The newest update is available on Steam right now! Its fully compatible with your pre-existing 0.9/0.10/0.11 worlds. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1zdFjAWNUDw Watch the release trailer here! Update 0.12.0 has a strong focus on the early game. From the very beginning, a mill is available to the player. The mill does not need colonists and can craft items 24/7. It can produce some fundamental early game items like beds and torches, and a handful of building blocks and roofs. It changes the start of the game quite significantly. Theres more to do for the player. Personally cutting down trees is more rewarding now. Players can also generate meals by removing naturally occurring berry bushes and putting the results into the mill.
The mill does need time to do its crafting, and results are not automatically deposited in the stockpile. Players have to walk to the mill and choose whether to deposit the results in their personal hotbar or in the communal stockpile. Mills are limited to only one per colony or outpost. These drawbacks make the mill fairly balanced. Its a great boost at the start, but as your colony grows it becomes more convenient to let colonists produce these recipes.
From a technical perspective, the mill is quite revolutionary for Colony Survival. It is currently the biggest object in the game, and it has actual moving parts. We had to develop some new systems to accommodate this, and we hope to use those systems for future additions. To make placing the mill more predictable for players, a greenish variant of the mill is shown where the player is aiming with the mill equipped. This new system is reused for a bunch of other objects too.
A small change with big consequences concerns the roofs. They were added a couple of updates ago and many people have used them, but they had a problem. When you place a diagonal roof on the front of a building, the roof-block becomes part of the facade of the building. But it does not adapt to the specific type of blocks in that facade. We chose some default cobblestone and planks textures for these facade-roofs, but in many builds, that didnt match what people were actually using. It looked pretty wonky. Zun has built a new system that allows roof blocks in facades to automatically adapt to the block theyre resting on. It makes roofs look a lot better! The existing tiled roofs were only available when you had progressed quite a bit into the tech tree. We made new roof types that can be made with the mill at the start of the game: wooden roofs and straw roofs. Of course, they also use the auto-adaptation system.
Roof awkwardly connecting to blocks in 0.11
Straw roof smoothly connecting to blocks in 0.12 For a long time, weve had quarter blocks in the game. Players could use these to build stairs. They were available in multiple colors, but they were untextured, and we have gotten quite some complaints about that. Zun could easily apply the auto-adaptation system to these quarter blocks, so weve added a new type of them: dynamic quarter blocks. They are automatically textured in the style of the block theyre resting on. And to make them even more dynamic, they can also be placed vertically! They also reuse a system from the crown moulding. Wherever two quarterblocks meet in a corner, they actually connect to form a unique shape. It opens up a lot of decorative possibilities.
In 0.11, farms could not have too big of a height difference between the highest and lowest part of the field. This has changed pretty radically. Farms on steep hills are now a possibility!
Last but not least: by popular request, weve reintroduced coated planks! Heel veel plezier met de update :D Reddit // Twitter // YouTube // Website // Discord

Everything shown and described in this blog is not available publicly yet, it will be in the next update. Work on the projects detailed in the previous blog continued this month. We finished the mesh for the auto-crafter. To distinguish it from regular jobblocks, and to signal that it can do productive things without human input, its powered by wind - its a mill.
Were trying something new here. Its not just a voxel-sized workbench, or a single large mesh like the banner. The mill is actually a combination of many smaller parts, most of which fit neatly within the 1x1x1 voxels of the game. Yet you wont build it part-by-part. It will assemble automatically. The in-game bed already does the same. Technically, its two parts that both place at the same moment when you click once. But a structure with so many parts - weve never done that. Zun is working on some new systems to properly integrate this. Im excited - we might add more structures like this in the future! Hopefully, we can actually get the blades of the mill moving while its active.
Most of the UI is functional. You can see it in the image below. On the left, theres a list of possible recipes, currently only containing two test-items. You can select them and see some information about them, and then you can add them to the production queue. When items are done, theyre added to the box on the right. Players have to walk back to the mill to collect these items physically, either by assigning them to the hotbar or by sending them straight to the stockpile.
The new auto-textured quarterblocks look pretty great, and it made us want to use them more in our builds. Which quickly led to another desire: being able to use them vertically too. So Zun actually added that ability to the new dynamic quarterblocks! They can now be placed on the side of blocks too, instead of merely on top. This allows for a whole new range of decorative options.
Talking about decorative options - many people demanded the return of coated planks, the darker and more reflective variant of planks. A couple of updates ago, we replaced the old planks texture with a new one, but we didnt add a coated variant. Ive now made one for the new planks texture!
Bedankt voor het lezen :D Reddit // Twitter // YouTube // Website // Discord

The two most dramatic overhauls of the game were update 0.7 and 0.9. With 0.7, we wanted to make the game more challenging and complex. Thats why we introduced features like the happiness system. Later on, we realized there was a problem with some of these features. They punished growth and recruiting more colonists. That was never the intention. We reworked the happiness system into the current Colony Points system. With 0.9, we wanted to make expanding and hiring more colonists more rewarding. One of the ways we tried to do this was by strictly limiting the player-crafting. If players can create hundreds of building blocks with the click of a button, letting colonists do this work is a bit wasteful and inefficient. We stand by this decision, but it has made the early game slower and less exciting. We want to fix this by letting players make early-game building blocks and other essentials without relying on colonists. But for the sake of balance, this should not be possible with just one click and zero other costs. Were strongly considering to introduce the auto-crafter, a mill-like building that processes inputs into certain building blocks. But the auto-crafter takes some time to finish its production, and players need to be physically present at the auto-crafter to deliver and gather materials. Itll empower the player in the early game, without being totally unbalanced. So we were thinking about the topic of proper early-game building blocks, and thought that we should add some new ones. The special roof blocks have been quite popular, but they appear pretty late in the tech tree. So an extra early-game roof block sounded good to us.
And what is a sensible primitive roof? A thatched roof made of straw of course! So weve been making all roof variants necessary to generate proper thatched roofs in all possible shapes. Were very happy with the end result! While working on the roofs, we discussed another common issue. The sides of the roof are their own thing, but wherever they meet the front of a building, they have to match the blocks. The roofs that are currently in the game use some default textures for that front side - planks and stone bricks. If you were using those to build that structure, perfect, itll look great. But if you were using any other building materials, you get this weird stairs-like pattern where your chosen blocks meet the default texture of the roofs.
So, Zun decided to fix that! In the current unreleased dev-build, the front of roofs will actually match the block theyre standing on. It looks much better! And with that feature developed, Zun applied that a bit further. Why shouldnt quarterblocks also match the texture of the block theyre standing on? So weve been playing around with the dynamic quarterblock now, which does exactly that.
All of these should become available in the next update, which hopefully makes the early game a lot more interesting! Bedankt voor het lezen :D Reddit // Twitter // YouTube // Website // Discord

The lightmapping made visible A massive update to the lighting system is available right now! Its compatible with pre-existing savegames. If Steam doesnt update automatically, try verifying the integrity of the game cache. In the previous versions of the game, the world was either directly lit or indirectly lit. Direct lighting occurs when the sun hits an area, all the rest is shadow. There was just one value for each. Whether the shadow was behind a little bush in an open field, or deep into a cave, didnt matter. All indirectly lit areas received the same brightness.
Old We did add a system that checked the position of the player. It measured how exposed the player was to the skybox. If the player was in an open field, the indirect lighting would be boosted. Deep in a cave, the indirect lighting would be dimmed. But this too treated all shadows in the same way. If you were standing in a tunnel in the middle of a mountain with a view onto bushes in the middle of a field, the shadows in the tunnel would be just as dark as the shadows caused by the bushes! Of course, this is not how lighting works in real life. Real light bounces around. When something is not directly in the sun, but sunlight is reflected towards it from the sky, the ground and other nearby surfaces, it still appears bright to us. But when you close your curtains, move into the basement or walk into a cave, the reflected light gets weaker and weaker until it is fully dark.
New Its very performance intensive to continuously simulate this on your PC. But as a voxel game where the world is made out of big cubes, there are some useful approximations. In the new update, we calculate lightmaps for all those cubes. The brightest value is for every 1x1x1 area that can directly see the sky above it. Every block that cant see the sky like that, but that is directly adjacent to the first category, is a bit darker. This chain is calculated 16 blocks deep. Shaded areas in forests and the interiors of buildings with big windows will be a lot brighter compared to the previous update. But on the opposite side - deep tunnels will be actually dark now! Theres a more realistic contrast in general. The wonky system where all the indirect lighting would become brighter or darker based on the position of the player, has been removed.
Old Instead of trying to trace complicated paths to the sun, there are some simpler rules you can apply. Crevices and hidden corners will always be darker than openly exposed surfaces. Ambient Occlusion exploits this to add some realism. We had been using a standard AO that applied this effect, but it only looked at smaller details - it had a range of about five centimeters. We added a new one that uses the voxel system to analyze the local environment. Instead of five centimeters, it adds appropriate shading based on a range of about two meters. Last but not least, while polishing the lighting and its consequences, we took a look at the tone mapping. Tone mapping is a form of image processing that tries to turn the raw outputs of the game engine into something your monitor can render well. The old tone mapping was pretty standard, but it did increase contrast and change colors in ways we werent completely happy with. We changed it to more neutral tone mapping. The new lighting system is more complex than the old one, and that will decrease performance a bit. But at the same time, you should need less torches and other player-made lighting in this new version, and that actually helps performance again. Another thing that should help with performance on very low-end hardware, is a a way to toggle the sun off. With the new light mapping, the game actually looks fairly okay in that state.
New If youre playing 0.11.1 and you run into any glitches or bugs, please let us know! If you dont like the changes in general, if you want things to be darker, brighter, with more contrast, more saturated, less saturated - share that too. The previous version, 0.11.0, will still be available in the beta branches tab. Well definitely read feedback on our Discord, in the comments of this blog and on our Steam Forums! Heel veel plezier met de update :D Reddit // Twitter // YouTube // Website // Discord

In the previous blog, we talked about an improved lighting system. Were close to releasing it publicly, but we love to do a test first! Were curious about the results in different worlds, the performance on different hardware and your opinion about it. The differences arent extremely obvious when just roaming the outside world, but it does really affect interiors, and its especially noticeable in underground conditions. Tunnels that are far from sunlight are actually dark. If you want to try the beta, go to your Steam Library, right-click Colony Survival and go to properties. In the betas tab, enter the access code sendfeedbackplease. This will unlock the beta-light branch. Enable it and your game will be automatically updated with the new lighting! It should not pose a risk to old savegames. You might encounter some buggy edge cases though. As the access code suggests: please send feedback! Join our Discord and share your feedback in #general or put your screenshot in #screenshots. Feel free to leave a comment on this blog too. Veel plezier met de beta! Reddit // Twitter // YouTube // Website // Discord

The release of 0.11 was a big success! Player counts regularly peaked above 300 simultaneous players, and our recent review rate rose to 98% positive. Thanks to everybody for the support! We released a couple of small patches, fixing some minor issues and improving some models a bit. We also updated the Steam Storepage. All screenshots were multiple years old, and none featured the new colonist models. We uploaded a bunch of new ones to rectify that situation. Were already hard at work on the next big update. The lighting in Colony Survival has been fairly primitive. Sun lighting was harshly divided between direct and ambient. Of course, in real life, sun shadows have a much more complicated gradient.
Visualizing the new lightmaps So Zun is working on a system that dynamically renders lightmaps. He has added an Ambient Occlusion system that uses raytracing to make corners and crevices appear darker. And he has built a system that knows which areas have direct sunlight overhead. The floodfill system that was already used for lighting from torches and such, now applies to that as well, to make the sunlight spread around more natural. All of this helps to make the lighting more beautiful, more realistic and more practical. Its still a bit wonky in certain edge cases, like when it has to deal with water, so its not completely ready for release yet. But it will go public in the next big update!
Bedankt voor het lezen :D Reddit // Twitter // YouTube // Website // Discord

Update 0.11 is now available on Steam! The most visible change is a total replacement of all the colonist models. In the past, we only had one colonist model. It used UV-mapped textures, and they were difficult to change for us. The only thing that varied between colonists was the color of their shirts. The new vertex coloured model is much easier to adjust for us, and the differences between colonists are much bigger now. A lot of colonists have relevant tools and bags attached to their belts. There is a wide variety of hats and helmets. Shirts, pants, shoes, the belt itself, the wristband - all of these appear in many different colors. Some colonists are more muscular, others less. Some have rolled up sleeves, others dont. Some wear wrist guards, others wear gaiters. We are very happy with the results and hope you can appreciate them as well! Let us know about your most and least favorites, and share your ideas to improve the look of current and future models.
To make the colonists even more unique, weve decided to add individual names to the colonists. When you recruit a small group of colonists simultaneously, theres a large chance that they share the same surname. Names are only visible while you wield the command tool. Click on a colonist with the command tool and a new menu will appear. Here, you can generate a new random name for your colonist, or you can edit it manually. You can also see which job theyre doing, and visualize where they are traveling.

Better Builders

Replace Specific - replace one type of block with another[/olist]We cant wait to see what youll build with these new options!
Some final changes: over time, grass blocks will spread their grass to neighbouring dirt blocks. And previously, saplings placed by the player would always grow into the same tiny, basic tree. In 0.11, these saplings will be able to grow into the tree shapes you saw in nature. Let us know about your experiences with 0.11 in the comments or on our Discord! Veel plezier met de update :D Reddit // Twitter // YouTube // Website // Discord

[ 2024-05-31 09:24:16 CET ] [ Original post ]

The current colonist model was already in the game over eight years ago, in early 2016. The workflow for producing it was horrible. The model has a bunch of surfaces that connect and disconnect in many different spots. To texture them, the model has to be unwrapped into a flat image that displays all these surfaces next to each other. But getting a feel for how the textures look on a 3D model from a flat image is very difficult. When it looked semi-decent, I didnt want to touch it anymore. The only difference between the colonists is currently the color of their shirt, which we can very easily adjust by putting a simple color code in a .JSON file. When we added new monsters in 0.9.0, we used a different method to craft the models. Instead of texturing the model in a more traditional way, we made slightly more detailed 3D models and used vertex painting to color them. We had used the same method to generate for example the beds and torches at the very beginning of Colony Survival development, and later on we used it for jobblocks as well. Were very happy with the results there.
Farmer / tinkerer / beekeeper I had used it to make a new vertex-painted colonist model before the release of 0.9.0, but Zun never got around to implementing it. It was also a bit flat, undetailed and boring. In recent weeks, Zun did put it in an internal development build, and I gave it a bit more life and detail. We like the results a lot and are near-certain of adding this to the main branch. Instead of merely having a different-coloured shirt for every job, it has now become possible to make much more custom designs for different jobs. I can quickly adjust how muscular colonists are, the color of not only their shirts but also of pants, shoes, bracelets and belts, I can roll shirt sleeves up or down, I can add tools to their belts or hats to their heads. Ive been making a bunch of new models for different jobs and we believe its a big improvement!

Names and miscellaneous

After six years, Colony Survival finally has a new main trailer! Here it is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WbbDsOB_3zQ Making it was quite the challenge. We really wanted to showcase the potential of the game. We needed beautiful worlds that integrated all the new content from 0.10.0, stuff like the enhanced rail system and all the new decorative items. We asked for help from the community with the Builders Contest - here are the winners! Although their worlds are impressive and beautiful, they didnt showcase all the things that we thought a main trailer should contain. So we spent weeks building a custom world exactly suited to filming the trailer. Then we filmed it. For the first time, the entire pipeline is 4K. 4K rendering of the game, 4K recording, 4K editing. The difference with older videos is very noticeable! Last but not least, we needed a proper trailer song. One that will really grab newcomers who visit our storepage for the first time and know nothing about Colony Survival. Eventually, we found The Mad King by Rok Nardin, a young Slovenian composer. We got in touch with him and licensed the song for our trailer. We are very excited about the end result. Thanks again to everybody who helped make it possible!
We set another major step since the last Friday Blog. We now have full controller support and Steam Deck compatibility! This is actually a thing that is checked by the team behind Steam. You have to put in a request for them to look at your game, and then theyll actually play it and test a bunch of different features. We didnt get fully approved on the first try. We received some feedback about things that we needed to improve. We did, and this week we did get the full approval! This is a feature that has been popularly demanded since the release. If youve been waiting to try and play Colony Survival with a controller or on your Steam Deck, then this is the moment! Bedankt voor het lezen :D Reddit // Twitter // YouTube // Website // Discord

The game is currently on sale! Its 30% discounted. If you dont own it yet - this is a great time to purchase it! And if you do - thanks, and consider telling your friends or outright gifting them the game :) Today, we released 0.10.3. The main changes concern controller support. In the past, we did some work to make it a bit possible to use the controller, but it was still very primitive. Lots of basic functions were very inconvenient. Now, Zun has put in a lot of effort to make using the controller (or playing on Steam Deck) a lot more comfortable. He has actually been playing the game a lot on his couch, with a controller, this week! He has implemented a long list of small tweaks to improve that playstyle. There are some non-controller related improvements too. One of the most noticeable changes concerns the fisherman. With the new water transparency, we changed the model of the fishing rod: the line now continues under water. The functionality has also changed a bit - your fishermen can now use water that is 1 or 2 blocks lower than they themselves are.
Raftsburg Last and least, for the first time in years, weve updated the storepage. We changed some promotional texts to better reflect the current state of the game, nearly completely rewrote the answers to the Early-Access-questions, and updated some banner-images. Bedankt voor het lezen! Reddit // Twitter // YouTube // Website // Discord

Lagoon's world used in these screenshots and the video Lighting has changed quite dramatically! Here is a before/after video: https://youtu.be/d_i8hXLc-EU Last month, we published a pretty long video featuring the winners of the Builders Contest. There are many different shots of those worlds in the video, but theyre pretty much all filmed during the middle of the day or in the night. I deliberately avoided sunrises and sunsets. They look pretty impressive with the landscape, but I felt that they didnt work well with the towns and buildings - they made everything look very dark/red/yellow. Another problem I noticed was the excessive strength of the torches and lamps placed by players. In the middle of the day, they were still casting bright yellow/orange light on the buildings around them. It felt quite wrong that I had to avoid large parts of the day cycle to make the game look great. So we decided to update the lighting! It looks quite different now. Sunsets and sunrises are brighter in general, and the yellow-red effect associated with them lasts much shorter. In the old version, the effect lasted for many in-game hours, which doesnt make any sense.
To simulate morning dew, there is a new fog effect in the valleys, which helps to bring some of the drama back. And weve dimmed torches and other player-built lighting during the day, to make towns appear less orange.

