Every colonist has one of twelve personality archetypes, a wealth tier, a household and a daily routine driven by a global clock. They work shifts, sleep, eat, commute and take their leisure where it suits them. They pair up, form households, raise children, send them through school, and eventually watch them move out and start households of their own.
What they want — across ten categories from nourishment and connection to culture, nature and faith — is what pulls the economy forward. Wants create demand; demand opens businesses; businesses need resources you mine, refine, manufacture or import. As colonists grow wealthier they aspire to higher-tier experiences that are hungrier for power and materials, and the whole colony has to climb to meet them.
You place the civic backbone directly: power, life support, clinics, schools. Everything else you found as districts — give an area a character, and the colony fills it to demand, resource availability and profit: several coffee shops, competing gyms, the occasional business that fails and closes. It grows with you rather than only because of you.
And it all happens on a planet that was alive before you arrived — nine biomes, wandering herds and flocks, megafauna, weather and wind, rivers and lakes, all generated from a seed and different every game.
