Frequently Asked Questions

This frequently asked questions list summarizes the project’s purpose and findings.

1. Solved gameplay mysteries
2. Still unknown
3. Project questions

Solved gameplay mysteries

This project has been able to answer the following long-standing questions. Most topics are other pages on the site.

Why does K240 crash sometimes?

The culprit appears to be the fleet teleport bug. An error in the fleet handling routines can cause a fleet to jump instantly to its destination, leaving all its ships behind. Attempting to move this glitched fleet will crash the game. A possible quick-fix is disband the affected fleet. An official bugfix was released. Press “V” during play to see your version; v1.886 has the bug, v2.000 has the fix. The free authorized download from Gremlin World is unfortunately the old version. See bugs and differences between versions.

What causes the message “Asteroid structure too weak”?

A colony can only have a maximum of 100 buildings, regardless of building size or asteroid size.

I suddenly won without doing anything. Why?

The Ax’Zilanth have an asteroid teleporter technology known as the Mass Displacement Podule. There’s a chance they will teleport directly into another asteroid and be destroyed. Other aliens may plausibly be destroyed by normal asteroid collisions.

Why does the OSD complain I don’t have enough Bytanium or Dragonium?

The “YARDS NEED MORE <ore name>” message is calculated incorrectly. Ore is used up gradually during the production of a ship, but the status message incorrectly compares it to the total ore required to produce the ship, not the remaining ore required. This usually happens with larger ships that need uncommon ore, since it’s rare that you run out of Crystalite. It especially happens when building the Orbital Space Dock (10 Bytanium, 20 Dragonium), since nothing else uses Bytanium so it’s optimum to sell all but 10 Bytanium. The ship will still build correctly; only the status message is incorrect.

Are there any cheats for K240?

There are exactly twelve cheat codes. Other cheats reported by some sources are either false (e.g. secret hard alien cheat) or only applied to the demo version (fire alien missiles, or fire unlimited missiles). There are a few exploitable glitches, such as the Repair Facility glitch which over-heals ships with shields.

What do I need population for?

You need 8 colonists per Missile Silo, Mine, Deep Bore Mine, Seismic Penetrator, Command Centre, and Construction Yard. If you don’t have enough, any mining or ship/missile construction work operates at 40% efficiency. No other buildings require population. Additionally, you gain an undocumented 100 credits per day per colony and 2 credits per day per colonist. You also need at least one colonist or the colony is automatically destroyed, and certain alien weapons directly attack your number of colonists. See building behaviour.

How do I increase population growth?

You can’t, other than reducing population loss due to things like radiation. Each day, there is a fixed 40% chance for a colony to gain one colonist, and a 10% chance to lose one colonist. It is unaffected by current population, unrest, food surplus, hospitals, or anything else. However, hospitals do reduce the rate of colonists killed by radiation. See health, radiation and population growth.

What triggers the bribe to improve ore shipments?

It’s completely random. The amount of ore you sell makes no difference. See random events.

What causes the breakup of a Scoutship?

Random event. It’s dramatic to assume the Scoutship was intercepted by the enemy, but it’s random.

Does destroying an asteroid increase the risk of meteor showers?

No. It’s a random event.

Why don’t Tetracorp send me reinforcements like they used to?

Reinforcements are random events, and twice as common as other random events. The first random event will always be reinforcements, but only against the first two aliens. The harder aliens don’t give automatic reinforcements at the beginning.

My last Transporter was destroyed and Tetracorp suddenly sent me a new one!

Coincidence?

It’s no coincidence. If you have no Transporter, the next random event will always give you a Transporter.

Why did Tetracorp send me a Transporter with two Napalm Orbs and no shields?

The hardpoints on the ship are determined entirely randomly. They can have any hardpoint except for Static Inducer and Warp Generator. The first hardpoint is always a weapon.

How many Medical Centres and Security Centres do I need?

You need one Medical Centre and Security Centre for every 100 full colonists after the first 50. Security is critical (see security and morale for what happens if you let unrest grow), and even after you build enough Security Centres, unrest only subsides slowly. Medical Centre is only needed to cure outbreaks, which only occur by random events, although they have a small effect in reducing radiation.

How many Decontamination Filters do I need?

Fewer than you might think. Although every Decontamination Filter reduces radiation by 30%, every Medical Centre additionally reduces the effect of radiation by 10%. Even then, you can reach 70% radiation before you start suffering a net population loss on average. See health, radiation and population growth.

Do Decontamination Filters permanently erase radiation?

No. They sometimes appear to, because you can demolish a Decontamination Filter and find radiation still at 0%. What actually happened is that you mined the ores that are generating that radiation: 10% per 100 Asteros, per 2 Traxium, and per 1 Nexos.

Why is my money going up even when I haven’t sold any ore?

An important undocumented feature is that you gain 100 credits per day per colony, and 2 credits per day per colonist. This is the primary benefit of population, since workers are only required to operate mines and to build ships or missiles. Even then, each relevant building only requires 8 workers, and those buildings still operate at 40% efficiency in a worker shortage.

What is the Kll-Kp-Qua “special type of warhead” mentioned in the manual?

A missile which reduces the population of an asteroid by 20.

What does Last Minute Intelligence mean by “be careful when taking over an enemy

asteroid”?

Asteroids which once belonged to the Ore Eaters explode when colonized. It is unknown if this is intended to represent structural weakness from over-mining, or some kind of boobytrap. It has the game benefit of destroying asteroids which the Ore Eaters been mined dry, which allows new asteroids to spawn in.