Cloud Sync

In-depth with Lighting

The live build of Colony Survival was just updated from 0.10.0.13 to 0.10.1.0! The main change in this update concerns water. The visuals are much improved. Instead of it being solid light-blue shaving foam, its transparent with a new wave-effect. Moving around in water has also been enhanced. https://youtu.be/IRUsFNhlkpk There have been some minor changes made to the lighting too. There are now low and medium settings for Torch Quality. These render the torch lighting at a reduced resolution. This should be very noticeable for the performance of the game on minimum-spec computers.
The lighting during the day cycle has been tweaked a bit. We also found a bug affecting the ambient lighting during the sunset and sunrise, which has been fixed. If you want to mess around with the lighting yourself, visit Colony Survival\gamedata\textures\materials and edit lighting.png. Lighting.txt provides detailed information on how it works. Changing the look of the water is possible too, and can be done with the settings at the end of serverperclient.json, which is found in Colony Survival\gamedata\settings. If you get interesting results, please share them with us in the comments or on Discord, were very curious about it.
Veel plezier met de update! Reddit // Twitter // YouTube // Website // Discord

As long as Colony Survival has been publicly available, people have called the water block the ugliest in-game block. It has always been a pain point. Water is actually a very strange material. Unlike sand or stone or grass or wood, youre not simply looking at a static surface. Water is transparent and reflective, and big bodies of water are always moving.
Both transparency and reflections are complicated and costly to pull off right. Many games have static worlds, meaning the major features of buildings and terrain arent really moving. Simultaneously, their water is often also something that cant really be moved, and which always acts as a simple 2D surface. Its a lot easier to make this simplified water look realistic.
But in our game, its not so simple. Players can completely change the terrain and they have to manually add the buildings. They can dig canals and make the water dynamically move to new spots. The water actually consists of 3D blocks which can be viewed from all sides.
Our old solution was to just give it a physical surface like all the other blocks, and to make the textures move around automatically to simulate little waves. It worked when you looked at it from a distance and didnt think about it too much, but when you got close and focused on it it was quite weird.
But now, Zun has taken the time to look at the water properly, and to figure out a form of transparency that works well with our lighting system. Were very happy with the results! All the pictures in this blog show the new water. It hasnt been released publicly yet, but expect it to be part of the new patch. Bedankt voor het lezen! Reddit // Twitter // YouTube // Website // Discord

Two months ago, we started this Builders Contest, with a deadline for Jan the 5th. That date has passed and we have selected our winners! Watch the video to see their worlds. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5M-xUwPVuTw

The winners are:

Araria [/olist] We will send the promised Steam Gift Cards to the winners. Weve sent the winners friend requests on Steam. Steam requires people to be friends for two days before they can send Gift Cards. We were genuinely stunned by the worlds the contestants have built. We didnt expect so many people to build such huge and detailed worlds and submit them. We want to thank all participants, also the ones who didnt get in the Top 5! There were many worlds of comparable high quality, and it was difficult to select only five from them.
All these worlds can be downloaded from the Workshop and explored by yourself! And when youre in Colony Survivals Steam Workshop anyway, it might be a great moment to look at all the other things that are available there. Bedankt voor het lezen :D Reddit // Twitter // YouTube // Website // Discord

[ 2024-01-12 11:22:40 CET ] [ Original post ]

Colony Survival is currently on sale! Pick it up for 30% off between now and January 4. The Builders Contest is also still going on. Follow the instructions and upload a world before January 5 to compete for the prizes! Roughly nine weeks ago, we released 0.10.0. The response has been great! There were some things we still wanted to finish, and unexpected issues that popped up after release, so a bunch of other patches have been released. At the end of November, we hit 0.10.0.12. Then we took a development break in December. What is 0.11 going to be? What is 0.12 going to be? These are big questions weve been thinking about since the release of 0.10.0. I think weve been struggling with that question more than we ever did in the history of Colony Survival. We're full of ideas, but the question is how to integrate them into Colony Survival. In the achievement data, we can see that only a small fraction of players who launched 0.9.0+, less than 1/33rd, has reached the end of the tech tree. Releasing an Industrial Era update and adding it to the end of the tech tree, where it will be experienced only by that tiny percentage of players, seems pretty wasteful. We could have industrial-like machines earlier in the game, like windmills. But we want them to involve significant gameplay, it should give options to players, it shouldnt just be a standard jobblock with slightly more complicated requirements. That could mean having to connect things together with for example pipes/cables or something like that. But with our magic stockpile and total absence of real life logistics, such things become problematic quite quickly.
Of course, we can change that as well! But weve got multiple ideas like this, and wed basically have to change the core fundamentals of the game and rebuild it entirely from scratch again, in a way that is substantially different from the product that people decided to purchase and that they got used to. More strongly than ever before, after more than 10 years of working on this project, and after more than 6 years of being in Early Access, we feel like the time for a Colony Survival II might be coming. We will continue developing Colony Survival "1" in 2024. If were going to leave Early Access, we want to do that in a more finished, more polished state. There are still some rough UIs and little things that dont make a lot of sense. And, this is the time for fun stuff. Players have mentioned that building big structures without the flight cheat is truly frustrating. To alleviate this, something like an in-game, historically appropriate 'jetpack' at the end of the tech tree seems very suitable. Another example of a finishing feature could be a special UI that allows you to create large custom monster attacks, to test your defenses to the breaking point. Things like these wouldnt be major updates by themselves, but they do help to satisfy some remaining problems and curiosities. Were thinking hard about the future of Colony Survival and a potential Colony Survival II. Were still uncertain about the optimal way to spend our development efforts. Massively change the current Colony Survival? Finish the game up, polish it, leave Early Access and build a CSII with different fundamentals? What things would you still like to see added to CS1 before we leave Early Access? Let us know how you feel about it! Share your suggestions in the comments or on Discord. We wensen jullie hele fijne Kerstdagen en een gezond & gelukkig Nieuwjaar! Reddit // Twitter // YouTube // Website // Discord

Pathros by PatateNouille We are organizing a new Builders Contest! The best world will win a digital Steam Gift Card worth 100, and the next spots will win 50 / 25 / 15 / 10, respectively. We are planning to use these worlds to film a new main trailer and to make new screenshots for the Steam Storepage. This leads to a bunch of specific needs and preferences:

What are we looking for?

• Worlds showcasing many of the features in the game, especially newer features like the rails, roofs, gliders, outposts, traps etcetera
• Houses for colonists to work/sleep in
• Visually appealing colonies that form a coherent whole, like a village, castle or city.
• Functionality of what's built - it should be actively used by colonists and serve a purpose beyond the visual
• Visible infrastructure between colonies and outposts, with rails / paths / bridges / gliders
• Colonies that do "the whole game"; they should be approximately self-sufficient in the way it ends up when you naturally play the game, they should look "lived in".
• Worlds that have depth, that you can get lost in, with outposts in the distance and plenty of small streets and alleys

What are we not looking for?

• Huge fields of tightly packed beds
• Giant warehouses
• "Car park farming"
• Worlds that look like they were built with cheats, where it is obvious that the player always used the flight-cheat to move between colonies, that many resources appeared without the required production facilities
• Worlds visibly using mods
• Purely decorative builds

The rules

• Upload your world to the Steam Workshop from Colony Survival (Main Menu > Mod Manager > Create Item)
• Navigate towards the Colony Survival Workshop in Steam, acces "Your Workshop Files" and click on the world you just uploaded
• Put 2024 Builders Contest at the start of the description
• Add at least one screenshot to showcase your colony
• Fully publish your world to the Steam Workshop
• Do this before January the 5th 2024, 8AM Amsterdam time
• Its fine to use worlds that youve started before the start of the contest
• It should be a world of your own creation, youre not allowed to download a strangers world and upload that
• Youre allowed to upload multiple worlds
• We operate according to the spirit of the rules, not the letter of the rules. We might adjust the rules to better fit the goals of the contest.

The update has been released to the default, public branch of Colony Survival! By popular request, it mostly adds decorative items like doors and window frames. Much of that content has been detailed in previous blogs, so well start by mentioning some features that have been added since the start of the Open Beta.
0.9.0 added horizontal elevators that could quickly move players in a straight line. The Open Beta changed that to actual rails which could go up hills and around corners. This full release adds junctions, both three-way and four-way. Hold the default movement buttons to determine your direction: A to go left, D to go right.
Weve also added rail gates. They are closed by default, blocking passage towards both monsters and colonists. When a railcar approaches, it quickly opens and closes to allow the railcar to pass the gate smoothly. Another new feature that can be seen in the picture is signs! They can stand independently on the ground, be attached to walls or hang from roofs. Players can enter their own custom texts on the signs.
The final important new feature of the last few weeks is Archimedean screws. When youve accidentally flooded your mines, this is the new tool to drain them. Sadly, completely realistic, realtime 3D water physics on a large scale arent possible yet, so their functioning is a bit wonky. When you place an Archimedean screw, water in a radius around it just straight up disappears. Unrealistic, but practical and computationally inexpensive. Apart from these recent features, there is a long list of new content and changes. A lot of it is based on a new system of automatic adaptation. Roofs will react to their local environment and other roofs that are placed around them. Doors will automatically combine into double doors, window frames merge with nearby windows. Crown moulding automatically forms proper corners, pillars receive their top and bottom in the appropriate location. Items like doors, window frames and flowerboxes can be painted to make buildings even more unique. Weve added proper stairs that look much more realistic than the old quarterblocks. Of course, all these new items can be produced by your colonists, requiring a bunch of new recipes, sciences and a new job: the artist. Another practical benefit of 0.10.0: controller support has been significantly improved. Last but not least are the less practical, less tangible improvements. Zun has done a lot of deep technical refactoring. The networking code has been enhanced, and there are some performance improvements which are mainly noticeable in worlds with enormous amounts of colonists.
Since the release on Steam in 2017, weve added large amounts of new content, dwarfing the amount of content on the day of release. Simultaneously, at least 25% of inflation has occurred. As announced before, this is why weve decided to do a slight price hike, coinciding with the release of 0.10.0. The price has gone up from /$19,99 to /$24,95. We wish all of you a lot of fun with the new update! Let us know what you think of the changes, and please alert us if you encounter any bugs. Were planning to film a new trailer showing the new content, so if you build something interesting and/or beautiful and upload your world to the Steam Workshop / to our Discord, theres a chance of it being featured in the new main trailer! The new automatic adaptation / paint system gives us a lot of new options for new content. If you feel like some options are missing, if you think youve got a good idea that fits in well with the new content - let us know and there is a very decent chance it will get added! Veel plezier :D Reddit // Twitter // YouTube // Website // Discord

We launched the Open Beta a couple of weeks ago and its going well! Many people are testing the new content and sharing their feedback. There were some technical issues and a stream of patches has been released to fix them. But the most interesting stuff is some new features and content! The roofs got some criticism in regards to the front. The diagonal holes were filled up with simple 3D-planks. These dont look like the 1x1x1 block textured planks.
We did some discussing and Zun thought he could replace the 3D planks with the actual texture, to make them match precisely. And he proposed giving the blue roofs the cobblestone texture, so that these can be matched in a different way. He implemented this plan and it looks great!
Rails have received junctions, to make them even more flexible. Paths can cross each other, and players can determine where they go on junctions. By default, players travel in a straight direction, but they can go left by holding A and right by holding D.
Last but not least, weve introduced signs! They can be placed on the ground, or on walls, or be hung from the ceiling. And of course, they can be inscribed with your own custom texts! It really helps to personalize your colony, and were looking forward to seeing what you will build with all these new things.
If you want to join the Open Beta, the relevant instructions are here. Bedankt voor het lezen :) Reddit // Twitter // YouTube // Website // Discord

https://youtu.be/KY6LGJQBI2I The last blog ended with an open problem concerning the bottom of roofs. The response to roofs in general was very enthusiastic, but we also got a fair share of feedback surrounding that specific problem. We think we found a solution: multi-purpose crown moulding. It looks good in combination with roofs, but players are free to build without it, or to use it in other places! 0.9.0 added the horizontal elevator to the game. It deliberately wasnt called rail, because it suffered from a bunch of constraints. It could only travel in a straight line. Moving to the left or to the right, or moving up or down, just wasnt possible. Thats quite problematic. With 0.9.2s auto-adaptation system, Zun saw an opportunity to fix this! So the horizontal elevator has been upgraded to true rail. Rails that can navigate corners, and which can climb and descend hills. Its very convenient - and fun! Were planning to release 0.9.2 in a few weeks. That release will be combined with a price hike. Colony Survival was released with limited content and features in 2017, for $20. In the past six years, the amount of content in the game has exploded. Sadly, inflation exploded too. When 0.9.2 is released, the price will rise to $25. If you were still on the fence in regards to Colony Survival, or if youre planning to invite friends to your colony, this is the right moment to purchase a copy!

Open Beta

Ive been thinking about adding proper roofs since. perhaps before the Steam release. It wasnt possible to add in a practical manner before Zun developed the automatic-adaptation-system. When he started working on it this year, I made the first mockup, just to see what it would look like, roughly.
It was very simple: just one side roof. The screenshot already shows more complicated blocks: side roofs with a front. But on simple houses, you can get quite far with just side roofs! But what if the width of your house is not an even number? Then this happens:
So we needed an extra shape: the middle roof. And of course, the middle roof also needs a variant with a front, one with a back, and one with both the front and the back in one block. Problem solved:
Which is nice when youre building simple square houses. But with this decorative update, we want to encourage people to move away from those efficient but boring shapes. What if your house has a more complicated shape?
You lack certain roof shapes: inside corners. And at the top, the middle roof needs a 3-way corner. Well, we can make these too of course.
But the reverse problem quickly announces itself as well.
The solution: outside corners!
And of course, theres another missing piece: 4-way corners for middle roofs! Here they are:
Are you starting to notice the pattern? Again, the reverse problem exists too. A 4-way corner is basically 4 inside corners. Theres also four outside corners occurring in one middle roof: a pyramid shape. Weve added that one as well!
Thats not all the options. All of these shapes are available in blue too!
The largest concern still left for the roofs is the bottom side. They lack something like roof gutters. Perhaps we can expand the quarter block system to include corner variants and upside-down variants as if they're gutters. Building and implementing all these shapes took quite some work. Making sure the right piece is automatically selected in all circumstances is complicated. When working on the automatic adaptation, Zun found a lot of edge cases. We even found some new ones while working on this blog. But weve been making a lot of progress and the new roof system is 98% functional now! Last week, all these items were cheat-items, they had to be spawned with commands to be tested. This week, Ive been working to integrate them into the real game. Figuring out where to place them in the tech tree, how to unlock them, to what (new?) jobs the recipes ought to belong, what the ingredients should be. Thats nearly finished as well. Weve still got to do some last implementation things, some fixing, some adding. The controller support also needs some more work. But the 0.9.1 release is coming into view! We havent yet had a Summer holiday, and we wont be taking ours before the update is out. And Id love to have some free weeks before the leaves fall off the trees :) Bedankt voor het lezen! Reddit // Twitter // YouTube // Website // Discord

Were participating in the Summer Sale, and that means that Colony Survival is currently 25% off! Weve continued our work on the new decorative items. Most significantly, weve added the framework for the new paint-feature. Instead of cluttering your inventory with many colored variants of all paintable items, the stockpile will only contain the basic variant. Youve got to grab and use colored paint items to paint those items in the color of your choice. Of course, theres also a paint stripper item, for when you want to return to the unpainted variant. This is now working in our unreleased dev-build. Windows and doors can be placed and then painted red, blue or green. It helps a lot to make buildings look more lively and unique!
Apart from that, weve added new lanterns which can be mounted on walls, ceilings and the ground. Roofs have been enhanced by adding a middle roof variant, solving a problem that happened when your roof had an uneven amount of blocks in its width. Zun found a complex technical issue in the Steam networking part of Colony Survival. It was a rather persistent issue but he has managed to significantly improve it! Weve also had a little Summer holiday. I traveled to Berlin, trying to get some insight on how we can build large colonies/cities that are simultaneously beautiful, enjoyable and functional. Ive discovered that I like subways/trains more than I thought! We've returned to work this week and are once again making good progress.
Bedankt voor het lezen :D Reddit // Twitter // YouTube // Website // Discord

