Alien Containment

General Information

Alien Containment facilities provide the special environments needed to keep aliens alive for extended periods of time. Without an Alien Containment, any live aliens captured at the end of a mission will die.

A single Alien Containment facility can hold any number of alien individuals from up to ten different combinations of alien species and rank. For example, one facility can hold any number of Sectoid Soldiers, but cannot hold alien units of every rank and race all at the same time.

The default starting base does not include an Alien Containment facility, although they are available to build at the start of the game. It is recommended you build one immediately, as some of the highest-priority research in the game depends on studying specific live aliens.

Unique Alien Types

There are 29 different alien race/rank combos in the game:

• Sectoid Soldier, Medic, Navigator, Engineer, Leader, or Commander
• Snakeman Soldier, Navigator, Engineer, Leader, or Commander
• Ethereal Soldier, Leader, or Commander
• Muton Soldier, Navigator, or Engineer
• Floater Soldier, Medic, Navigator, Engineer, Leader, or Commander
• Celatid Terrorist
• Silacoid Terrorist
• Chryssalid Terrorist
• Reaper Terrorist
• Sectopod Terrorist
• Cyberdisc Terrorist

The two robotic units (Sectpods and Cyberdiscs) cannot be captured alive. Therefore, only 27 of the race/rank combos that can be kept in a containment facility. To house all possible alien units in the game, you will need at most three Alien Containment modules. These modules do not need to be at the same base: you can transfer aliens between bases if the Containment at one base is getting full.

In practice, one containment module can suffice for the duration of the game. Researching live aliens invariably kills them, and if all aliens of a given type are researched, their space will become available for a different unique alien type. Thus to clear out space in your containment, just research some aliens. This is only necessary if you are nearing the limit of 10 unique types that can be held in your containment. (Each alien type available for research represents one of the unique types in your containment.)

If you have more than one alien of a given type in your confinement, you will be able to research that alien type repeatedly until all aliens of that type are used up. If you have already gleaned all possible information from a given alien type, you will not gain a new UFOpaedia entry once the research is done. Soldiers in particular offer little of value, revealing only information about their species, if you have not yet studied any member of their race. See Researching Aliens for details on what information can be gathered from each alien type.

You cannot dismantle ANY Alien Containment facilities at your base if even one alien is in storage. Build your Alien Containment facility to plan for future growth and expansion.

If the alien containment module is destroyed in a base assault, the aliens will still be there when a new containment module is rebuilt.

Statistics

Construction Time: 18 days
Construction Cost: $400,000
Maintenance Cost: $15,000/month