Cycle-clock

A dial that shows the colony's place in a repeating 12-sol Cycle, styled like the season clock in Against the Storm. Twelve marks (one per sol of the cycle, not twelve hours), split into three 4-sol phases each with its own background shade, and a single indicator that points at the current sol of the cycle. The cycle repeats forever: after sol 12 the indicator jumps back to the top and phase one begins again.

The three phases

Each phase is 4 sols, exactly one third of the dial (120 degrees), with the seams on the 12, 4 and 8 marks: blue runs 12→4, amber 4→8, red 8→12. What each phase does in play is not yet defined; today the phase is a visual division only.

Which sol the indicator points to

The dial has twelve marks numbered like a clock. The cycle repeats every 12 sols, so any sol maps to one of the twelve marks:

position = ((sol − 1) mod 12) + 1   (a number from 1 to 12)

The phase that mark sits in is ceil(position / 4): 1 to 4 is the first phase, 5 to 8 the second, 9 to 12 the third.

Sol 3 points to 3; sol 35 points to 11. The boundary between mark 12 and mark 1 sits at the top of the dial, so the top is where one cycle ends and the next begins.

The indicator

A single hand runs from the centre of the dial to the current mark, exactly like a clock hand. The marks sit at clock positions: 12 at the top, 3 at the right, 6 at the bottom, 9 at the left, so the hand's angle is position × 30 degrees clockwise from the top. It sweeps smoothly through the sol - updated every in-game hour, so mid-sol-3 it sits between 3 and 4 - and wraps from mark 12 back through the top into the next cycle.

The dial face

Behind the marks the disc is split into three 120-degree arcs, one per phase, each filled with its phase shade, so the current phase is obvious from the colour under the hand. The first arc spans marks 1 to 4 (upper right, just clockwise of the top), the second spans 5 to 8 (across the bottom), the third spans 9 to 12 (up the left side back to the top).

Prototype and design directions

A working visual prototype is built as a standalone test mod (CycleClockTest, separate from Survive the Storm). It renders in the Surviving Mars HUD style: a gunmetal metallic bezel, three anodized colour thirds, embossed numbers, a "Disaster Cycle" title, and a chrome hand that sweeps one mark per sol.

Two visual directions are being explored:

• A - clock (above): a sweeping hand points at the current sol.
• B - season ring: no hand; an outer ring fills clockwise to show progress through the 12-sol cycle, and the centre shows one of three season images, one per 4-sol phase.

Building it

The clock is a HUD widget injected top-right: a static metallic face image with a separate chrome hand image stacked on top, rotated at run time via the XImage Angle property (angular minutes, clockwise). It is rebuilt on NewDay and the hand re-angled every NewHour for the smooth sweep. The general technique, the widget classes and the gotchas are on the modding page: Adding UI elements.

Sources

Prototyped as the CycleClockTest standalone test mod. The sol-to-position and phase formulas are plain arithmetic on the current sol; the dial images are generated by tools/gen_cycle_clock.py.