In the past month, weve continued work on controller support and more decorative blocks. Weve noticed that large collections of decorative blocks are common in many frequently used mods. We think it would be good to make the unmodded game a bit more like that. One problematic thing in these mods is the abundance of variants. Firstly, things come in multiple colors. Secondly, there are quite some mods that offer combined shapes - like fences that actually link up. Which does require players to have separate items like fence start, fence middle, fence end. If each of these parts has color variants as well, the inventory quickly becomes very cluttered.
To solve this problem, weve got paints and adapting blocks. Firstly, players will be able to make paint items, and theyll have to use these items to physically paint blocks. This helps reduce all these items to one base color variant. Secondly, Zun has made great progress on a system that automatically chooses the right 3D-model for the situation. Take for example the fence. A fence can be unconnected - basically making it a wooden pillar. It can be connected to 1, 2, 3 or 4 other fences horizontally. And if you stack the unconnected fence (the pillar) vertically, it adapts into a special pillar with unique pieces at the start and end. So weve got many different 3D-models for the fence, but only one will be available in the stockpile. That simultaneously helps solve the clutter-problem, and it makes these items a lot more usable!
A special problem was the window. One of the blocks were adding is a window frame, and this one will adapt to different window sizes as well. When designing the required 3D-models, I only thought about regular rectangular windows; 1x2, 2x4, 6x4. But of course, players can build much more complicated window shapes. And in the process of building a large window, or when removing one piece from an existing large window, you also get quite weird, non-rectangular shapes. Figuring out how to deal with these shapes and making them look relatively sensible and natural was a challenge, but Zun has solved it well! I havent been able to break the current system.
The new decorative blocks have no functional impact on gameplay. They are not required, they dont make colonists happier or more productive. On one hand, they are merely tools for more artistic players. On the other hand, I do think theyll influence less artistically inclined players as well. Ive noticed that due to the new options, I look differently at my buildings. Im more tempted to make them a bit unique, and I feel more immersed. We hope itll be a good step towards making CS feel more alive! Bedankt voor het lezen :D Reddit // Twitter // YouTube // Website // Discord

In the past month, Zun has put a lot of effort into adding proper controller support to Colony Survival. For a longer time, it has been possible to access basic gameplay functionality with the Steam Controller or the Steam Deck, but it wasnt up to standard. And playing the game with a regular Xbox/Playstation/Switch controller was pretty much impossible. So weve been working to improve that situation. Rebinding jumping from space to A on your controller, or moving around from WASD to a thumbstick, is not that complicated. What is complicated, is replacing the mouse in the UI. With a mouse, you just move the cursor to whatever place you need it to be and click to select it in one step. With a controller, youve got one button selected, and then you move that selection to another button right next to it. If theres 10 buttons between the selected button and the intended button, youll need to repeat that 10 times.
Connections between buttons in the UI editor Our interface wasnt designed with that in mind. In some places, you have to move through dozens of other buttons to get where you want to be. For example, moving your selection through all of your savegames to get to the play button. Thats not very practical. In some cases, Zun improved this situation by refactoring the layout of the UI into a more controller-friendly design. In other cases, this situation can be improved by adding button shortcuts. Instead of having to press the Play button in the UI, it could be enough to select a savegame and press for example X on the controller.
Well have to make those shortcuts visible in the UI, otherwise people dont know they exist. That means we need support to display all the buttons on most controllers. And the ability to rebind all these buttons in the controls settings menu. By default, Unity doesnt properly support that, but weve found a very useful asset that has helped us integrate all of that. Good controller support is now roughly 70% finished and will be publicly released in the next update.

Better Building

Colony Survival is currently on sale! It's 20% off until 23 March. We also just released the first major update to 0.9: 0.9.1. The major change in 0.9.1 concerns pathfinding and siege mode. In short: siege mode is properly functional again, and pathfinding should be better and faster. On to the long explanation! The Old Situation Before 0.9.0 Paths for colonists and monsters are calculated in a special Navigation World. This world is made up out of Chunks that are 16 blocks wide, 16 blocks deep and 16 blocks tall. Many of these Chunks are underground and hold no space for NPCs to physically stand. When there are places for NPCs to be, these are designated and connected with each other in a special Navigation Mesh. When a monster spawns far outside of a colony and has to find a path to the banner, he has to connect Navigation Meshes in many different Chunks. Sometimes, the path through a Chunk is a straight line through an empty field. Sometimes, the path through a Chunk is a complex maze with gates, barriers, stairs, bridges, tunnels and multiple different levels of height. NPCs only had access to a rough estimate of the time it would take to traverse a Chunk. This lack of information regularly caused them to make silly choices. Before 0.9.0, monsters spawned from 8PM to 1AM. The monster spawning algorithm picked a random location outside of the safe zone and tried to find a path from there to the banner. If it succeeds, a monster is spawned there. If it fails, it does another attempt, and another, and another. After twenty attempts, the algorithm gives up and activates Siege Mode, which lasts until the end of the spawn period, 1AM. In that period, food consumption would increase eightfold, but only in that period, leading to an increase of your daily food consumption by 160%.
"View of the world as seen by NPCs - just showing positions they can stand at. Color is approximated distance away from the banner. The Situation in 0.9.0 In the recent big update, monsters only spawn between 8PM and 9PM. Siege mode lasts equally long, which means your daily food consumption only goes up by 32%. We planned to have a proper Notification Menu, and in preparation for that, we removed the text message that informs you about the activation of Siege Mode. The audio effect could only be heard in the specific outpost/colony where Siege Mode was active. This made it very easy for players to be completely unaware that Siege Mode was even a thing. The effect on food was barely noticeable too. 0.9.1 Improvements Each Navigation Mesh now contains a Signpost pointing in the direction of the banner. This makes it a lot easier for monsters to calculate the right path, which significantly improves performance when youre dealing with large amounts of monsters. Without Signposts, pathfinding would give up when mazes became too long and complicated. With Signposts, 0.9.1 should support mazes that are functionally infinite. The Signposts are recalculated every 20 to 30 seconds. Monsters only spawn in Chunks with Signposts outside the safe zone. If these are not available, there is no path to the banner, no monsters will be spawned and Siege Mode is activated. This can now happen 24/7! Closing your gates in the middle of the day will result in Siege Mode. It will last until Signposts are available outside the safe zone again. As long as Siege Mode is active, 1 meal will be lost from the stockpile per hour for every 5 Threat related to that outpost or colony. The text message for Siege Mode has returned, and the audio signal is now global and can be heard everywhere. Siege Mode should be a lot more obvious now, both the warning and the consequences. NPCs now also know how long it will take to traverse a Chunk, instead of relying on a rough estimate. This should make their pathfinding choices more sensible.
Top-down view of the Sign Posts. The white blocks are a path around a colony wall to the banner. Miscellaneous The horizontal and vertical elevators were very slow. Their speed has been boosted to make them more relevant. The vertical elevator has been upgraded from 18km/h to 54km/h, and the horizontal version increased from 22km/h to 90km/h (that last number is the speed limit of the glider). Colonists spawned with an empty stomach and immediately tried to collect a meal. They now arrive fully satiated. Trade rules could not be removed. Now, thats possible. Clay is available at the builder. 32-bit Windows is causing issues, so support for it has ended from 0.9.1 onwards. Those on 32-bit systems can continue to play 0.9.0 via the beta branches. And some other minor fixes and optimisations, available in the in-game changelog! EDIT 23:18 Amsterdam time: The update has been reverted until further notice. The monsterspawning algorithm spawns monsters in safe zones in a significant amount of worlds. We're trying to find and fix the issue. EDIT 00:04 : Update 0.9.1 is live again! The problem above should be fixed now. Bedankt voor het lezen :D Reddit // Twitter // YouTube // Website // Discord

Two weeks ago, we've asked you to participate in our survey. Over 600 people did so! Thanks a lot for your effort, it's very helpful. We promised to share the results, so here they are! We hope to learn something from this survey that would help us improve the game for both existing and future players. We think we can do that, but of course, there is a selection bias. Survey respondents are mostly people who already own the game and follow these blogs because they like the game. That's not a perfectly representative sample of either existing or future potential players, so these answers do require some interpretation.
Those who participated in the survey started playing the game at moments quite evenly distributed along the CS timeline. It's great to see so many people still with us from the original release date! Many of these people have played the game for over 100 hours, which we are quite impressed by. The options for 0-30 hours are barely used. Nearly three-quarters of the surveyed players have played for over 50 hours.
The "achievement decline" is quite gradual, which is good in my opinion. There is a "gap" between starting outposts and using the glider launcher though. I think it wasn't that pronounced when only the first 30-80 people had answered the survey. Do we need a more accessible form of transport before glider launchers? 1 in 5 players has written a Steam Review. One third will never do so. Nearly half says they will do so in the future. Steam Reviews are much appreciated :)
Important sentences that were cut off: "I have participated in the 0.9.0 Beta" / "Videos on YouTube" / "Streams on Twitch" It's interesting to notice that the most popular thing in this list is watching Colony Survival on YouTube. More than half of you have played CS in co-op with a friend, while less than 1 in 5 have joined a public multiplayer server. Nearly half of the surveyed players have used the Steam Workshop to download a mod, texture or world, which is a lot more popular than I expected! Nearly half of you have joined our Discord, but less than half of that group is verified, which means the majority has never left a message on that Discord server. Another noticeable thing is the fact that less than 1 in 5 have participated in the beta - at a certain moment I was convinced that anybody semi-interested in 0.9.0 had joined it!
According to your judgement, 0.9.0 raised the game from a 7.3 to a 8.6. We're very happy with these numbers :)
Staying in Early Access for another couple of years is clearly the most popular option, but "5" is the third most popular option - indicating quite a lot of "neutrality". The option to leave Early Access a lot sooner is met with that same neutrality - "5" is the most popular option here.
1 = Complete disagreement, 5 = Complete agreement Apparently, one of your main causes for enjoying Early Access is more and better updates. Influencing development is less important. The majority of you doesn't think we necessarily need to stay in Early Access any longer because CS is not yet ready to be a "full release title". But a not insignificant group of 44.2% does advice us to improve the game more before leaving EA, and we'll definitely attempt that.
1 = Complete disagreement, 5 = Complete agreement 87.1% of our players doesn't believe we've been in Early Access for too long. I feel we can interpret these results as a vote of confidence. We don't have to stay in EA much longer, it's fine if we leave it, but it's also fine to stay there for a longer period. Most of you don't view EA as a bad excuse to have low quality elements in games.
1 = Complete disagreement, 5 = Complete agreement You've all got quite positive impressions of Early Access! You're not that worried about savegames breaking, and only 1 in 5 believes the label is unpopular and limits the growth and popularity of Colony Survival. Of course, there's some bias in this answer. People who do have very negative opinions about Early Access, don't purchase and follow Early Access games! Now the question is, how many Steam users agree with you? If 4 out of 5 Steam users do dislike Early Access, that's a lot of players we're missing.
Insert Thanos-perfectly-balanced meme The current price seems to be perfectly "in the middle". Nearly equally sized groups think the price is a bit cheap / a bit expensive. Raising the price to 25 is still seen as perfectly reasonable or even cheap by a majority of surveyed players. 1 in 3 players does believe it's a bit much though. It's a tough dilemma: losing significant amounts of revenue because we're pricing the game too cheap is suboptimal, but losing revenue and potential players because the game is too expensive might be even worse. We're strongly considering a 0.9.1 update which contains some new content and that finally raises the price to /$25.
There is a jetpack mod by Kenovis on the Workshop that allows players to re-activate personal flight without breaking achievements, at a significant in-game resource cost. We really like the idea, but it "just" uses the "flight cheat", it doesn't feel like a true jetpack. We thought the jetpack would be popular because many people miss the personal-flying-without-breaking-achievements feature. It is popular, the majority rates it quite highly, but there's also a lot of voters rating it 1-5. It's the least popular idea in this part of the survey. Boats in general score a lot better, but one specific young British man decided to artificially add 1000 fake votes, to indicate his disagreement with boats. To deter future tampering with surveys, his country has been ejected from the EU.
Blueprint builders are very popular. Portals/dimensions less so, but 10/10 is still the most popular options.
Inbetween those two options in terms of popularity are pipes/cables/conveyor belts. We're thinking about how to implement those!
One of the biggest problems I experienced during my own playthroughs of 0.9.0 was the invisible slow destruction of distant outposts. I expected the outposts-UI option to be more popular than the other options, but the reverse happened. The differences are small though.
1 = Content, 5 = Polish A majority wants us to focus on polish this Winter, and on new content the rest of the year. That makes sense!
1 = Combat, 5 = Building 1 = More complexity, 5 = Quantity You clearly voted to be more interested in better building than better combat! I hadn't expected that and since noticing these results I've been thinking a lot about how to accomplish that. That subject deserves at least a full Friday Blog! More complex and detailed colonists were also less popular than I expected. But that's good - adding more detail there would be hard to do in Colony Survival I!
1 = Tutorials, 5 = Content 1 = 100% focus on singleplayer, 5 = Put some effort in the experience on public servers A large majority would like to see us focus on content instead of tutorials. I do understand this, but we've got to keep in mind that surveyed players already own and play the game. Perhaps potential new players are hesitant because of the lack of proper tutorials, and solving that issue would be very worthwhile? Only a small minority wants us to put some effort in improving the experience on public servers. I think we can conclude this mustn't receive a very high priority on our to-do-list :) So, these were all the answers to all the questions in the survey. Were their any answers that surprised you? Are there things you'd like to add or explain? Let us know in the comments or on Discord! Bedankt voor het lezen :D Reddit // Twitter // YouTube // Website // Discord

Enter the Survey here! Until Monday, were participating in the Steam Base Builder Fest. Get the game now for -25%. This will be the lowest price for a long time! After the sale, well certainly adjust the price in some relatively minor currencies like the Argentine peso. Some nations have suffered major inflation, and we have not adjusted to that since 2017. This causes the price of the game to be totally out of sync with the /$ 20 price tag. Were still planning to raise that /$ price tag as well. Well probably combine that raise with the release of 0.9.1.

Early Access

Updates & Worlds

Happy New Year, or as they say in the north of the Netherlands, veul hail en zeegn! The release of 0.9.0 went very well. A bunch of existing players returned to the new update, and another group decided to purchase the game for the very first time. Its great to see all this activity. Weve received an enormous amount of feedback, screenshots, videos and mods and we try to see and read all of it. Our primary goals of the update seem to have been accomplished. Outposts work. They are used much more frequently than the previous multiple-colonies system. Instead of complaints about how tedious they are, were now receiving complaints that outposts might be overpowered! We believe its good that outposts are slightly overpowered - we want to reward players for expanding, building and travelling. Most players seem to agree that 0.9.0 has more content and is engaging for a significantly longer time than previous versions. We can follow your progress by looking at the achievement statistics, and that progress is steady. There doesnt seem to be one specific unintuitive part of the tech tree that causes a sudden drop-off of players.

Problems

Mods

We just uploaded 0.9.0 to the main Colony Survival branch! It should be available to download and play right now. If it isnt, you might want to verify the integrity of game files. We've released this update a couple of hours before a discount, so if you're here very quickly and you still need to purchase the game, it's in your best interest to wait a moment :) We're planning to give a similar discount somewhere in January. Afterwards, we're probably going to raise the price of the game. This is the largest update weve ever released. It totally overhauls the game. The tech tree has been rebuilt from scratch, and the terrain generation has been drastically enhanced and changed. This means that you will have to start a new savegame. Pre-0.9.0 worlds are incompatible with 0.9.0. This does not mean your pre-0.9.0 worlds are lost though. Right-click Colony Survival in the Steam Library, click properties and go to the betas tab. Here, you will be able to select older versions of the game, suited to the older world youd like to revisit. 0.9.0 contains a gigantic amount of new content. New features, new jobs, new weapons, new monsters, new building blocks and new science. Grenade launchers, steel gliders that are launched into the sky with explosives, glassblowers, threat banners, elevators, tools, traps. Weve adopted new design philosophies which change some of the fundamentals of how the game is played. All old achievements have been removed and replaced with 50 new ones - and these ones shouldnt be unlockable with cheats! Wed like to explain the biggest changes one by one. Before we go into details, I'd like to give one piece of advice to people who are going to jump right into the update: Colony Survival is not an idle game. When certain things feel slow, that's an incentive to expand and recruit more colonists, not an incentive to wait. We've done our best to ensure that all jobs are valuable 'to the end' - we hope you won't ever regret scaling up and setting up a big new production chain.

