Survive the Storm escalates the four disasters over the whole game instead of leaving them at whatever the landing site rolled. This page is only what the mod does; every base-game number, timing rule and derivation lives on the vanilla Disasters page, deep-linked where it matters. The headline is the scaling table below: it keeps the base-game difficulty levels as the yardstick and adds the mod's day-1 / day-100 / day-200 rows on the same one-number-per-disaster scale.
The base-game matrix from the vanilla disasters page (same units, its legend applies), with three rows appended for how Survive the Storm escalates over time. The base rows are the yardstick; the StS rows are the mod. Vanilla's two % dangerous columns are dropped here: the mod pins both to a fixed value that no longer varies with difficulty, stated below the table rather than as a column. What the sub-types are and how the mod's mix differs from vanilla is under Disaster types.
| Difficulty | Dust Storm | Cold Wave | Dust Storm + Cold Wave | Meteors | Dust Devils |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| % of sols active | % of sols active | combined % of sols | % of map hit / sol | % of map covered | |
| Very Low | 0.0% | 0.0% | 0.0% | 0.04% | 0.00% |
| Low | 7.4% | 9.1% | 15.3% | 0.07% | 0.05% |
| High | 16.7% | 14.5% | 27.0% | 0.10% | 0.10% |
| Very High | 19.0% | 22.0% | 34.1% | 0.12% | 0.16% |
| Extremely High | 24.2% | 27.0% | 40.8% | 0.35% | 0.31% |
| StS day 1 | 10% | 10% | 20% | 0.1% | 0.1% |
| StS day 51 | 20% | 20% | 40% | 0.325% | 0.325% |
| StS day 101 | 30% | 30% | 60% | 0.55% | 0.55% |
| StS day 201+ | 50% | 50% | 100% | 1% | 1% |
The four StS rows: the mod ignores the landing site's rating and drives every colony up the same linear curve from day 1 to day 201, where it caps - no further scaling. Dust Storms and Cold Waves each climb from 10% of sols active at day 1 to 50% at day 201 (20% at day 51, 30% at day 101); Meteors and Dust Devils each climb from 0.1% to 1% over the same span (0.325% at day 51, 0.55% at day 101). All four scale linearly and independently.
Read against the vanilla difficulty rows above, the intent is to open around High and reach roughly Extremely High by day 51 - the day-51 combined weather share, 40%, sits right at vanilla's both-Extremely 41% - then keep climbing past any vanilla level to day 201. The target numbers are kept deliberately round (10-50%, 0.1-1%) so they are easy to read, which is why they do not line up exactly with vanilla's difficulty values on those days.
The mod also fixes how dangerous each Dust Storm and Dust Devil is, so it no longer scales with difficulty the way vanilla does - which is why those two "% dangerous" columns are gone:
Code/StS_HarsherDisasters.lua.major_chance /
electro_chance pinned to 100). In vanilla the dangerous share (Major or Electric) climbs
9.8% at Low to 75% at Extremely High
(vanilla Dust Devils). Built in
Code/StS_MeteorDevilEscalation.lua.The combined column is Dust Storm plus Cold Wave: 20% / 40% / 60% / 100% down the StS rows. Below day 100 the two stay mutually exclusive (one weather disaster at a time, like vanilla), so the combined is the share of sols with some weather disaster. Day 100 is the first sol they may overlap; from there the combined reads as the average number of weather disasters active at once, reaching 100% at day 201 - on average one weather disaster always running, sometimes both. Vanilla can never do this: with both threats on it never runs them together, so its combined tops out around 41% (the base rows above).
Meteors and Dust Devils are abstract coverage targets - Meteors 0.1% to 1% of the map struck per sol, Dust Devils 0.1% to 1% map coverage, both over days 1-201. These are target numbers, not game settings: the build translates each into the game's spawn parameters. Alongside the amount, the mod also fixes every meteor large and every devil Major-and-Electric (above). Meteor scatter (where meteors land) and the all-large size override are live; the per-sol amount (escalation) and the devil type are built, untested. See What the mod changes and Disaster abstractions.
What each sub-type is and does is base-game behaviour and lives on the vanilla pages, not here: Dust Storm plain / Great / Electrostatic and the single-kind Cold Wave on vanilla Disasters (fill rates on Maintenance); meteors small vs large and volleys on Meteors (and the difficulty matrix); Dust Devils regular / Major / Electric, their minions and battery drain on Dust Devils.
