Special projects

Every special project you send a rocket to on the Planetary View under the mod: what each costs to launch and what it gives back. The Trade projects (one per rival colony) come first, then the three the mod reworks, then the vanilla projects it leaves as shipped.

Projects the mod adds or reworks

Project	Launch payload	Reward	Round trip	Reappears
Trade (one per rival)	30  (60  for SpaceY)	The rival's Trade Good: Sponsor Research, raw Research, a tech or Breakthrough reveal, Colonists, resources, a Rocket, or terraforming - depends on the rival (Trading).	1 sol	10 sols, and each run costs 20% more Rare Metals than the last
Launch SETI Satellite	30 , 5	Flat $500 M Funding, one-off.	2 sols	25-50 sols
High-speed Comm Satellite	30 , 5 , 5 , 5	Flat +200 Research / Sol, permanent. Each completed satellite adds its own, so they stack.	2 sols	75-125 sols
Contract Exploration Access	10	Flat $500 M Funding, one-off.	2 sols	20-40 sols

Legend

• Launch fuel: every launch also costs the rocket's regular launch fuel - 70 for a standard Rocket, 50 with Advanced Martian Engines - on top of the payload shown. Detail: Fuel: what a launch really costs.
• Trade is 12 projects, one per rival sponsor. The Rare Metals price and the Trade Good depend on which rival is on the map; a trade appears only after you finish your Founder Stage and sits next to its rival with no spawn notification. Full per-sponsor list, delivery and escalation: Trading.
• Contract Exploration Access is story-gated. It stays disabled until the Pre-Founder event The Martian Trail switches it on (40% chance to be in a game's pool); lose that roll and it never appears.
• Flat rewards. The mod removes the vanilla per-use taper: SETI and the Comm Satellite give the same amount however many times you have run them.

Vanilla projects the mod leaves as shipped

These projects are unchanged by the mod in reward, payload and timing; they only inherit the map-wide +40% launch fuel like every rocket. The full detail - diminishing and stacking rewards, disaster chances, the technology each needs and its 100% cutoff - is on the vanilla Special Projects page.

Project	Launch payload	Outcome	Expedition	Reappears
Capture Meteors	60	Meteor storm at a random spot (it can threaten the colony); leaves Metals, Rare Metals and research Anomalies.	60 h	5-15 sols
Capture Ice Asteroids	100 , 15	+5% Water (about 60% chance of a Marsquake).	90 h	5-15 sols
Import Greenhouse Gases	$600 M, 30	+2% Atmosphere, +1% Temperature (about 40% chance of a Toxic Rain).	72 h	5-15 sols
Cloud Seeding	80 , 20	Triggers a clear-water Rain. No direct parameter change.	48 h	6-24 sols
Seed Vegetation	100 , 35	+5% Vegetation.	100 h	3-12 sols
Launch Space Mirror	100 , 35 , 15	+10% Temperature and +10% Solar-panel power (stacks). Rocket lost.	12 h	25-50 sols
Launch Magnetic Shield	80 , 20 , 15	Cuts per-Sol Atmosphere loss by 0.05% (stacks). Rocket lost.	60 h	25-50 sols
Melt the Polar Caps	400	+20% Water, +10% Atmosphere (halved per earlier completion). Rocket lost.	40 h	15-20 sols

Legend

• The seven terraforming projects (all but Capture Meteors) each need a technology before they appear and each stops appearing once its parameter reaches 100%; Capture Meteors needs no tech and never stops. Which tech, the exact diminishing curves and the extra gates are on the vanilla page.
• Rewards that shrink or grow with repeated use are documented on that vanilla page; this table shows the first-use figures.

Fuel: what a launch really costs

A rocket must be fuelled to its full launch fuel before it can lift off, exactly like an Earth trip. The mod raises every rocket's launch fuel by 40% map-wide, so a standard Rocket needs 70 Fuel to launch, dropping to 50 once Advanced Martian Engines is researched (base 50, +40% rule, then that tech's flat -20; SpaceY's Dragon is lower, Paradox's is +30 higher). Every special project pays this same launch fuel - none is cheaper or free:

• The mod's projects (Trade, SETI, Comm, Contract Exploration Access) carry no Fuel in their payload, so the launch fuel (70, or 50 with the tech) is their whole Fuel cost; the non-Fuel payload - Rare Metals for a trade, Metals or other resources for the rest - is loaded on top.
• The vanilla projects list Fuel in their payload, which counts toward the launch fuel rather than adding to it: if the payload lists fewer than the launch fuel, the rocket is topped up to the launch fuel; if it lists more (Melt the Polar Caps' 400), that larger figure is the cost.

How the mod rewrites each reworked project

SETI, the Comm Satellite and Contract Exploration Access are each one preset the game looks up by id. Once at load the mod rewrites the same three fields: the outcome function is replaced with one that returns the flat value no matter how many times the project has been completed; the expedition time is set to 2 sols; and the launch payload is rebuilt to the costs in the table above. One outcome function drives both the launch-time preview and the funds or research actually granted, so the number shown is always the number received.

The Fuel line is dropped from every payload (see Fuel): the rocket's regular launch fuel - 70, or 50 with Advanced Martian Engines - is then the whole Fuel cost, with the non-Fuel resources loaded on top.

The Comm Satellite gets one extra change: its reward is a permanent per-Sol boost, but the vanilla card showed a bare research number that read like a one-off, so the mod appends " / Sol" and the card now reads 200 Research / Sol. It is the only project whose outcome text the mod touches.

New colonies get all the changes. Reward and payload are read live, so they also apply after a mid-game reload; the expedition duration is copied into a project when it spawns, so a project already placed in an old save keeps its old duration and only projects that spawn after the change run for 2 sols.

Sources

Surviving Mars base game (app 464920) with the Survive the Storm mod; all DLC assumed installed. Resource amounts are stored ×const.ResourceScale (1000); Funding uses raw units (1000000 = 1 M); expedition time is game-time units where 720000 = 1 sol.