Outposts

• Second colonies had some unique benefits, but they were only available if you travelled a massive distance to other biomes, like the Tropics and the Far East.
• The only ways to get there were by foot, which was very tedious, or by glider, which required players to launch themselves in some kind of strange and confusing VTOL way
• If players wanted to share items between their colonies, they had to use a complicated and slow trading interface
• The only unique benefits of second colonies were new luxury items, which you didnt really need and didnt give access to special or interesting new content

• The unique biomes now have semi-randomized locations in the main world. You dont need to leave a big spawn-biome to find them - they are much closer and all around you.
• Gliders have been changed a lot to make them more convenient and fun to use.
• Outposts automatically share their stockpile and science with the main colony and other outposts. No more tedious trading interface.
• Outposts are required to gather unique resources that can only be grown or mined in heaths, swamps, on top of mountains and below mammoth trees. These resources are required to get access to a lot of the mid- to late-game features and technology, making outposts an integral part of the game.

Threat

A New World

Traps & the Sacred Failsafe

New Tech Tree

Gliders & Elevators

The Merchant & Colony Points

Crafting Times & Tools

Harvesters & Sources

And much, much more

Last but not least

Thanks to LadyKathleen for this beautiful castle inspired by the Mont-Saint-Michel! Update 0.9.0 will probably be released publicly on December 22! We strive to combine that release with a minor discount. There will probably be another discount in January 2023. After those discounts, were strongly considering a price increase. Weve been hard at working adding a massive endgame to CS. A continuous problem in CS is the importance of the next step. If the endgame is outposts+gliders+the production of books of knowledge, then the actual end is a step before that. There needs to be something after outposts and gliders to actually make it worth producing and using them. Preferably, producing and using them at scale. The first 0.9.0 beta release didnt have that. So players unlocked these things, but didnt really have an incentive to use them. The massive endgame that were currently adding to the beta aims to fix that. There should be plenty of in-game rewards that require setting up and expanding a big network of interconnected colonies and outposts. Recruiting 1000 colonists should no longer be a made up stretch goal for the intrinsically motivated player - the game should actually encourage and reward you all the way there.
Weve tried to accomplish that by adding a bunch of early industrial content to the endgame. Complicated machines like printing presses, metal lathes and tabulating machines take a lot of colonists and unique resources to produce, and they are necessary to unlock the last in-game technologies, like grenade launchers and a steel glider which is launched into the air explosively. More and stronger guards require strong monsters as opponents. It was noticeable during tests (and its obvious when you think about it) that, while the strongest types of monsters are always a small minority, they are the vast majority of monsters who survive deeper into your defences, making them the most likely target of traps. In the first beta, different types of monsters could only be distinguished by the colour of their eyes, which is hard to do and hard to remember. So, weve made unique models for different monster types. These models are much clearer at intuitively signalling different monster strengths.
I could write a lot more about all the new jobs, items, traps and weapons, but - the release is very close! Weve still got a lot to do, and hopefully youll see everything with your own eyes in less than two weeks :) Bedankt voor het lezen! Reddit // Twitter // YouTube // Website // Discord

Join the beta by following the instructions here The beta has been live for two months now. In the first month, we focused on polishing, fixing and streamlining the existing content of the beta. In the past month, weve worked hard to add a bunch of extra content. 0.9.0 is feeling a lot more complete now! The most exciting new content, in my opinion, is gunpowder related. Gunpowder is now made at the alchemist, and requires sulfur, saltpeter and charcoal. Sulfur is mined in heaths and saltpeter can be made in composting bins. The first weapon that can be crafted with gunpowder is an explosive trap. It adds a new feature: area-of-effect damage. Its triggered when a monster walks on top of it, and will hit all monsters who are within 2 blocks of distance. To make the explosion look more convincing, we decided to add force to the ragdolls of dying monsters. Other traps and guards now also apply force when they kill monsters, making the combat look more satisfying. After Zun added support for area-of-effect weapons, he applied this effect to caltrop-traps as well. Further research leads to handcannons. These are primitive, handheld gunpowder weapons that do a lot of damage, but they can only hit monsters at a short range.
Weve added another way to protect yourself from the monsters. Its a failsafe. It has to be slowly charged over many days, and can then be used once to take out a lot of monsters simultaneously. It will also reduce the monster threat for the next night. Its very useful as a way to save your colony when you make a mistake and monsters breach your defences. The failsafe consumes Sacred Points, which are earned by distributing Sacred Meals to your colonists. These meals are made sacred when a colonist adds a candle to them at an altar. There are multiple tiers of meals, and weve reintroduced chickens and cabbages as a way to make advanced meals which earn more Sacred Points. Another new item is the Astrolabe. Historically, its an astronomical instrument with many functions, one of which is determining your location. In Colony Survival, selecting an Astrolabe in your hotbar will display the location of nearby unique biomes: heaths, swamps and mountaintops with special ores. This makes it a lot easier to find and travel between them.
Weve also introduced alarm bells. You can place them on any block, and if a monster steps on top of it, a loud bell starts ringing, indicating the presence of monsters in a location determined by you. They make it a lot easier to notice problems in your defences before they become a big problem - and they give you some time to run to the failsafe and trigger it, if necessary. This new beta content patch also contains a glassblower, which requires silica sand found in the heath, and potash for the composting bin. Glass can be used to make eyeglasses, which can be used by researchers, writers and scribes to speed up their work. It can also be used to craft a monocular. Select it in your hotbar to use it! That summarises the biggest changes, but the patch contains a lot of other tweaks. Science which adds threat to the colony is a lot more noticeable now. The furnace and splitting stump have lost their texture-designs and are now 3D vertex colored meshes. Tin and gold appear deeper in the world. There are new jobs that make Science Chests and advanced job blocks. Weve added a lot of new audio effects to jobs and traps. The compass now requires science and can only be crafted by colonists. Weve done some internal testing for the new content, and just today it was finished enough for the testers to try it. So this Friday Blog is simultaneously an announcement for the beta testers: your beta should receive an automatic update adding all of the content above right now! Wed love to know how unlocking and using the new content and features goes for you, so keep us updated in the #test-channels on Discord. Thanks for all of your effort, help and encouragement! Bedankt voor het lezen :D Reddit // Twitter // YouTube // Website // Discord

Three weeks ago, in the last Friday Blog, we were at 0.9.0.6v2. Were still delivering frequent updates, and we made it all the way to 0.9.0.13! An example of the fixes contained in these updates is pictured below. The testers are finding numerous small problems and rough spots, and were dedicated to polishing 0.9.0 to a high standard. If you want to test 0.9.0 in a less polished state, feel free to join the beta following the instructions here.
Most of these updates contain a bunch of small tweaks and fixes, but no major changes to the content of the game. But last week, we released 0.9.0.10, which contained a lot of new building blocks. 0.9.0 was rebuilt from pretty much zero, and at first we were completely focused on testing new gameplay features. Tools; outposts; traps; the glider-launcher; elevators; currency & the merchant; the new world generation. All of the colonies we built were highly functional and not decorative. The testers rightfully complained that 0.9.0 lacked a varied selection of building materials. So, Ive spent some time developing a bunch of new textures and building blocks. Some are completely new, some are new textures for old blocks. Some of the textures we replaced were quickly made 5+ years ago, and we believe the new textures have a significantly higher quality.

The Principles of the Farming Outpost

Over the past two weeks, weve selected 122 people from the #beta-applications channel on Discord and gave them access to the beta branch of the game. On top of that, we also added the Testers-group which were selected in a similar process for the 0.7.0-test a while ago. Weve received enormous amounts of feedback, from one-sentence descriptions notifying us of tiny errors in item descriptions, to long posts with deep analyses of what works and what doesnt. Thanks a lot to everybody who applies, tests and shares feedback! It is very valuable.
This has already led to six (technically seven) new versions being released, ranging from 0.9.0.0 to 0.9.0.6v2. In the image above is a small sample of the improvements in these builds. I was a bit scared that the beta would lead to quite a lot of negative responses. For example, people not liking certain changes, and people being confused by new mechanics. But in general, the response has been very positive! Most testers seem to like the changes and believe they are improvements. Of course we are very happy with this - but, it has introduced a new problem. 0.7.0 and 0.8.0 both had the endgame including the distant biomes that require loads of travelling and complicated trading rules. Lots of players skipped this content because it wasnt rewarding enough. 0.9.0 solves this problem, but it does mean loads of people now actually finish the game, or at least reach the end of the tech tree. And now these people are clamouring for more content! The current 0.9.0 beta doesnt contain matchlock guns or printing presses, and we would love to reintroduce these items. We already had rough plans on how to do that, but hadnt implemented them yet. Were calibrating our plans based on the beta feedback, and well re-implement that content and other era-appropriate items. We hope this will result in a satisfying endgame for 0.9.0! The beta will become more open once that content is finished. If you cant wait, feel free to apply to the beta via the instructions in the previous blog! If your application is more than three days old and you havent been selected, and you very much want to participate, youre allowed to send in a new application. Please check whether you followed the instructions carefully.

New Terrain Generation

Finally, the day we've been looking forward to for so long has arrived! Were starting the 0.9.0 Beta Program today. The Beta is going to be a process with multiple stages. Were constantly adding new content and tweaks, and we want to continuously add fresh testers to see how the game is functioning for a first-time player at that moment. The current beta version is still work-in-progress, and not everything is properly explained or polished. The first testers need to be experienced enough to handle that. For that first group, were going to be quite selective. Were looking for people who are serious and who are great communicators. As the Beta Program continues and the beta version gets updated and improved, were going to add larger and larger groups of testers. Eventually, every application that meets the minimum requirements will be approved.
Here is how to apply: A.) Join our Discord server B.) Go to the #beta-applications channel in the Welcome category C.) Post a message that answers the questions below. Remember, we care a lot more about honesty and communication skills than high numbers! The goal of the Beta is finding useful criticism, not flattery ;) [olist]

Which skills/experiences/personality traits of yours make you especially suited to be a beta tester for 0.9.0?[/olist] D.) Wait until youre granted the 090 Tester role E.) Once youve received it, youll be able to see #test-instructions in the Perpetual Testing Initiative category. That channel contains all the information you need to download the beta branch and start testing! Thanks a lot, and good luck :D
RIP Queen Elizabeth II Reddit // Twitter // YouTube // Website // Discord

[ 2022-09-09 13:00:07 CET ] [ Original post ]

Work-in-progress terrain rendered with the new system In the past month, Zun has made major progress on the new terrain generation! It uses a fundamentally new design philosophy. In 2017, we released CS with arctic areas in the north and tropical areas in the south. We wanted to give players the opportunity to settle themselves in a different looking area. We did want to give players a large temperate area to find the ideal spot for their colony, so the distance youve got to travel before finding another biome is pretty huge. In 2019, we wanted to make these distant biomes useful for gameplay. We added the multiple colonies feature, and unique resources per biome. We liked the idea, but it was disappointing in practice. Travelling and trading between colonies is very tedious, and the rewards arent worth it. 0.9.0 fixes that core problem by adding outposts, which are like new colonies, except that their stockpile is merged with the main colony. This makes it a lot easier to set them up and to benefit from their unique products.
More from the new terrain generator Instead of demanding that players travel huge distances to distant biomes, were now reworking the world to have more variety in the spawn biome. Instead of having random patches of arctic and tropic intermingling, the spawn biome is now intended to be mostly temperate, interspersed by fens and heaths. These fens and heaths contain unique and valuable resources. Some ores are only available at mountain tops. Its basically the same ideas as 0.7.0, but the barriers are a lot lower, and the rewards arent just some relatively useless endgame items - the rewards are now a core part of the tech tree. Fundamental changes to the world generation are pretty much always breaking old savegames. We can add new jobs, items, monsters and weapons to 0.9.1, but we cant easily overhaul the terrain generation there. So this is something weve got to get right before the update releases. Were not merely making some adjustments to change the terrain a bit, were reworking and optimizing the way the system works to the core. That reworked system is now capable of rendering pretty nice terrains and the results can be seen in this blog! Its very much work in progress though, it should look quite different in a couple of weeks.

Threat-shifters

NPC-models

Beta

Since forever, designing content for Colony Survival has had a major issue. If youre designing a regular first-person shooter, puzzle game or story-driven experience, you can just add more. Another level, a new map, a new puzzle to solve. This is a pretty straightforward way to add content. But in Colony Survival, your colony occupies a static location. And your colonists automatically execute your orders, 24/7. The goal is expansion, and you use expansion to solve your problems.
We cant just add another level. And every difficulty we add will be taken care of automatically once youve added the appropriate jobs. Of course, every new project should exceed previous ones. New food ought to be more nutritious, new luxury items ought to be more valuable, new weapons ought to be more powerful. This results in the following hypothetical graph.
A challenge for a 100 man colony is easy solved by a 200 man colony, whose problems are easily outproduced by a 300 man colony, etcetera. And this means that relatively quickly, players arrive at an unsatisfying point, where all in-game goals are beaten thoroughly. All science has been unlocked, all upgrades have been purchased, all monsters are beaten. At that point, expansion is still possible. You can try to go for 1000 colonists, and there is a decent amount of fun in that goal, but it doesnt have an in-game purpose anymore.
A trapfixer/sapper reloading multiple dropper traps The entire structure of 0.9.0 has been set up to fight that. Crafting has been slowed down, monsters are tied to scientific unlocks and will overwhelm small colonies, youll need lots of colonists to produce items for export, outposts need to be built, etcetera. Previously, weve rearranged the tech tree and added new content to our dev-build so that we could test the new features. That worked well for smaller tests, but we still reached the end relatively quickly. In the past month, weve been expanding the content in our internal dev-build. Weve added new unlocks, new jobs and new items.
A hemp farmer Weve expanded on a new type of job. We had already added the trapfixer, which might be renamed to sapper thanks to Melker500s suggestion. You place a jobspot for this type of job, and the colonist will move to nearby traps to load and reload them with ammo. We decided we could reuse this for other new jobs. So weve added a researcher who requires nearby bookcases, allowing players to build custom libraries. Weve also added a poison farmer who harvests nearby poison plants. These types of jobs allow players much more flexibility in their designs, and are more interesting than standard jobblock-type jobs.
A library and one researcher The new content takes place between the Iron Age and the arrival of gunpowder in Europe, roughly 1AD and 1300AD. This era contains a period commonly called the Dark Ages. How do we fit high productivity, expansion and growth into the Dark Ages? Well, writing and studying texts seems to have been a common and extremely labour-intensive practice in the Dark Ages. Having to build a large scriptorium, allowing many colonists to dedicate themselves to these practices, seems to be a historically realistic feature. We can also fit it neatly into the requirements for in-game scientific unlocks - like the alchemist and the poison guard. Also, scientific notes and books arent one-time items, they can sensibly stay relevant in the rest of the game.
Medieval monks at work, source is medievalfragments.wordpress.com Of course, items like paper for books require their own production chains. Weve added papermaker jobs, and hemp farmers. The hemp gets used in items like ropes as well. Dont worry, were not constraining ourselves by striving to be perfectly historically accurate :) Wherever we need to be unrealistic to improve gameplay, we do so. But we feel that keeping an eye on reality makes things both more fun, easier to play and easier to design. Keeping track of production chains is a lot more intuitive when theyre sensible. Things just fit better when there is an underlying realness to them.
Alchemist at work After spending the past weeks making new recipes, icons and meshes, this week I could finally test the new content in-game. It has been a lot of fun! It's fitting together really well. In a very intuitive manner, I expanded to nearly 400 colonists before I even started mining iron. This makes the game feel completely different. Everything happens on a larger scale now, and you really need to plan your buildings and pathways very well, if you want to keep a clear overview of your production. The content that was added in recent weeks is roughly 70% of the content we'd like to add before the beta is ready for release. The other main feature that needs to be finished before beta release is the enhanced terrain generation. This still needs multiple weeks of work. We're getting very close! Bedankt voor het lezen :D Reddit // Twitter // YouTube // Website // Discord

Its been a while since the last Friday Blog, and a lot longer since the last released update. This has resulted in some questions. It seems its the right moment for a summary of our progress! Wed like to divide that summary into three parts:

• Things that are finished
• Things that still need to be done before we can release the public beta
• Things that need to happen between the release of the beta and the definitive, public release of 0.9.0

I.) Things That Are Finished

II.) To-Do-List before Beta Release

III.) To-Do-List before Public Release

The last blog was quite controversial! We were very happy with the elevators, but they received quite some criticism. Two main points appeared: [olist]