Survive the Storm does not change what any sub-type does; it changes only the mix, replacing vanilla's difficulty scaling with a fixed share. Each change is stated once, under the fixed danger shares and What the mod changes: every Dust Storm pinned to about a third plain / Great / Electrostatic (~67% dangerous), every meteor large (100% destroy), every Dust Devil Major and Electric (100% dangerous). Cold Waves have no sub-types, so the mod adds none.
The mod ignores the landing site's Dust Storm and Cold Wave ratings and forces both on for every colony, then drives each active share up a linear curve from 10% of sols at day 1 to 50% at day 201 (the cap), 20% at day 51 and 30% at day 101. Below day 100 the two stay mutually exclusive like the base game; from day 100 they may run at the same time, which is how the combined load climbs past the base game's 41% ceiling toward 100% at day 201. Each storm's type is pinned to a third each (plain / Great / Electrostatic), so about 67% are dangerous (see types). In Code/StS_HarsherDisasters.lua; full design: Harsher disasters.
For the duration of every Cold Wave every rover moves at 50% speed, restored when
the wave ends. Vanilla Cold Waves do nothing to rovers - a rover only ever breaks from dust (dust
storms and dust devils), and the one rover weather event, Missing Rover, fires on a dust storm - so
this is the cold-wave counterpart to the dust storm's grip on them. The cut is a keyed
move_speed modifier on every BaseRover (RC Commander, Transport, Explorer,
Safari), keyed by id so a duplicate wave or a load mid-wave never double-applies. In
Code/StS_ColdWaveRovers.lua.
A Cold Wave also makes colonists eat more - 0.3 Food per meal instead of 0.2, reverted when the wave ends. That is a food change, documented with the mod's other food tuning on the Food page.
A regular (weather) Meteor Storm now drops its meteors on independent random passable tiles across the whole map instead of one drifting 1 km band. Same meteor count and cadence, different where. Scripted story and mystery strikes stay aimed at their dome. Verified in-game, in Code/StS_MeteorScatter.lua; base mechanic and coverage: meteors.html.
Every meteor is a large one, so every hit destroys what it strikes instead of only
damaging it. At load the mod sets large_chance to 100 on each of the map's meteor
descriptors, so GenerateMeteor's small-vs-large roll (Random(100) < large_chance)
is always true and picks large every time. A large meteor still behaves exactly as in the base game; only
the frequency changes (100% instead of the site-rolled ~10%). This covers ambient meteors (storms,
singles and volleys), which all read the map's meteor descriptor; damage is left unchanged and placement
is the separate scatter above. In StS as
Code/StS_LargeMeteors.lua; base mechanic and
sizes: meteors.html.
The mod escalates Meteors and Dust Devils to fixed abstract targets over days 1-201 (then held),
linearly: Meteors 0.1% to 1% of the map struck per sol (0.325% at day 51, 0.55% at day 101), Dust Devils
0.1% to 1% map coverage on the same curve. These are target numbers, not game settings - the build
translates each into the game's spawn parameters (storm-driven meteors; devil wave interval). Alongside
the amount, the mod fixes the type: every meteor large
(large_chance 100, so each is the wide 35 m disc that destroys what it hits,
Code/StS_LargeMeteors.lua) and every Dust Devil both Major and Electric
(100% dangerous). Built in Code/StS_MeteorDevilEscalation.lua (v1.9, untested). The
abstraction-to-parameter mapping:
Disaster abstractions.
Only the mod-specific arithmetic is here; every base-game figure and derivation (the difficulty rows, the r / (1 + r) storm-load math, the meteors-per-sol breakdown, the vanilla type shares) lives on the vanilla Disasters page.
Code/StS_MeteorDevilEscalation.lua). Dust Storms are pinned
great = 33, electrostatic = 34 (~67% dangerous) regardless of sol or
difficulty (Code/StS_HarsherDisasters.lua, read by the type roll at
Lua/DustStorm.lua:376-385).Random(spawntime, spawntime_random) range for the gap, whose true
average is UNVERIFIED; the mod picks length and gap around that same midpoint, so if
the engine average differs the realized occupancy drifts the same way. Full note:
disasters.html.