Moon Base Blueprints: How Video Games Are Preparing Us for NASA's Artemis Lunar Settlement

As NASA advances its $20 billion Artemis program to establish humanity's first permanent lunar base, video game designers are grappling with similar challenges of survival, resource management, and infrastructure design on the moon's hostile surface.

The space agency's ambitious roadmap calls for sustained human presence on the lunar surface, with permanent infrastructure set to arrive alongside Artemis V in 2028. Meanwhile, the gaming industry has experienced a surge in space-based settlement simulators, from large-scale RPGs like Starfield and No Man's Sky to specialized builders like Space Engineers and Oxygen Not Included. The lunar environment—characterized by isolation, resource scarcity, engineering constraints, and extreme conditions—provides the perfect testing ground for exploring how humans might actually survive and thrive on another celestial body.

Entertainment vs. Reality: Starfield's Approach

Bethesda's Starfield prioritizes accessible gameplay mechanics over scientific accuracy. The base-building system allows players to construct modular outposts that serve as hubs for space exploration, but the focus remains on practical functionality rather than environmental realism. Players can extract resources, automate production, and establish crafting stations, yet livability takes a backseat to resource extraction. While power requirements and cargo links between bases introduce some management elements, the streamlined design emphasizes usability over authenticity.

NASA-Endorsed Simulation: Moonbase Alpha

For a genuinely realistic experience, Moonbase Alpha—officially supported and published by NASA itself—offers players an astronaut's perspective at the lunar south pole. Shortly after arrival at the base, a meteorite impact damages critical life support systems. Players must coordinate teams of up to six astronauts using authentic NASA equipment, including rovers, robots, and real-world research tools. The game features accurate lunar terrain, authentic EVA and oxygen mechanics, and genuine NASA systems such as solar arrays and robotics, providing perhaps the most faithful representation of what lunar settlement would genuinely entail.

Deep Simulation: Surviving Mars as a Lunar Proxy

For comprehensive base-building that maintains scientific plausibility, Surviving Mars stands out as the strongest candidate. The game incorporates realistic systems including modular pressurized domes, life support management, limited power and water resources, and Earth-dependent supply chains. By selecting maps with low temperatures, minimal water availability, and high solar exposure—and enabling relevant DLC and mods—players can approximate lunar conditions with remarkable fidelity.

To truly simulate lunar settlement, players can self-impose constraints: restricting pressurized habitats to domes, relying solely on solar panels for power, maintaining crew populations between ten and thirty members, and emphasizing logistical Earth dependency. Under these conditions, progress becomes methodical and tense, with survival dependent on redundancy, efficiency, and meticulous planning. A single failure cascades into potential total collapse, mirroring the genuine stakes of operating an off-world outpost.

Other Contenders in the Gaming Landscape

Oxygen Not Included delivers intricate simulation mechanics including gas pressure dynamics, heat transfer calculations, and oxygen management, with the ability to construct on asteroids resembling lunar terrain. Space Engineers excels at replicating the moon's airless environment and low gravity, enabling players to design pressurized bases, airlocks, power infrastructure, and vehicles. An emerging title, Possible One: Lunar Industries, is being positioned as "the first realistic lunar colony management game," signaling continued industry interest in authentic space settlement simulation.

Aligning Game Design with NASA's Blueprint

NASA's Artemis infrastructure strategy encompasses surface habitats, Lunar Terrain Vehicles for landscape traversal and cargo transport, pressurized rovers, solar power systems, energy storage, and modular microgrid networks. Many games replicate these systems with varying degrees of accuracy.

A critical element that the best simulations emphasize is in-situ resource utilization (ISRU)—harvesting materials locally rather than importing from Earth. Following NASA's decision to eliminate the proposed Lunar Gateway orbital station in favor of direct lunar base construction, extracting resources such as water ice from polar regions becomes essential for mission viability.

Energy management represents another crucial parallel between games and reality. Rather than simply generating sufficient power, the fundamental challenge involves reliable and efficient distribution—a bottleneck that titles like Space Engineers and Surviving Mars authentically depict. Modular expansion similarly mirrors real-world requirements: isolated breaches prevent catastrophic system-wide failures, modules can be specialized for specific functions, and redundancies protect against single-point failures.

From Virtual Colonies to Human Habitation

When Artemis astronauts begin assembling an actual foothold at the lunar south pole, the experience may feel strangely familiar to dedicated simulation enthusiasts who have spent years managing virtual lunar colonies. The most scientifically rigorous space settlement games have already trained players to think strategically about power budgets, fragile supply chains, and survival strategies in unforgiving vacuum environments.

As Artemis gradually constructs humanity's first genuine off-world residence, it will prove fascinating to examine how closely the industry's most realistic simulations have predicted what an actual lunar base will ultimately resemble. Video game designers and space engineers may discover they've been imagining the same solution all along.