Zun had a brilliant idea this week. We need some kind of transport between colonies and their outposts. Its a lot shorter than the distance between main colonies and the distant biomes in 0.7.0 / 0.8.0, but some alternative to walking would still be nice. And it would be great if it actually involves some building. Weve got the glider, but there are quite some complaints about the controls of it. And it doesnt really make sense that the glider actually has an invisible engine, and can take off vertically and then just accelerate. But we also dont want to spend weeks and weeks working on a complex transport mechanic, postponing the release even further. A demonstration of what using elevators currently looks like: https://youtu.be/N-UaudIhhaM So he suggested elevators. They dont actually move in-game, for now. Nor do colonists use them. But if you build a connected elevator shaft with two entrances, you can teleport between the entrances. This has all kinds of purposes, but Zun simultaneously suggested removing the engine from the glider. In 0.9.0, it should only glide, as its name suggests. That means youve got to build a tower to launch it from, and that tower can be climbed quickly with the new elevator mechanic! Of course, stone age societies dont suddenly build a functioning elevator out of wood and rock. Its unlocked later in the tech tree, and producing a piece of elevator shaft is pretty expensive. It should be a significant goal.
The basics of the feature only took a day to develop. Were planning to add an even more expensive horizontal variant as well. It wont be able to twist and turn, so youll have to build it in a straight line from A to B. So building a horizontal elevator should take quite some effort, especially if you want it to look a bit nice, with bridges and tunnels. But the end result would basically be a local, specific teleporter. We had an idea for 0.7.0, the update from 2019. We wanted to let you expand throughout the world and give purpose to some exploration. We wanted to make travelling relevant. But it didnt turn out exactly as we liked. Lots of 0.7.0 features worked quite well, but the distant colonies were really distant, hard to set up and quite irrelevant to the core of the game. Were now correcting our mistakes. The original vision is still appealing, but it needs to be better. Outposts are a lot easier to set up, due to them sharing both the stockpile and science with the main colony. They will be useful to the main colony without having to be very distant. Travelling between them shouldnt be tedious, and there should be interesting and challenging ways to build infrastructure between them. We think we're close to achieving that, and that should make the system function a lot better than it did in 0.7/0.8. Combined with all the other changes in 0.9.0, were highly excited about the new Colony Survival. We hope to be able to open up the beta to a broad group of testers in the Spring, and were planning for a full release of 0.9.0 in the Summer. We hope we dont have to postpone that release date - that would cost us our holiday ;)
Two weeks ago, we shared the news of the death of our cat Lizzy, the source of the Liz part in Pipliz. We received an enormous amount of supportive reactions. We couldnt respond to all of them personally, but I do read them all. Were deeply touched and grateful for your support. Bedankt voor het lezen! Reddit // Twitter // YouTube // Website // Discord

The new mudbricks-block, and new textures for the old planks-block Two weeks ago, we wrote about Zuns extensive beta-testing. It resulted in a long list of issues, some bigger, some smaller, and weve been working hard to fix these issues.
New logs texture A general issue was the lack of building material. I had focused my own tests mainly on new content and new features: tools, traps, the overhauled tech tree. I built simple colonies with walls of planks and beds in the open air. Zun has a more sophisticated approach, but that made him quite bothered by the lack of available building materials other than endless planks.
A new dirt texture that is actually distinct from logs! I had added mudbricks as a new cheap building material, suitable for the early ages (stone age, copper age, bronze age). While it was available in the tech tree and it could be crafted by colonists, I hadnt bothered to add an actual texture I hadnt actually made new textures for full blocks, with normal maps and height maps etcetera, in years. New jobblocks always use a mesh, and they dont require traditional 1x1x1 textures. I was a bit worried that I would have a hard time getting back into my old workflow, and had postponed the problem.
An experiment that will probably not be in the final release, and the old planks texture When actually trying to make the new mudbricks texture, it quickly turned out things were a lot better than I had feared! Texturing went pretty well, and I noticed that I might actually be able to significantly improve on the older textures. I regularly shared my results in #general on Discord, resulting in interesting discussions that helped to improve the final result. Thanks Boneidle, Bog, PatateNouille, Ardandal and all the others who shared their feedback and suggestions!

Lizzy

2014

Pip and Lizzy together

2019

Some new meshes Zun has been extensively testing the internal 0.9.0 dev build. He too is very happy with the new features and overhauled tech tree! At its core, 0.9.0 is much improved compared to the public 0.8 version. But, before we open up the dev build to a wider audience, were going to need a bunch of refinement. One of the sore spots is the UI. New features often received ugly, bare-bones, rudimentary UIs. Theyre useful for testing, but not intuitive and clear. Some older features, like distributing luxury meals, have been scrapped, but their UI is still lingering around and making things confusing. Were working on fixing that up. Weve continued to convert UI-jobs into item-jobs. What that means, is that instead of using the command tool to place a glowy outline which attracts a worker, youve actually got to produce a physical item which summons a worker to perform its job. Weve had cube-blocks, 1x1x1 cubes which attract a worker to work next to the item, but weve now got jobs where the mesh is actually standing on the same block as the worker. For example, the water gatherer is now summoned by physically placing a special bucket-like item on a block, and the water gatherer will then work on top of that block, standing next to the visible buckets. [Note: we've actually had "colonists working in the same 1x1 area as the mesh" before! The 2015 Greenlight build had it for both miners and guards, and 0.1.0 still had it for archers. That changed later in 2017]
There are a lot of small adjustments we want to make to the tech tree due to Zuns test. Some examples. Zun quickly recruited a lot of colonists without advancing much in the tech tree. He hit the 100-colonist-limit, and needs 250 ColonyCoins (WIP-name) to increase that limit. Problem: the default ColonyCoin limit is 100, and has to be expanded by building and placing lockboxes. They can only be built by the engineer, which required some more tech tree unlocking by Zun, but that was hard to do while unable to recruit new colonists. Zun managed to solve the problem by rearranging existing workers, but relatively new players shouldnt be expected to solve a complex issue like that at the start. Were planning to fix it by adding the lockbox recipe to the blacksmith at his anvil, which is unlocked significantly earlier than the engineer. We might also make the first colonist-limit-upgrade cheaper than the ColonyCoins-limit.
0.9.0 focuses a lot on the Stone > Copper > Bronze > Iron transition, with each material being more efficient, with Bronze being very expensive but also very powerful and durable, while Iron is cheaper, less amazing but more cost-efficient. Bronze initially requires the purchase of tin, which is very costly. I wanted to make bronze continuously important, so its used in expendable items: ammo and tools. But this can become very confusing for players who dont know exactly how all the mechanics and production streams work. They want to craft something important and permanent from bronze, like a jobblock, but all the rare and expensive bronze ingots theyve got immediately get turned into bronze tools or bronze bolts, which are instantly distributed or fired away. It also means that guards which rely on bronze ammo are unreliable: if you don't buy tin, they become useless. Were considering removing expendable bronze items entirely, but are still weighing alternatives. At first, traps were unlocked in the Iron Age. We wanted to introduce this feature earlier, so you can now build dropper traps in the Copper Age. They have to be built above monsters, which is hard to do at scale without building narrow mazes. As a replacement for disposable bronze ammo for guards, Zun suggested bronze traps that shoot to the side. That makes it a lot easier to hit monsters, and doesnt require players to continuously purchase tin: the ammo wouldnt need bronze. Were working on dozens of small and medium-sized issues like this, and well believe theyll make 0.9.0 much more intuitive. When thats done, well start expanding the beta.
An example of a small portion of all the things-to-fix we encountered Before the full, public release, there are some content/feature things wed still to add. The Mission System and an improved Notification System should help a lot to introduce players to 0.9.0 and the game in general, and to better manage their much larger colonies and outposts. Wed also like to expand the Iron Age and add some extra ages to make full use of the outpost system and to have a serious challenge for advanced players. With all main features already introduced and functional, adding more content shouldnt be too hard. Bedankt voor het lezen :D Reddit // Twitter // YouTube // Website // Discord

This week, Ive been test-playing the latest internal dev-build. Zun has just completed his newest feature: outposts! Back in November, we came up with that idea and the reaction from players was overwhelmingly positive. Ive now been able to try it out, and I don't want to exaggerate, but it truly is a lot of fun! This is what 0.7.0 should have been like. Its way more fun to build a path towards a mountaintop and start a local mine there, than to have to fly for multiple kilometres towards a colony that is unconnected in all dimensions. The outposts share their tech tree and their stockpile with the main colony. This makes it a lot less cumbersome to restart. You dont have to start over from scratch, you dont have to use tedious UI to send over some beds and food and ammo, you can just continue with your resources from the main colony.
In all previous versions of Colony Survival, only the area within your green safe zone was useful and productive. You could ignore most of the world as irrelevant. It was merely scenery. But with the outpost-feature, you start to look at the world very differently. That flat stretch of land on the other side of the river could be a great farming outpost. The forest on the other side of your colony could become a source of logs, planks and firewood. Etcetera, etcetera. Were going to enhance the world generation to take advantage of this new feature. What areas, what resources, can we add in the main temperate spawn biome, that will incentivize players to build all kinds of diverse outposts? Were still working that out. Zun and Vobbert have not played the 0.9.0 dev build yet. Were getting very close to the moment where the dev build is sufficiently playable for a genuinely enjoyable long-term playthrough, without using cheats or commands to fix work-in-progress problems. I hope well get there next week or the week after that. That version will still have quite a lot of work-in-progress-UI that is not ready for release. We're trying to streamline gameplay first, and when that's all working as intended we can design the final UI. Then Zun and Vobbert will playtest it, fully aware of all the things that are still unfinished, and theyll probably find some serious problems that need to be fixed ASAP. When thats done, we hope to open up the beta to the first batch of testers. There are still multiple features and changes that we want to implement before 0.9.0 can become the main public branch of CS, and development on that will happen simultaneously to the first beta tests. But its always good to get feedback from beta testers relatively early!
Bedankt voor het lezen :D Reddit // Twitter // YouTube // Website // Discord

Its the last day and the last blog of 2021! We want to start out by thanking all of you for your support and your patience. Weve released zero public updates to Colony Survival this year, and despite that, theres still plenty of activity in the comments, on the Discord and in the surveys. Thats very motivating! Thanks to everyone who purchased Colony Survival: were very grateful that we can be dedicated to its development full-time. And thanks to the modders, the server hosts, the translators and all others who are helping us improve CS! Despite the lack of updates to CS in 2021, a lot has changed behind the scenes. Our current dev build has new core mechanics, major changes to the gameplay, and lots of new jobs and items. It has been a productive year. We wouldve loved to release a steady stream of small updates instead of one mega-big-update, but sadly, we cannot. If 0.8.0 is a decent, finished, regular car, the current 0.9.0 dev build is a streamlined sports car with a race engine, three tires, no brakes, no radio and no air-conditioning. We believe the end result will exceed 0.8.0 in all dimensions, the current work-in-progress has some impressive new features, but its also such a massive overhaul that its currently just significantly less complete than 0.8.0. We couldnt have planned it otherwise. Everything is so interrelated: the jobs & and the tech tree, the jobs & the world generation, the tech tree & monsters & traps, all the new changes & the interface When you change one thing, all the related things have to be adapted as well. We dont treat Colony Survival as a sandbox game with wildly disconnected features: it ought to be one coherent experience where you follow the tech tree from the Stone Age to the Industrial Revolution.

Animal Husbandry

The Covid Situation

2022

While testing my colony in the 0.9.0 dev build, I noticed that I had a hard time producing bronze and iron. To construct the kilns and bloomeries needed to expand iron production, some bronze is needed. Instead of the bronze ending up in the new jobblocks, it was quickly converted into bronze tools, which were soon taken by colonists. I did want some bronze tools in my inventory, for science unlocks and as ingredients in certain crafting recipes, so I did not want to reduce my bronze tool production to 0. I wanted to tell my colonists not to use the bronze tools as tools. But I couldnt. Zun and I had discussed this issue earlier, and we couldnt come to a satisfying conclusion. I was imagining an interface where you could adjust the tool-priorities of your workers, and where you could change these preferences per job category. For example, gunsmiths should take the best tool available, while berry farmers should only take bronze/iron tools if copper/stone tools are not available. We had a hard time converting this idea into a proper UI that is actually intuitive to use. After renewed efforts we settled on a different idea. A simple interface that determines a global limit for all colonists. The limit determines the amount of tools, per type of tool, that colonists will leave untouched in your stockpile (except when they need them as ingredients in a crafting recipe). By default this is something like 3, while the default production limit is higher, resulting in a continuous flow of tool production and tool use. But if you want to save your bronze/iron/steel, you can adjust these limits and force colonists to use other tools. Where to put this menu? We couldve put it into the colony menu, among a lot of other interfaces. But we found a solution: a tool distribution table. An actual in-game item that has to be placed in the world, and where colonists physically go to collect new tools. Walk up to it and click on it to activate its menu, and thats where you can adjust the tool limits. We think this is more immersive and fun than one big colony menu with dozens of different functions hidden behind all kinds of buttons and links. Before this new item, colonists automatically received new tools. This made the entire process very opaque. When they go to the tool distribution table, youll actually see an icon of the tool theyre grabbing. This makes it a lot easier to see whats happening. Were planning to do the same with the grocery store, the table where colonists collect their meals. 0.8.0 just shows a generic icon, were planning to display the actual meal thats being grabbed there.
We decided to do the same with the statistics menu. We added a new in-game item, the Statistics Board, which can be placed in the world and can be clicked on to access the statistics UI. Its still accessible in the traditional way, but were considering removing that entirely. Decluttering the UI will probably help to make the game more accessible to newcomers. Wed love to have your opinion. Is it good to connect UI elements to physical in-game items wherever that makes sense, allowing you to build some kind of in-game HQ, or should the entire interface be collected and accessible in one abstract UI-space? We made another change to make things more real and less UI-based. Colony Survival 0.1.0 released with quiver-items that needed to be placed in the world to recruit archers. With the addition of new guard types in 0.4.0, that was changed to abstract colored squares. Weve got plans to add new guard types, but didnt want a massive spreadsheet-menu, so weve converted that back to the old actual-item-gameplay. Heres the metal rack that crossbow guards use to store their bolts:
Weve heard some players ask for a more living world, instead of a mechanical colony of robot-slaves. It doesnt seem viable for us to develop super realistic human-like models with complex, unique animations for all their actions, nor are we able to add deep conversations with colonists, but we hope that a lot of relatively small changes like the ones above help to make the game feel more immersive.

The Future of the World

The jobblock maker in the internal 0.9.0 dev branch. We're considering to allow an increased heigth for jobblocks. Progress in the past week has been fairly steady and predictable. The refactoring of NPC movement has been completed, and caltrop traps actually slow down enemies now. The final items without icons or meshes have received the attention they needed. Instead of boring you with all the technical details, wed like to bore you with philosophical details! Well start with a story about Formula 1. Zun, Vobbert and I watch most races, certainly now that a Dutchman is leading the championship. When I was young, in the Schumacher-era, I thought Formula 1 was a competition between the fastest cars we could build.
Michael Schumacher at the 2004 United States Grand Prix, all F1 images from Wikipedia When I grew older, I learned F1 has an enormous rulebook. There are all kinds of technical specifications the carmakers have to follow. The car must fit very specific dimensions, it has to be a certain weight, it has to use a specific kind of engine, they cant exceed a certain fuel use, the aerodynamics are limited, assists like traction control are outlawed. This means Formula 1 cars arent the fastest cars in the world. Theyre not optimized for speed, nor are they optimized for beating the competition. Theyre limited by all kinds of constraints, and could quite easily be much faster without them. When I learned about that, I was quite disappointed. Formula 1 is exciting because the cars are so extremely fast and the technology is so advanced! Why would you limit that? Architects, musicians and writers dont deliberately reduce the quality of their output by 30% because of arbitrary rules. Why does F1?!
A Mercedez-Benz W196, participated in the 1954 and 1955 F1 seasons Nowadays, the F1 rulebook might actually be one of the things I appreciate the most about the sport. I wish the real world was regulated that well! It turns out that although a competition about designing and driving the fastest possible cars does result in exciting competitions to watch to a degree, the correlation is far from 100%. Back in the 1950s, the rulebook might have been quite thin, resulting in a competition that largely did concern the fastest cars they could build. But as technology advanced, speed and cost went up. This has all kinds of detrimental effects if you want a competition that is actually fun to watch. You dont want crashes to regularly severely harm or kill drivers. You want to watch humans drive, not all kinds of onboard electronics. You dont want one super-wealthy team to make a car that extremely outperforms all others which just wins championship after championship without competition.
A BRM P133 in 1968 The difference between #1 and #2 in a F1 race is regularly only a fraction of a second. Being able to lose 100 grams of weight can thus make or break your race, because the lower weight will give you increased speed. Without strict rules, this would mean starved drivers and no safety features. The teams are continuously trying to find loopholes in the rules. If they can find a semi-legal way to improve their lap times even a tiny bit, theyll do so. If you follow F1 for a while, youll be confronted with all kinds of discussions about flexible wings, novel steering methods and other weird rule-bending technology. At a certain moment McLaren introduced the F-Duct system, where the driver had to close off holes in the body of the car to change the aerodynamics - an unexpected way to circumvent the ban on movable aerodynamic devices. To summarize:

• The Formula 1 organization wants to organize safe, exciting and relatively affordable races
• The teams and drivers are focused on winning those races, and theyre constantly in a very intense competition with others who try to achieve the same thing
• These goals are quite at odds with each other and this results in a continuous cat-and-mouse game between the organization and the teams, which throughout the decades has produced a rather massive rulebook. This is quite inevitable.