Do the aliens follow the same rules as the player?

No. The rules vary considerably between individual aliens (see the alien pages on the index page. For example, some actually mine ore, while others do not. There are some commonalities; e.g. aliens do not use currency, do not buy blueprints, and are limited to five of each missile.

Are the upgraded turret blueprints worth it?

Plasma Turret deals as much damage as 2.5 Laser Turrets, and Photon Turret deals as much damage as 4 Laser Turrets. They are 60/66% more power-efficient than the Laser per point of damage, and become cost-effective per point of damage at 20/17 turrets, respectively, accounting for the investment of the blueprint. However, Laser with the Turret Optimiser is 100% more power-efficient and has the advantage that it also doubles every turret on a Protected building (which are worth building anyway because they usually have higher hit points). It’s not cost-effective, but it stacks very well with Photon Turret, where it deals 8 times the damage of base Laser and is 3.2 times more power-efficient.

How many Anti-Missile Pods should I build?

One Anti-Missile Pod has a 21% chance to shoot down any given missile. However, each additional Pod only adds 2% to the chance, to a maximum of 71% with 26 Pods. Building 26 Anti-Missile Pods would cost 182,000 CR plus 78MW of power generation (20 Solar Generators for 30,000 CR), plus the blueprint at 250,000 CR, so 462,000 CR in total. It might be better to spend that money on nuclear missiles to destroy the enemy before they fire.

When firing a valuable missile like a Mega, is it worth sending other missiles

with it as decoys to prevent it from being shot down?

It makes no difference. Once a missile reaches an asteroid, the only thing which can stop it is Anti-Missile Pods or their alien equivalent (Ore Eater Defence Battery, Rigellian Defence Battery, and Swixaran Tentacular Defender). However, each missile has a flat percentage chance to be shot down, which isn’t affected by the number of incoming missiles or the rate of incoming missiles.

Are there any errors in the game manual?

A few, mostly regarding specific building behaviour. Most notably, Powerplants produce 32MW/day while there is unmined Asteros, and no power when it is depleted. Asteroid Engines use 2-7 power rather than 0-5. Ships in a “hanger” are only only repaired if you have a Repair Facility, and ships in orbit are never repaired even if you have a Repair Facility. The Photon Cannon is more powerful than the Plasma Cannon, as are the ship hardpoint versions. For features which are not documented in the manual, see… this entire site, really.

The final game screen gives me a bonus of 5,000,000 credits. Do I actually get

to keep it?

No. Internally, your money isn’t acutally incremented in 5,000,000. Not that it would make a difference, since your money doesn’t carry over between missions. In Dungeons of Avalon, you actually do get to keep the 20,000 gold you get for winning.

What does Last Minute Intelligence mean by the “very predictable” pattern in the

Kll-Kp-Qua attacks?

They will retaliate with missiles when fired on, and build fleets when attacked by fleets. See Kll-Kp-Qua for details.

The manual says the Ore eaters only attack mining colonies. Does that mean they

won’t attack asteroids without any mines?

No. All player-controlled colonies in the game are mining colonies.

Still unknown

Why is Patrick Phelan credited with providing K240’s music when there is no

music in K240?

Unknown. Was there once music?

What was the Orbital Shuttle for?

A ship called the Orbital Shuttle appears in the code, and can be edited in. However, we don’t know its original purpose, what its statstics were supposed to be, or why it was removed.

Why was the third game end screen removed?

A file called outro3.mgl shows a third intro screen which, according to the code, would have been shown upon defeating the Swixarans. However, defeating the Swixarans actually just shows outro1.mgl, the standard win screen. Why? The best guess is that either the render took up slightly too much memory, or it wasn’t ready in time for the final build.

Project questions

Have the sprites been ripped from the game?

Some large pieces of art have been extracted from the MGL files, and numerous game sprites appear in images.

How easy would it be to mod the game to let you use alien technology?

Not trivial. Firstly, most building and ship hardpoints are hardcoded to a list of fixed size, so adding one ship, building or missile would either mean removing one to make room, or changing code in multiple places to increase the number of slots. Secondly, alien technology is often hardcoded to work for the alien only; e.g. even if you put the Swixaran self-destruct device on your own ships, it would only blow up your own asteroids.

How was this disassembly acquired?

A disassembly program called IRA recreates 68000 assembly language code from an executable. It’s not the original source code, and importantly is missing variable names and comments, making understanding the code a challenge. All variable names and comments appearing in the code have been added myself. See disassembly and analysis tutorial for more information. Later analysis was done with Ghidra.

What was K240 originally programmed with?

According to Games-X issue #1, K240’s predecessor Utopia was programmed in 68000 assembly language using a system known as SNASM68K running on a 25MHz 286 PC with a 40MB hard disk. While native assemblers existed on the Amiga, SNASM included a powerful hardware debugger which connected the PC to the Amiga via SCSI, and the PC’s faster CPU meant it could assemble the program more quickly than what was presumably a 7MHz Amiga 500. (The publishers of SNASM would notably go on to produce the Psy-Q devkit used by most PlayStation games.) K240 was also programmed in 68000 assembly language, and therefore probably also used SNASM68K, given its advantages.

Does the original source code exist?

Although a lot of Gremlin Interactive source code was likely lost when the company closed, it is believed that programmer Graeme Ing still possesses a copy of the source for games he worked on, including K240. If you have a copy of the source or other surviving development data, please respond to the ticket at issue #3, or just release it online somewhere and I’ll certainly find it.