obvious first mistake. Mars has a day-night cycle, and the game models it properly — including the blue sunset. At night, a solar-only base is a base on battery, and a small battery bank will not carry oxygen production, heating and a fabricator at once.

Before you expand, do three things:

• Add a second generation source, or enough storage to cover a full night with margin.
• Move non-critical loads — lights, cosmetic fixtures, the fabricator — onto a switch or a separate circuit if the build allows it.
• Watch what happens during a dust storm. Storms cut solar output and visibility, and the base must idle through them.

The power grid guide→ covers sizing in detail. For now, the beginner rule is enough: if the lights dim when the oxygen producer kicks on, you are already over budget.

Day four: food, and the seed decision

Sol One's farming has a neat tension: every crop you grow is also a seed. Eating the harvest means eating your next planting. The game's official description makes this explicit — each crop can be eaten or replanted — so the early farm is as much a planning problem as a horticultural one.

A practical first farm:

• Plant a small number of plots, not a field.
• Keep back a fixed share of every harvest as seed stock.
• Grow under light in a sealed room so you can tend it without a suit.
• Do not eat the last of a crop type until you have a second plot of it.

Food is also the system most likely to be rebalanced during Early Access. Treat any specific growth time you see in a video as provisional.

Day five: research and the first upgrade

The research bench is where the game's tech tree opens. In the launch build it is a tier-one tree, fed by samples and data points collected from the world — including the crashed ship and abandoned mission sites that dot the map. Research is not a side activity; it is the gate between "surviving" and "leaving".

Early priorities:

• Anything that improves oxygen or water efficiency.
• Storage and logistics upgrades, because hauling is your real bottleneck.
• Fabrication unlocks that let you build rocket components later.

The research guide→ maps the tree by intent rather than by node name, since node names may shift in patches.

Day six and seven: the first expedition

By the end of the first week you should have a base that holds pressure, a water reserve, a power setup that survives the night, and a small farm. That is the point to leave it.

Take the rover — or walk if you have not built one yet — to the nearest point of interest. Crashed ships and abandoned bases are the game's supply of parts, materials and story, and they are the reason the map is worth crossing. Bring back more than you left with, and bring back notes on what you saw: the second expedition is where the rocket plan starts to look real.

Five mistakes that end runs

1. Expanding before the loop closes. A second habitat is not progress if the oxygen producer cannot fill it.
2. Building the workshop inside the habitat. Dust, heat and fumes in the room you breathe.
3. Ignoring the suit. The suit is your vehicle. A damaged suit turns a short walk into a fatal one.
4. Treating the rocket as end-game. The rocket is the goal, but every system you build feeds it. Start collecting rocket-relevant materials before you think you need them.
5. Playing at 1.5× speed in your head. Sol One rewards deliberate trips. Running out of oxygen halfway to a POI is the most common death in the first ten hours.

What "ready" looks like

You are ready to stop being a beginner when all five of these are true:

• The habitat holds pressure through a full night.
• Water storage covers at least one failed supply trip.
• Power covers the night without load-shedding oxygen.
• Food production is positive, with seed stock held back.
• You have visited one POI and returned with more than you spent.

At that point the game changes from survival to industry, and the walkthrough→ picks up the thread from there.

FAQ

How long is the first week? In play time, roughly six to ten hours for a careful first run. The in-game day length is much shorter, so "week" here means your first several sessions, not seven Martian sols.

Can I skip the base and live out of the rover? No. Oxygen, water recycling and farming all want a fixed installation. The rover extends your range; it does not replace a habitat.

Is there a tutorial after the intro? The game teaches through its systems and UI rather than a scripted tutorial. The first objectives point you at survival; the rest is inference.

Should I play on the default difficulty? Yes for a first run. The survival meters are tuned to be manageable once you understand the chain, and difficulty mostly changes how forgiving the margins are.