All mentioned changes concern the internal, unreleased dev build Last Friday Blog mentioned the idea of outposts. This resulted in massive support: lots of you shared their enthusiasm! That was great to see, and it strengthens our dedication to this plan. Since then, progress has been good. In the image above, a trap can be seen. Traps were very much work-in-progress two weeks ago, and theyre a lot more finished in our current internal dev build. They are properly reloaded by special colonists, and there are now also variants of traps that can drop items on monsters that pass below them. Theyve also received their own, new 3D model. Were still planning to update it though. Zun is now working on a new effect: slowdown. Were planning to add traps that can drop caltrops, which would slow down monsters. This requires new info to be saved for each monster though. Were also planning to have other things that can affect monsters for a longer time, like poison. Properly saving these statuses for each and every monster and sending them to each connected player in multiplayer requires a minor technical overhaul, which is happening right now.
A trap from below The last two weeks also saw the addition of many new icons for 0.9.0-items, and 3D-models for new jobs. Weve also redone certain old icons that didnt fit the new style and standards. Here are two screenshots of some of the new content:

Another project was updating the spreadsheet calculator. Since 0.7.0, weve got an internal system that can print a spreadsheet with all kinds of data, especially data regarding the total labor cost of items. How many seconds of work are required to make an anvil and all of its ingredients? 0.9.0 adds some major new changes to this process. Some items cant simply be crafted by a colonist, and have to be purchased from the trader with currency. And the crafting time isnt static: it decreases when you use better tools. This makes calculating the total cost of a product significantly more complex. With the new spreadsheet calculator, we now have access to a lot of new data. Were going to use it to rebalance the costs of in-game items. Until now, it has been the result of guesswork. That has resulted in some weird things. The Golden Shield costs a lot of time to craft, but it can be sold for 250 coins. But the calculator concluded that the ingredients of the Golden Shield cost 230 coins already! All the work crafting the shield and its ingredients are better spent crafting linen, which can be sold for more coins with less work. Weird things like that will be fixed.
One of the results of the calculator. Spot the problems! Bedankt voor het lezen :D Reddit // Twitter // YouTube // Website // Discord

As promised last week, the dev build now has a functional Iron Age! Playtesting it has legitimately been a lot of fun. Currently, the Iron Age is also the first time players are able to unlock and use traps. Were seriously considering introducing this new feature earlier in the game. The Iron Age is now the most advanced age in 0.9.0. Its the hardest to unlock, and producing enough iron to unlock traps and to craft a bunch of them is relatively difficult. I was surprised by the amount of miners and smelters I had to unlock. At first, I wanted to fix that, to reduce the costs of the crafting recipes. But then I realized that this is exactly what we want to encourage. We want players to build big colonies and to recruit a large number of colonists, and these accomplishments should be meaningful.

Outposts

Image from Wikipedia In our last blog, we suggested traps as the solution to a myriad of problems. The general response was enthusiastic, so weve been working on implementing it. Zun worked on the technical side of things, and things went very well there. I had to work on integrating the new jobs and recipes properly in the 0.9.0 tech tree. And I struggled quite a bit with that. It felt like the keystone that completes an arch. We stacked up features on the left, we stacked up features on the right, and traps were the last feature needed to complete the system. And that last step is the most difficult one, because it has to make sure everything is properly balanced. An issue comparable to this one, 140 blogs ago. It took a while, but weve figured it out and things are moving forward again! In the meanwhile, Zun tested prototype-traps. Heres an image of such a trap defeating monsters!
Loaded traps are temporarily using the stove mesh, empty traps use the writer's desk mesh We ran into a new technical problem that had some interesting visualizations. Blocks like crates and jobblocks have access points. These are places right next to the crate where colonists can stand to use these blocks. In 0.8.0, thats only right next to the block.
...crates like here are visualized as
....green = crate, red = access point This is problematic for certain new traps. Some traps can only be aimed upwards, others can only be aimed downwards. It makes sense to reload these traps when standing on top of them, or below them. It also makes sense to integrate traps in walls at the height of the torso instead of on the floor - these should also be able to be reloaded by colonists standing next to them. So Zun improved the access points system to be able to deal with these new situations.
So weve now got an internal dev build with functional prototype traps, and a detailed path on how to integrate them in the tech tree. We expect to have pretty functional 0.9.0 gameplay, from the Stone Age to the Iron Age, by this time next week! Bedankt voor het lezen :D Reddit // Twitter // YouTube // Website // Discord

Weve been having a lot of debates about how to implement monster&guards in 0.9.0. We wanted more options, more variety and more challenge. We made some significant steps, for example by connecting the size of the monster threat to the tech tree as well, instead of solely to the amount of colonists. But now we had to turn our general ideas into specific guards/monsters/weapons/ammo, and that turned out to be pretty hard to do right. We kept running into some problems:

• How do guards select which monsters they attack / prioritize? Do players have control over this?
• How do we prevent the gameplay from becoming repetitive unlock stronger guard-cycles?
• How do we give players a fail-safe system that saves the colony if guards cant handle a new, stronger wave?
• How to differentiate heavy damage early game weapons from middle game medium damage weapons?
• If we provide more guard-options, how do we prevent the guard-menu from becoming too cluttered?

After last week's blog, we received some PMs with some feedback. It was becoming quite confusing to follow what plans we're actually working on and what exactly is going to be in 0.9.0 and what not. Those same PMs were also curious about our plans after 0.9.0. If theres broader interest, well discuss that in next weeks blog. But in this blog: our plans for 0.9.0! Disclaimer: to a degree, the development of CS remains a flexible process. While testplaying, unexpected issues pop up, and wed rather fix that than release a problematic version earlier.

Implemented: Tools

Implemented: Monsters linked to Science

Implemented: Better Crafting Times

Implemented: UI Science

Implemented: Real Currency and Real Traders

Implemented: Stone Age to Bronze Age Content

Not Yet Implemented: Iron Age to Gunpowder/Machine Age Content

Not Yet Implemented: Models and Icons for all Content

Not Yet Implemented: New Guards and Monsters

Not Yet Implemented: UI Overhaul

Not Yet Implemented: Colony Recover Mode

Not Yet Implemented: New Terrain Generation, and other Fundamental Changes that Require New Worlds

The overhaul of the tech tree is going well. The internal dev build is continuously getting new jobs and content. The past weeks saw the addition of new things like leather, animal carcasses, parchment scrolls, cooked meat and bronze tools. Testing these things is a lot of fun! It generally works as intended and requires only minor amounts of refinement. But this week, we did discover that the early game does require a significant amount of reworking. We scaled down the monster threat at the beginning, and slowed down quite a lot of jobs. This works really well when youve reached 30+ colonists, but the start can be pretty annoying. This has multiple causes:

• Science progress relies on things like wheat and flax - requiring you to wait on your newly unlocked jobs for 48 or 24 hours
• Expansion of your colony requires items like beds, stone tools and crates, which all take longer to craft than they did in 0.8.0
• Your crafters still use stone tools, which seriously slows down your crafting
• Youre not attacked by any, or by barely any, monsters, making the nights pretty pointless
• Theres a serious lack of building materials, so you cant start working on walls, towers and buildings

This week, weve added more items, jobs and science to our internal dev build. Apart from that, weve also added the fundamentals of a pretty radical overhaul to gameplay: in 0.9.0, the monster threat will be mostly connected to your scientific/technological progress! In all previous versions, the monster threat was solely connected to the amount of colonists you had recruited. Of course, this is a strong incentive to minimize the amount of colonists. In 0.9.0, we deliberately want to encourage rapid and sustained colony growth. To achieve this, increases in monster threat level will be mostly connected to scientific unlocks. There will be a number of key milestones like ushering in the bronze age or the iron age. In the science menu, these milestones display how much monster threat they add. In the top-right corner of the UI, the currently accumulated monster threat level is shown. Weve been testing this system this week, and are happy with the results! It encourages a different style of gameplay. Instead of doing small improvements to your defenses every couple of nights, youre now really preparing for a big event. Another benefit is that it allows us to determine the pace better. In previous versions, inefficient players were punished pretty harshly. They needed more colonists, which attracted more monsters, which required more defenses and guards and ammo. Vice versa, very efficient players could reach the endgame with a pretty small number of colonists. In 0.9.0, we can easily finetune the threat. If we want to add an end game milestone that attracts extreme numbers of monsters, requiring extensive defensive preparations, we can do so. Things like that werent possible before, and were looking forward to using these new abilities to their fullest amount.

The Previous Blog

In the past weeks, we've built the first prototype with actual 0.9.0 content. In the past, we did alter some systems, but we kept 0.8.0 content. The new prototype has lost pretty much all 0.8.0 jobs, items and science. We're starting from the ground up! The tech tree is getting completely reworked, and so are the jobs and items. Of course, a decent chunk of 0.8.0 items are coming back, but often in different places, with different recipes. For four years, we've been building on the foundation of 0.1.0. Now, we're completely restructuring the game while taking into account all the lessons we've learned since the first release. We've listened to your comments, we've played and tested and experimented, we've thought and debated, and now we're implementing those new ideas. Playing the prototype has been a genuinely exciting experience. In our opinion, things work a lot better than they did. The most noticeable change at the moment is the longer crafting time. Combined with the new tech tree, it really changes the way the game feels. In the past, crafting an item often took only a handful of seconds. Beds, weapons, new jobblocks: most were done in 3-7 seconds. Fifteen seconds at the maximum. Crafting times were the same for all items at one job. Core items like planks could be made instantly by the player. This was a fundamental restraint, and we tried to work around it by requiring a bunch of random ingredients for many items. Beeswax, olive oil, copper nails, iron rivets. A lot of time was spent figuring out which random item was missing and setting up the production chain required for it. This has been dramatically streamlined. Recipes are clearer and more straightforward, but require significantly more crafting time. Instead of random items being the bottleneck, youre now facing labor constraints way more often. You want more crafters, more miners, etcetera. Players themselves can craft barely any items. Youve got to expand your colony faster now, and weve made that a bit more fast-paced to counter the more punishing crafting times.
Of course, theres an alternative to boost your production! Tools have also been implemented. You start out without tools, and gradually work your way up, from stone tools through copper tools to bronze tools. Each comes with a significant boost in production speed, but unlocking them is gradually more challenging. Weve discussed plans for more public betas as well. Were hoping to be able to open up 0.9.0 to those whove tested previous updates in roughly one to three months. New testers will be able to sign up one to two months later! Bedankt voor het lezen :D Reddit // Twitter // YouTube // Website // Discord

Cloudville / Wolkenhausen by JoeMan This month, we've been working on implementing the plans described in the previous Friday Blogs. We've now got an internal dev-build with a system for consumable tools, used by jobs. Colony Survival 0.9.0 is going to be bigger and deeper than ever before. It will change how you were used to playing the game. There will be new systems that will hopefully be interesting and engaging for many dozens of hours of playtime. But how are we going to introduce all these changes and new mechanics, in a way that is both clear and exciting, for new players and long time fans alike? We tried to accomplish this by refactoring the tech tree and by changing which items are fundamental and how they are produced. But while trying to do that, we noticed that we couldnt accomplish it in a way that felt successful. With successful meaning that it will smoothly lead players towards the midgame and further. Weve often seen examples of players getting stuck in the early game, and we want to prevent that as much as possible. Without dumbing the game down, of course :) So weve made a decision. 0.9.0 will include The Mission System. That means there will be a set of Missions that encourage you to, and reward you for, accomplishing certain goals. These goals will vary from setting up a self-sustaining colony, advancing to the bronze/iron age, reaching a 1000 colonists and other important stepping stones / milestones. Experienced players can ignore the Missions if they want to. They shouldnt interfere with your plans, you wont be forced to repeat the same boring, artificial procedures every time. But theyll give new players some direction, and instructions on how to accomplish the most important steps. We really believe this will make the game a lot more accessible and fun.
While discussing the details of the Mission System, we ran into a new problem. Should Missions auto-complete when requirements are met? Or should players have to press Complete themselves, like Science currently requires? Whatever we choose, its important to notify players when requirements are met. Currently, weve got a system that feeds one-line warning messages to the chatbox, but thats not very sophisticated. For loads of purposes, it would be useful to have a better Message System. Better, more detailed messages that are more easily seen and retrieved. Messages about Missions and Sciences that are ready to complete. Messages about harmed and killed colonists, messages about food and ammo running out, perhaps even Daily Reports. With bigger and more complex colonies, getting proper feedback of its functioning is crucial. So, weve decided to implement a seriously improved Message System into 0.9.0 as well. Zun has been making good progress there! Lots of it doesnt have a nice UI yet, but well show more in future Friday Blogs. Bedankt voor het lezen :D Reddit // Twitter // YouTube // Website // Discord

Mask of Agamemnon, Greece, 1600BC. All images in this blog are sourced from Wikipedia. It is Blog 200 :D Since the previous blog at the start of June, we've passed June 16th, marking the "4th birthday" of Colony Survival's release on Steam. Coincidentally, weve also achieved a high amount of consensus on the details of 0.9.0 and are ready to work them out into an actual overhaul, into new crafting recipes, new jobs, new items, new guards, new monsters and a new tech tree. Lets start by returning to a core problem of ours: how do we create satisfying gameplay for Colony Survival? We all want to build a colony that does something, that improves, that overcomes obstacles, that solves a problem. At its core, our mechanics support that very well. Start with 10 colonists with primitive items, jobs and tools, expand to 100 colonists with advanced items, jobs and tools, and your colony is much more capable of doing whatever it does. That cycle can repeat again to 250 colonists, and 500 colonists, etcetera. But what challenge stays interesting that entire time? A problem that is solved by going from 10 to 100 colonists does not motivate you to expand to 250 colonists. We tried to solve that by creating persistent challenges. The amount of monsters attracted by your colony grows as you expand your colony. The requirements to keep your colonists happy got higher and higher as you recruited more colonists But instead of motivating people to keep growing, these challenges actually punished people for growing, and they heavily incentivized efficiency and min-maxing. Thats why 0.8.0 replaced Happiness with Colony Points. Instead of pushing people to keep up with the daily demands of solving persistent challenges, wed like to reward people for building something, for growing their colony and becoming more and more capable and effective. For the last months, weve been pondering and debating how we can realistically implement this shift in philosophy into the game in a practical manner, in a way that makes the game more fun for beginners and more engaging for long-term players, in a way that refreshes the game for people who have gotten tired of it, without alienating those who have gotten used to the way the game works. Satisfying all these demands is hard, but we think we have found a solution. We will extend the timeline of the game, deep into human prehistory. Well start in the Stone Age, and gradually evolve towards the Industrial Revolution. During the last month, weve investigated this historical development, looking for crucial technologies and interesting jobs and items. The luxury items for the Happiness feature were mostly meant to be daily items like food and candles. They were crafted quickly, but relied on a combination of many different items. The new luxury items'' will mostly be meant for export. They dont have to be consumed daily, and with the support for extended crafting times per recipe in 0.9.0, their production can take longer. They will rely significantly less on a complex mix of ingredients. Weve searched through history for interesting luxury items according to these new guidelines, and we were surprised to find many interesting artifacts that demonstrated the existence of complex technologies and high artistic ability deep into prehistoric times.
Trundholm sun chariot, Denmark, 1400BC So, the products themselves should be more satisfying to craft. The reason to craft them too: instead of having to satisfy the happiness demands of your colonists, youre earning Colony Currency, which can be used in many different ways between which you, the player, can choose. And the tech tree itself will be significantly longer, and require a significantly more developed colony to complete. Weve also talked about the monster threat. Were committed to adding more types of weapons and monsters. Wed like to see stronger monsters, monsters that can fight back with ranged attacks, monsters that, on death, explode into poison clouds that make monsters stronger while they harms colonists. And wed like to see guards that can do area-of-effect damage, guards with highly powerful but short range equipment, sniper guards, guards with projectiles that do damage over time. But we have decided on a change that is perhaps more impactful. Were now pretty much certain that we want to mostly decouple the amount of monsters that assaults your colony from the amount of colonists in that colony, and recouple it to your progress in the tech tree. That should be another strong incentive in favor of rapidly growing your colony, instead of an incentive that hinders growth and favors carefully min-maxing your way forward. Of course, careful gameplay should stay important and success there ought to be rewarded! There will be new vital choices that players will have to make, and where carefulness is fundamental.
Strettweg Cult Wagon, Austria, 600BC Weve received some disappointed replies asking about our plans for realistic logistics. Were sad to say theyve been postponed/cancelled. We were very serious about them at the start of 2021, but when working out these plans we ran into trouble. It required lots of new features and adjustments, which would cost a lot of development time, and the benefits started to pale, compared to the costs. We believe the new plans are easier to implement, but with improvements to the gameplay through the entire game, instead of only during the endgame. We hope to start implementing new items and jobs in the next couple of weeks, and hope well be able to show progress there in the next blog! Bedankt voor het lezen :D Reddit // Twitter // YouTube // Website // Discord

A test-world for Zun's refactorings A month ago, in the most recent Friday Blog, we wrote about new, rough plans for 0.9.0. Since then, weve been trying to turn these outlines into specific new crafting recipes and tech trees. While doing that, we ran into multiple problems - and we think weve solved them.

Tool Usage Percentage - TUP

How to achieve progress?

