How the recruitment pool fills, how many recruits are Tourists, how applicants leave the pool, and the one technology that speeds it up. Every sponsor shares the same setup except China. One Sol is 24 hours. The per-sponsor lineup is on the Sponsors page.
Each sponsor has an applicant pool that tops up by one new applicant at a fixed interval, but only while the number of non-Tourist applicants is below the pool size. China alone is boosted on both counts, its pool and generation each 30% higher than everyone else:
| Sponsor | Pool | New applicant every | Rate |
|---|---|---|---|
| China | 65 | 18 h | ~1.3 per Sol |
| All others | 50 | 24 h | 1 per Sol |
Every applicant the game generates - the initial fill and each top-up alike - takes a flat 1 in 10 (10%) roll to become a Tourist instead of a recruitable colonist. So a fresh pool holds on average about 5 Tourists at the standard 50 and about 6 to 7 at China's 65. Tourists do not count toward the pool size and are never refilled, so they sit on top of the colonist target rather than slowing it. Tourists that arrive as a reward when a Tourist departs are separate; see the Tourism page.
An applicant stays in the pool until one of four things removes it:
Applicants neither age nor die while in the pool: each one's age is fixed the moment it is generated. Only colonists already living on Mars grow older each Sol and can die of old age.
The Social technology "Live From Mars" permanently enlarges the pool and speeds it up, and hands over a one-time batch the moment it is researched. Its reworked in-game description reads:
"Increase Applicant Pool and Applicant generation by 20 %. 10 additional applicants
appear.
New Building: TV Studio Workshop - A workshop building which also generates funds for
completing TV shows."
The applicant line is the same for every sponsor. What it comes to:
| Effect | All others | China |
|---|---|---|
| Applicant pool +10 | 50 → 60 | 65 → 75 |
| Generation +20% | every 24 h → 20 h | every 18 h → 15 h |
| Applicants granted on research | 10 | 10 |
The description quotes +20% because +10 on the standard pool of 50 is exactly 20%. For China the same flat +10 (65 to 75) is only about 15%, so its pool part is not really 20%; the text is written around the default and left as-is. The generation +20% is exact for every sponsor. The TV Studio Workshop line comes from the In-Dome Buildings DLC and is kept intact in the reworked description; the tech still unlocks that building.
Base game plus every DLC. Built (untested in-game). Base-game paths are relative to
external/SurvivingMars.
mod-survive/Code/StS_ApplicantScarcity.lua - sets each sponsor's initial_applicants (50, China 65) and its ApplicantGenerationInterval label effect (24 h, China 18 h), the interval built via the StS_SponsorBaseGenInterval helper it also exposes for Live From Marsmod-survive/Code/StS_TouristChance.lua - overrides the base global GenerateApplicant (external/SurvivingMars/Lua/ApplicantsPool.lua:9-17), changing the Tourist roll from Random(1,100) <=5 (5%) to <=10 (10%); every generated applicant (initial fill, hourly top-up, Tourist-departure reward, Live From Mars grant) takes itexternal/SurvivingMars/Lua/ApplicantsPool.lua:107-144 NewHour top-up generates one applicant every ApplicantGenerationInterval while the non-Tourist count is below the pool size, and drops applicants older than drop_out_time (1000 h ~= 42 Sols), replacing only non-TouristsPool removal: external/SurvivingMars/Lua/Buildings/RocketUtilities.lua:181-186 removes recruited applicants from g_ApplicantPool; Lua/Units/Colonist.lua:760-768 removes up to 2 random applicants on a non-natural death; Lua/_GameConst.lua:456-459 NaturalDeathReasons = {["Old age"]=true}; Lua/ApplicantsPool.lua:103-105 ClearApplicantPool wipes the pool; Lua/Units/Colonist.lua:441-453 DailyUpdate ages only living colonists (age+1 per Sol, Die "Old age" at death_age), so pooled applicants never age or diemod-survive/Code/StS_LiveFromMars.lua reworks LiveFromMars (Data/TechPreset.lua:2870-2886): strips the vanilla Effect_ModifyLabel Percent -25 on ApplicantGenerationInterval and rewrites the description (new first sentence; TV Studio Workshop line kept; grey PR flavor dropped; TVStudioWorkshopCCP1 unlock kept). On research it grants 10 applicants and, via named g_Consts:SetModifier modifiers (re-asserted on load/start), adds +10 to ApplicantsPoolStartingSize and subtracts base/6 from ApplicantGenerationInterval (interval x 5/6 = +20% generation: 24 h -> 20 h, 18 h -> 15 h). SetModifier amount is raw ticks; modifiers combine as value = base*percent/100 + amount (Lua/Modifiers.lua:99)