Built by JoeMan In December, we released 0.8.0, which tried to improve some fundamental systems and fix some flaws. In January and February, we were making huge plans for 0.9.0. We wanted to take our time, add a lot of new content, and introduce awesome new features. We were considering to implement realistic logistics. This would be a huge change and impact a lot of other systems. We were trying to think through the entire plan. For example: with realistic logistics between colonies, its important to spread out resources. It doesnt make sense for all ores to be present at every location. So resources like iron ore should only appear in certain specific places. But that means players need multiple colonies when they get into the Iron Age! Thats a lot earlier than currently is the case. So well need to add a lot of pre-Iron Age gameplay to balance things out. We also added things like support for longer crafting times, which requires a full overhaul of all the crafting recipes. Zun optimized the savegames, which also leads to the requirement for new worlds in 0.9.0 (Disclaimer: Old worlds will always be accessible in old branches / 0.9.0 is a long way out / a converter might appear!). The need for savegame continuity is pretty restricting, and without that need, we have a lot of extra possibilities. We want to use as many as possible of them, to make sure future updates dont require another continuity-break. At the end of March, I started moving. It was quite a lot of work, and due to some unforeseen problems I spent nearly two weeks without proper access to the internet. But things are working now :D Things are still a bit Early Access but I dont mind that too much. Ive had a lot of time to think, and things seemed a bit overwhelming. Update 0.9.0 had become a gigantic overhaul with loads of uncertain but interdependent features, and a three year workload. The plans certainly sounded awesome, but doing it all in one gigantic step started to seem impractical. So we had a long discussion and decided to change our plans for 0.9.0. Its still not 100% certain, there are plenty of details to work out, and were open to your input! But here are our rough plans. Update 0.4.0 added a nice progression system. From inventing bronze to smelting iron to producing steel, slings > bows > crossbows > muskets, from slow weak monsters to fast strong monsters. It works very well, and its still the core of the game. 0.5.0 and 0.6.0 added branches to this framework, and 0.7.0 added multiple colonies to the end of this system. But the spine of the game is still the bronze/iron/steel thing (with the related monsters and weapons), added after a couple of months of development in 2017.
Were considering to refactor that spine. To improve it and to extend it. To make it work with all the other features weve added since 2017, and the features were planning to add in 0.9.0 (and keeping in mind the features were hoping to add afterwards!). We want to increase the timespan. Wed love to start in the Stone Age and have players invent and use copper tools as a serious improvement above stone tools. Tin should become a rare resource, and to start the Bronze Age, players would have to export luxury goods and import tin. To decrease their dependence on expensive imports, players should have the ability to start using iron. Weve done quite a bit of extra research into iron, and apparently, producing it is hard. Iron loves to bind with oxygen, so youve got to remove it from your iron ore and prevent the oxygen from returning again too soon (which is known as rust). To do so, youve got to mix it with carbon while heated, but heating the ore up increases irons susceptibility to binding with oxygen. Leave too much carbon in your iron and itll become brittle; leave too little carbon in your iron and itll become soft. Correctly executing this process requires a lot of knowledge, the right tools, and a lot of good fuel. Wed love to implement this into the game more realistically. Were considering having multiple levels of iron and multiple methods of smelting iron. There could be simple but lengthy processes that result in weak, brittle tools and weapons, and more complicated methods that result in better tools and weapons. The final step could be steel - which requires very high temperatures or huge amounts of labor to achieve. Add some chromium to get stainless steel. The mass production of steel only became possible at the start of the Industrial Revolution. Of course, each of these steps should have a purpose and not just be a messy crafting chain required to get to the endgame as soon as possible. Were considering to add Tools as a crucial component of the game. Instead of just foresters and miners requiring a one-time specific tool, most jobs should use them. Instead of each job having their own specific requirement, the Tools would be more general. But Tools will have a trait Durability, and when its depleted, the tool breaks and the worker will require new tools. The tools should also impact productivity. That way, each tool can have their own unique set of benefits and drawbacks. Copper Tools could be cheap but with low durability. Bronze Tools could have high durability, a large boost to productivity, but cost a lot to produce. Primitive Iron Tools could have the same boost to productivity at a lower cost, but also with lower durability. Now, we dont just want to make the game more convoluted, with more steps and more requirements. The new crafting chain and the new tech tree should also lead to more possibilities! An underdeveloped aspect of the game, which players have often requested to be expanded, is the combat-side of the game. Wed love to add more monsters and more guards, with new abilities. How about ranged monsters? Guards with area-of-effect damage, and others with the ability to poison or slow down enemies? How about monsters that strengthen nearby monsters, and monsters that get harder to defeat the longer they live? That would make mazes less overpowered and allow for a more diverse array of strategies to be useful. We're also considering options to make some monsters more intelligent. They're harder to implement properly, but monsters that fill moats or scale walls would be very interesting. Just as in 0.4.0, these things should be connected. Unlocking new materials requires expansion of the colony, new materials lead to new weapons, expansion of the colony leads to more and stronger monsters.
Compared to realistic logistics, these plans are a lot more achievable in less time, while were still very enthusiastic about the outcome. We think it would be a huge improvement above the current situation. Let us know your opinion and itll help us make a final decision! The plans for realistic logistics arent completely scrapped. We do keep them in mind while working on 0.9.0 and make our choices appropriately. Were pretty certain we want to make ores like tin scarce, requiring multiple colonies if you want to play without importing and exporting from (offscreen) NPC colonies. But logistics between multiple colonies were always intended as some kind of endgame, and wed like to put a lot of effort into the early and midgame first. TL;DR: I moved successfully, plans for 0.9.0 got extremely huge, considering a new plan for a refactored, improved and lengthened early-to-mid-game with more realistic metals and tools, and new weapons and monsters. Let us know what you think! Bedankt voor het lezen! Reddit // Twitter // YouTube // Website // Discord

For nearly two hundred weeks now, there has been a Friday Blog every week. We've enjoyed some short holidays, but always prepared a Friday Blog to post at the appropriate date. Sadly, we don't expect to reach the milestone of two hundred continuous, weekly Friday Blogs :( But for a pretty fun reason! I'm moving to a new place next week. It requires quite a lot of preparation before the move, and I'll have to spend some time doing odd jobs at the new place and setting up a new home office. The Netherlands is still a high-COVID-area with a rather stringent lockdown, and that doesnt make things any easier. Itll take some weeks before Im fully set up again. Apart from that, theres also been a significant shift in the update cycle. Since the release of 0.7.0 in 2019, weve strived to release an update every couple of months. These updates added Steam Workshop support, UI overhauls, the statistics menu, an inbuilt savegame converter, the ability to trash items, the compass, improved pathfinding, and many other features. With 0.9.0, that will change. Instead of adding incremental features, we want to add significant new things to the gameplay. We would have loved to do that in a bunch of small updates instead of in one big overhaul that will take a long time to develop. But Everything is connected. Monsters are connected to guards. Guards are connected to the tech tree. The tech tree is connected to the ores. The ores are connected to the world generation. Changing the world generation invalidates old worlds and requires people to start new savegames. Of course, we could do some simple changes to one of these aspects. Add a monster with more HP, and a guard that does more damage. We could have a release like that ready in a couple of days. But that wouldnt be a substantial improvement, just an iteration of already existing content. There are plenty of impressive mods that have content way better than the simple changes above. So an interesting, serious update should do more than that, it should add exciting new features. These new features take more time to develop. And when you change one system, youll have to look at all connected systems as well. When you eventually get to the point where new savegames are required, it becomes very important to add as many of the other changes youre interested in that also require new worlds. Eventually, it leads to massive plans that will overhaul a large part of the game. We would have loved to choose good, fast and cheap (were a small company and can't hire 200 programmers and 3D artists), but as they say, you can only pick two. Well have to settle for good and cheap. So 0.9.0 will take a while, and there will be a decent amount of weeks with relatively boring refactored a system and changes some JSONs style updates. Were planning to skip the Friday Blog in some of these weeks, and only post when theres something relatively significant to share, preferably something with a visual impact. Of course, were always available on Discord, and well probably make a separate channel there for mini-blogs, small updates on what were doing. Let us know what you think of this choice, and well calibrate the amount of blogs based on that! Bedankt voor het lezen :D Reddit // Twitter // YouTube // Website // Discord

Last week, we wrote about a new problem we encountered. With the plans for more spread out resources, it would make sense to make bronze more realistic. In real life, tin is actually a very rare resource. But if players require a second colony to produce bronze, those second colonies will be necessary very early in the game. That will be pretty difficult and confusing! We asked for help and received a lot of replies. They were very useful, especially this one from EZJ: [quote]Bronze age trade wasn't one person organizing multiple colonies and trading between them. Maybe adding small NPC colonies that can trade rare resources in the early game before you can start expanding and getting those resources yourself?[/quote] That does make sense. Most bronze-smelters, historically, would not have personally set up a tin outpost, they would have bought some from a trader. In 0.1.0, purchasing flax seeds with gold coins was a fundamental element of the game. It was a bit confusing because it worked like very other crafter, and it could benefit from a better interface. But having a good way to buy "outside goods" (and to sell to "outsiders"!) would be beneficial in many ways. It could be a way to give players access to more resources that aren't available in the first colony, at a cost. And it could incentivize players to produce certain goods on a large scale. We were already considering "MonsterForts", which would be custom built fortresses in other dimensions. With the other-dimension feature added, it would be relatively easy to add "friendly" fortresses as well. These could pretty much be NPC colonies! Perhaps you'd need to visit them to set up trade. NPC colonies have consistently been a very popular request, but we found it hard to imagine ways to add them, and to make them useful. We might be close to solving those problems! But eventually, players want to move beyond purchasing exotic resources, and they actually want to go out in the world and find these ores. How do players recognize them on the surface? Zun suggested that we might add caves and put the ores there. That could be a solution! Another idea is to generate deserted mining towns on the surface of significant ore deposits. It would work, but it would simultaneously imply that you live in some kind of post-apocalyptic scenario. That would be interesting, lore-wise.
So, if bronze is rather difficult to produce in real life because tin is so scarce, what stops people from immediately moving to iron production? In-game, we could just require players to produce a lot of bronze to unlock iron, but we'd rather make it a bit more realistic. What exactly is difficult about iron production? Apparently, the temperature required to smelt iron is a lot higher, and reaching a temperature that is twice as high requires more than just a double amount of fuel. It requires different fuels and different furnaces. It's not just that. Iron ore is generally pretty unpure and needs to be refined before it's properly usable. If all these processes are done well, you get strong iron that doesn't rust quickly. But that's hard to do. Most early iron was probably brittle and rusted easily. It took a lot of experimenting to get it right. We're unsure about the best way to translate these realities into interesting gameplay. We've been thinking about having dynamic tools for jobs: for example, foresters could use different axes, with better axes being more durable and allowing for faster logging. Perhaps there'll be a similar thing for smelting, with 'dynamic' fuels, allowing players to choose different options for different results. But it's complicated and we haven't fully decided on one solution yet. If there are any experts on metallurgy, we'd love to have your help :D Bedankt voor het lezen! Reddit // Twitter // YouTube // Website // Discord

Last week, we wrote about the addition of longer crafting times to the dev build. This allows us to refactor crafting times. The total cost of daily necessities like food and ammo cant change significantly (one day of food and ammo cant cost two days of crafting). But permanent improvements like job blocks can be changed to be significantly more expensive in terms of crafting time. Currently, job blocks often have trivial crafting requirements and are made in seconds. Completing a job block should become more of a valuable accomplishment, especially the more advanced ones. Currently, most job blocks can be made by the colonist operating the workbench, and by the player. The player has 0 crafting time. Nobody is going to wait 120 seconds for a new furnace if such an alternative is available. Should we remove a lot of recipes currently available for player crafting? Should there be an alternative job block crafter that takes a lot of recipes from the workbench? Because we can increase the crafting time, we can remove some ingredient items. Instead of a job block taking 8 seconds to craft + copper nails/tools/parts that require 22 seconds to craft, the job block itself can just take 30 seconds + pure copper. But the workbench currently mostly makes these ingredient items and job blocks. Is it wise to remove all of these from the workbench? While redesigning the crafting recipes and ingredients like this, its smart to keep our planned changes to resource distribution in mind. Weve been thinking of the details there more clearly this week. When we started Colony Survival, we were thinking about roughly the Viking Era, 700-1000AD. With later updates, we added things like crossbows and the printing press, extending the timeline to ~1600AD. Now that were thinking about making trade between colonies a more important part of the gameplay, weve tried to figure out when this became important in real life. It turns out long distance trade is already crucial when youre producing bronze, because tin is a very rare resource. But civilizations started smelting bronze in 2000BC, nearly 3000 years before the start of CSs current timeline! Bronze is one of the earliest unlocks in CS. We dont want second colonies to become important so soon in the gameplay. Do we skip it? Do we think of an unrealistic alternative (like tin being available everywhere)? Or do we extend the timeline to significantly before 2000BC, adding gameplay, progress and unlocks to the Stone Age? But which interesting, significant progression happened in the Stone Age, that we can utilize in Colony Survival? Domestication and selective breeding of crops and livestock seemed to have important consequences, but we cant easily put that into the game. We havent drawn any definitive conclusions yet, so let us know your opinion! How far back in time should CS start? How realistic should things be? Leave a comment here on Steam, or share your opinion on Discord! Bedankt voor het lezen :D Reddit // Twitter // YouTube // Website // Discord

Zun has mostly finished his work on the savegames. Previously, they were .JSON files. In some cases, they were prone to getting corrupted. They also required autosaves to save the data of all players who have been connected to the server, even if only a small minority of them have been connected since the last autosave. The new savegames use SQLite. It should be quicker and more reliable. The problem above with the autosaves is solved as well! This does have one serious drawback. Our dev-build of 0.9.0 already expects SQL saves and is incompatible with older savegames. No worries about your current worlds: they'll always be playable by using the 0.8.0 branch, and it'll take a long time before 0.9.0 is ready for release. But this does mean we can't easily release the new savegames as a 0.8.X patch. We could write a converter, but this takes a decent amount of time, and we'd rather invest that time in awesome features for 0.9.0. The new terrain generation and totally overhauled job/recipe structure will require new worlds anyway. Another change that was completed this week is longer crafting times. In the past, all NPC actions were practically limited at a maximum of 15 seconds. This boundary has been removed. Previously, we worked around that boundary by making complex recipes that required many ingredients. Now that the limit is gone, we want to refactor these recipes. Intermediate steps like copper nails could be removed, with items just requiring "copper" and slightly longer crafting times. Previously, crafting times were determined by the job block. Recipes at the tailor all take an equal amount of time. This can be changed as well now. Crafters can make both quick recipes take that only 1-5 seconds, and recipes that take for example 30 to 120 seconds. We want to use this new ability to make certain items take significantly longer to craft. Things like ammo should stay relatively similar, but items like weapons, which permanently improve your colony (instead of being "daily costs"), should take more effort from your colonists to produce. This ought to make them feel more valuable, and it allows us to add new features that allow players to reduce that crafting time again. For example, by crafting advanced tools for crafters to use, or by spending Colony Points to upgrade crafters. Next Up: Overhauling the Crafting Recipes + Working on Trade Routes! Bedankt voor het lezen! Reddit // Twitter // YouTube // Website // Discord

As explained in the last couple of blogs, adding realistic logistics between your main colony and its outposts will be a massive overhaul. There's a large amount of interdependency and edge cases. We're now 99% certain that we want to do this. The rough order looks like this: [olist]

Jobs should be more sensible and "upgradeable". Jobs like berry farmers should benefit from having larger areas. Jobs like wheat farmers could have similar yields on smaller areas if they use items like fertilizer. It would be nice if jobs like flax farmers have better yields if a beekeeper is nearby. Smelters should be able to use different fuels, and crafters should be able to use better tools for improved crafting times. [/olist] We haven't decided on all details yet. Will there truly be no realistics logistics within colonies? Will certain item types be constrained to "special" stockpiles - weapons and ammo can only be stored in armories, wheat in granaries, etcetera? We're still debating these issues. While we were making plans for the future, Zun has still been working on and releasing small patches for 0.8.1. The full details can be seen in #small-patch-changelogs on Discord, but here are the last three updates:
Developing 0.9.0 will be a large project that's going to take a relatively long time. We do believe it's a good idea. The plans will make way better use of the large world. The game is able to support tens of thousands of colonists, but only rewards recruiting a couple of hundred. That's a lot of unused potential that 0.9.0 should take advantage of. We could've chosen a different direction, or focused on smaller updates, but we think this path ultimately will result in a better game, compared to the alternative paths. Zun has already started working on a savegame overhaul for 0.9.0, and we're expecting to start working on actual new features very soon! Op hoop van zegen! Reddit // Twitter // YouTube // Website // Discord

[ 2021-02-26 13:17:15 CET ] [ Original post ]

When we started working on the first prototype for Colony Survival eight years ago, we didnt have a detailed plan worked out. Zun made a voxel engine, and Id loved to see walking, working, living inhabitants in that world. When Colony Survival was released into Early Access, nearly four years ago, it wasnt much more than that. A voxel world where farmers, miners, guards and crafters could be recruited and set to work. But it didnt have a real purpose. We just tried to copy some elements from history and the real world into a simulation. Do history and the real world have a purpose? Complex philosophical considerations about the nature of reality aside, the history of human civilization does seem to have resulted in something. Weve gained a lot of knowledge about biology, chemistry, physics, engineering, electronics and a lot of other domains. Were constantly using that knowledge to build tools and machines. These items help us gain further knowledge, and they provide us with wealth, comfort and security. This cycle seems to have happened continuously, from the invention of writing and the wheel to the realization of flatscreens and bluetooth. But these innovations seem to happen relatively spontaneously, without much top-down steering. Johannes Gutenberg wasnt commanded by the king to invent the printing press. It seems his family was involved with mints and goldsmiths, acquiring knowledge and skill in metal working there. When Charles Babbage built the first mechanical computer, he wasnt following anybodys orders. He inherited an estate, making him independently wealthy. He had a strong interest in mathematics, and partnered with Joseph Clement who could use advanced machine tools. These inventors worked independently, but they did consciously try to produce the machines they invented. That isnt even always the case. When Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin, the first antibiotic, he wasnt even looking for anything like that. He was investigating bacteria, and accidentally contaminated one of his experiments with a fungus. That fungus turned out to be penicillium, one that produces penicillin.
How do you add such innovations to a strategy game like Colony Survival? Telling a colonist go invent penicillin now is deeply unrealistic. But having it appear completely randomly would be strange and unsatisfying as well. The true road towards inventions seems to be like this. Make sure youve got a civilization of many, many millions. Most of these people will not directly work on inventions, but theyre vital to keep that gigantic civilization running on a day to day basis. Tens of thousands of people will have a combination of education, technical skills and some wealth. A part of that group will experiment and try to innovate. Some will fail, some will discover gradual improvements, and others will successfully invent new machines and theories that revolutionize the world, like the printing press and the theory of evolution. With the Happiness System and the Colony Points System, we tried to add some of these costs to Colony Survival. You cant innovate directly, youve got to sustain a large semi-civilized group of people, which requires a relatively large and advanced economy. Feed thousands of goldsmiths for many generations, and finally, one will invent the printing press. With that mindset, I thought about realistic logistics between many colonies. I wanted it to be a complex economy with many advanced colonies that all contain educated, skilled workers who can contribute to technological innovations. This requires a very complex trade network, with an enormous amount of connections between colonies. Setting up all these connections manually would be extremely tedious and unpractical, so that's why I thought about automated systems that utilize things like currency. But were developing a game that should be fun to play, not a historical simulation that should be completely accurate. And thus, last week, we decided to take a different approach: one massive, advanced capital that is supplied by many outposts. This simplifies the required logistics, and makes it much more approachable for the player. What should the purpose of this capital be? Just to make its inhabitants very wealthy and comfortable while exploiting the outposts? That would be pretty harsh. Solely to make technological progress, which can be used to make even more progress? Thats not very sustainable and a bit pointless as well.
A B-25 assembly line at North American Aviation's Inglewood, California, plant. 1942. Source. So, weve looked at historical top-down regimes. Ancient Egypt, where the faraos commanded tens of thousands of people to build the pyramids. The Roman Empire, where one city exploited three continents, which funded massive armies. The Soviet Union, which built many rockets and won all the first steps of the Space Race. Some megaprojects like the ones above would be great, to give purpose to your capital and its network of outposts. Of these projects, weve mainly discussed massive armies this week. Were pretty excited about that idea! That could be an interesting gameplay mechanic which consumes gigantic amounts of resources. In real life, situations like World War I & II are also deeply connected to technological progress, but in a more intended way than the spontaneous inventions mentioned above. Consider the Manhattan Project which produced the first nuclear weapons, or the German Wunderwaffe. Were considering adding a list of MonsterForts. These would be in a different dimension, which has to be accessed by some kind of portal or teleporter. The player would have to recruit, arm and train large amounts of soldiers in the capital, and would be able to send these to attack the MonsterForts. There, the reverse of the night-gameplay would happen. Monsters would have defenders on the walls, and a long line of colonist-soldiers would swarm the gates, trying to survive the hostile projectiles and to destroy the MonsterBanner. Destroying a number of these MonsterForts would be required to continue progressing.
Women are trained as engine mechanics in thorough Douglas training methods, at the Douglas Aircraft Company in Long Beach, California, in October of 1942. Source. Providing these soldiers with weapons, armor and other tools and equipment will require the efforts of your entire empire. Hundreds of miners, smelters, smiths and engineers will have to work. A large amount of foresters and woodcutters is necessary to supply them with fuel. Many farmers are needed to produce enough food. The armies can evolve throughout time, from simple spearmen, to fully armored knights, to riflemen. This idea is still work-in-progress, and might be unceremoniously discarded like the Guilders-idea was. We've still got specific issues to work out (Can you build/destroy blocks near the MonsterForts? What will the reward be?) and alternatives to consider. It'll require a months-long process to set up support for alternative dimensions. But we believe this will be a rewarding goal for both Colony Survival in general, and the system of outposts and realistic logistics in specific. Ultimately, youre the judge of that. Let us know in the comments or on Discord how you feel about these ideas! Bedankt voor het lezen :D Reddit // Twitter // YouTube // Website // Discord

For some weeks now, weve been seriously considering implementing realistic logistics. Weve been sharing the progress in our plans. This week, the team agreed on some basics, but we simultaneously discovered the full implications go a lot deeper.

Major New Consideration 1: Realistic Logistics Inside Colonies Or Not?

Major New Consideration 2: Designing New Production (& Consumption) Chains Around Logistics

Last week, we attempted to explain our plans to add some kind of economic system to Colony Survival. These ideas are connected to many of our other plans for the next big update, and related to frustrations about current systems. I skipped a large part of the context and went straight for a complex explanation with a lot of numbers and imaginary examples. Lots of people found this to be very confusing, for good reasons! Today, I'll try to explain our plans in a more sensible way. Let's start by looking at an example of a randomly generated world in current Colony Survival. You spawn in the center of the world. Your colony inhabits only a very small portion of the entire spawn region, and all resources from that region can be found and grown in that very small portion. All ores spawn everywhere, and all "spawn crops" can be grown anywhere in the spawn region. There's no important reason to set up a second outpost in the spawn region. At the very end of the game, players get the ability to start a second colony. You're meant to traverse the entire spawn region, and then you've got to cross an "inhabitable region": an ocean, a desert or a steppe. When you succesfully do that, you enter a new region with unique crops and some extra ores, for end-game luxury items. Again, one colony will gain access to all of these unique resources in that region. Resources can be traded between colonies. This happens purely via an interface menu, and is not connected to anything you've actually got to build in-game.
We loved the fundamental ideas behind this plan, but we're not very happy with the execution. After staying in one place for nearly the full game, players are suddenly expected to travel through multiple kilometers of empty landscape until they cross an arbitrary line. It's asking a lot, while the rewards aren't worth it for many players. So, we're thinking of a big change. We'd love to build a new world, where resources are scattered through the map and each location has unique benefits and drawbacks. The current world already renders a "temperature" and a "humidity" for each chunk of the map, and combined with something like "fertility", we could realistically make certain parts of the map more suitable for some crops and less suitable for others. Farming in the perfect spot yields large harvests; building in a less perfect spot results in diminished harvests. Some crops would love high temperatures while others are more suited for lower temperatures, etcetera. Basic ores would still be found easily, while more "advanced" ores like iron, coal and gold would only be available in certain locations, which could be found with for example the current compass tool. Instead of walking many kilometers to cross an arbitrary line, players will actually have to scout the terrain and make an intelligent decision about the placement of their colonies. Your network of colonies has to be connected via actual physical paths. These could be roads, bridges and tunnels marked by milestones, or waterways marked by buoys. Later on, we could even get rails with trains/minecarts. The cost of trading between colonies will be determined by the length and efficiency of these connections.
Map made with Inkarnate This system should offer a more gradual introduction to multiple colonies, make setting up these colonies more fun, and make the rewards for doing so larger. To prevent players from having to set up the same defenses against monsters again and again, we want to implement a way to redirect most or all of the monster threat to one specific place, like a well-defended capital or a special castle. Now, last week we tried to explain a system of "Guilders" which was considered confusing by many. Here's where they become relevant. The way your colonists spend their working time has changed throughout the updates, but the amount of seconds they can work in a day hasn't. Let's say there's 300 "labor seconds" per colonist in one day. On average, per update, they'll be spend roughly like this:
In 0.1.0, every colonist needed food and attracted monsters, resulting in the necessity to craft ammo to fight these monsters. So for every 10 colonists, you need a majority of them to craft food and fight monsters just to sustain these 10 colonists. A small proportion of time is spend on "Perma-Crafting": crafting items that are perpetually useful, like workbenches and bows. The rest of the "labor time" can be spend as players wish. In 0.4.0, a bunch of science bags were needed to make progress, demanding a share of labor time and giving purpose to "extra" colonists. In 0.7.0, things were made rather difficult with the introduction of happiness. Now colonists needed a bunch of special items to stay happy. If you failed to produce them, the resulting unhappiness would hamstring your colony. This was rather punishing, and in 0.8.0 we switched to the system of "Colony Points", retaining a lot of benefits from the happiness system while removing the large punishment. For the next big update, we want to give job blocks the ability to have longer crafting times for specific recipes. For example, crafting a matchlock gun should be able to cost for example 150 seconds, instead of 15. These extended crafting times should be reserved for the "perpetual upgrades". In return, the daily requirements to keep your colonists alive, food and ammo, should become a bit "cheaper" in terms of labor time. Their cost should be reduced even further to compensate for the addition of "delivery time", now that items will have to be physically delivered from one place to another. In historical times, before trucks and trains, delivering bulk goods was difficult and costly. Your wheat and firewood probably didn't travel very far to get to your home. But simultaneously, valuable and 'transportable' items like golden adornments, silver coins, silk and spices did get traded between distant places. In the Bronze Age, civilizations already set up far-ranging trade networks for things like tin and charcoal. tzi's axe was made from copper mined hundreds of miles south from where he lived. Trade in Colony Survival should be relatively realistic, and should thus be based on similar considerations. Items should have default values, based on something like "expected labor time" and "expected utility". The delivery costs should be based on the length of the path and the weight of the item. tzi's axe has a high value and a relatively low weight, so even in Bronze Age circumstances it makes sense to trade it over a distance of hundreds of miles. But a low value, high weight item like wheat (one year of copper axes is still one axe; one year of wheat is a lot of wheat) won't be transported similar distances, not for the average man at least. Bronze Age trade networks weren't set up by one Supreme Emperor who determined where every single item should go. Thousands of merchants existed, who throughout the centuries learned the best ways to deliver valuable items to the right consumers. So we believe the trade networks in Colony Survival shouldn't be based on a single players intuiting all the right choices either. Players should be helped by performing some basic calculations for them: "how valuable would it be to have item X here" and "how costly would it be to deliver item X here". If the delivery makes sense, it should happen, and otherwise it shouldn't. By default, a day's worth of food shouldn't cost two days worth of delivery time, that's not viable. To represent these values to players, it would be best to pick one way of representing it. This could be "Guilders". These would be closely connected to crafting time. Items that take a long time to craft are often more valuable than items that can be easily made.

• "Coppercolony" has produced a Copper Axe for 10 Guilders. Delivering it to "Craftercolony" costs 20 Guilders. It would be worth 50 Guilders there. Deliver it!
• "Farmcolony" has produced wheat for 3 Guilders. Delivering it to "Distant Exotic Colony" costs 50 Guilders. It would be worth 5 Guilders there. Don't do it!

Were still working on the details of implementing realistic logistics. As explained in last weeks blog, Ive been testing Kingdoms and Castles. When bigger population sizes and larger distances came into play, it became harder to understand and steer the production process. A handful of precise questions regularly appeared in my mind:

• Do my workers waste a large part of their working time walking from their homes to their jobs and back?
• Do my workers waste a lot of time idling at their job, because the required resources arent available?
• Do my workers waste a lot of energy hauling low-value resources from one side of the map to the other, while these resources could have better been produced or processed locally?

• Stockpile Next To The Walls: 30 seconds of delivery time, and the wheat itself costs 5 Guilder.
• Stockpile Seaside: 150 seconds of delivery time, wheat costs 3 Guilder.
• Stockpile Very Fertile: 1000 seconds of delivery time, wheat costs 1 Guilder.

• Next To The Walls: 30 seconds of delivery time for 10 wheat = 3 seconds per wheat = 0.3 Guilders of delivery cost (10 seconds of labor for 1 Guilder) = 0.3 Guilder delivery cost + 5 Guilder wheat cost = 5.3 Guilder total cost
• Seaside: 1.5 Guilder delivery cost + 3 Guilder wheat cost = 4.5 Guilder total cost
• Very Fertile: 10 Guilder + 1 Guilder = 11 Guilder total cost.

Last week, we've shared the results of our survey in regards to implementing realistic logistics. The response was overwhelmingly positive! Weve also read all the comments on the blogs, and the discussions on our Discord server. There are some opponents, there is some hesitation, but the general mood seems to be one of excitement! Were very seriously considering implementing realistic logistics. While the concept allows for a lot of extra features, its not without its issues. Making the system completely automatic means youve got little control over where items go. Making the system completely manual will be very tedious, and difficult for newcomers. Itll have to be a mix of automation and manual input, but making this system fun and intuitive to use is quite the challenge. There are many different kinds of logistics the system has to facilitate. The easy cases to solve are small colonies with clear directions. Miners produce ores which have to go towards the smelters. Farmers produce crops which have to go towards bakers and cooks. But this quickly becomes more complicated. Smelters, bakers and cooks all need firewood. What if theyre not all in the same location? What if one group consumes much more firewood than the others? How about jobs, like the workbench, that create a lot of items with loads of different ingredients? And how do we handle long distance trade? Is there one system for item transport, or are there different systems for logistics within a colony versus logistics between colonies? Some things were strongly considering to combine with realistic logistics are:

1.) A Reworked World

2.) Streamlined Crafting

Holy cow, last week's survey resulted in a lot of participation and discussion! The blog now has nearly 100 comments, and the survey is at 888 responses. All of this has been very insightful, so thanks a lot! Like always, we'll share all the results with you. Nearly all questions asked participants to rate something from 1 to 7, with 1 being "awful" and 7 being "great". The first question was:

Imagine the "magical stockpile" gets fully removed. All items need to be physically transported from A to B, with a combination of something like delivery men, conveyor belts and trains. How would you rate this change?

We could leave the early game like it is, and constrain "items that need transportation" to later in the game. This means there are "two systems" in the game. What's your opinion?

We could focus on other features that have less impact on the core gameplay, and reserve the ideas about logistics for a potential sequel. How do you feel about that?

Logistics "inside" colonies could function like they always did, with the "magical stockpile", while trade between colonies receives an overhaul. Here you'll have to build paths between colonies, with tunnels and bridges, and for long distances, safe sleeping places for the travelling colonists. What's your opinion?

The idea above could also be combined with realistic logistics inside of the colony. How do you feel about having both?

How do you feel about a feature that allows players to "clear" the world of monsters (but, for example, forcing them to defeat the same amount of monsters at a portal), allowing them to safely expand in a much wider area than just the safe zone?

What's your opinion about the addition of delivery men as a feature, who bring items from one stack of crates to another?

Should these delivery men mainly work automatically (based on the needs of workers), or mainly based on the explicit orders and requests of the player?

What's your opinion about the addition of conveyor belts / trains / ships / zeppelins / pipelines?

Participate in the survey here! This week, we've been doing a lot of thinking about the plans proposed in last week's Friday Blog. We received a lot of positive replies, and we've gotten more confident in implementing them. But simultaneously, we've noticed how some of these features are fundamentally linked to other major changes in the game. This would mean that Colony Survival could become a significantly different game than it currently is. Instead of adding new features while not changing the core, these plans could mean that fundamental systems will be radically overhauled. One of the most significant changes we're considering, is an overhaul to the stockpile and logistics. Currently, the stockpile operates like a 'cloud server'. Miners deep underground 'upload' their items using a nearby crate. Smelters above ground don't have to descend into the mines to gather their ores: they can just 'download' the ores using any random crate. While this system is easy to operate and pretty intuitive, it also deprives players of a large amount of interesting challenges. Jobs can be placed without much consideration in tall, ugly skyscrapers with no impact on efficiency. So many interesting things in real life are related to the problem of getting items and people from A to B. Ships, trains, harbors, bridges, tunnels, highways, cars, conveyor belts, elevators. The entire concept of cities is intrinsically linked to the necessity to be physically close to important places. The magic stockpile in Colony Survival deprives players of all of these things. There is no necessity to consider the location of your industries. There is no benefit to building realistic supply chains, like placing your smelters next to your miners. Trading between colonies is purely UI-work, and it doesnt matter whether there is a huge distance between the colonies or that theyre in sight of each other. Demanding that items are physically transported from one place to another changes all of this. The location of your jobs will have a large impact on the efficiency of your colony. Suddenly, features like (upgradeable) delivery men, trains, conveyor belts and elevators become useful. This gives us a lot of opportunities for the development of interesting new features.
But its not all sunshine and rainbows. It will make the game more complex, and the start of the game becomes more difficult for new players. The update will probably be incompatible with older worlds, or at least itll radically change their efficiency. (Older branches of the game are available for download via Steam, meaning its always possible to replay old worlds and old versions with a low amount of effort) Colony Survival will become a different game, and some older players will be disappointed. Is this worth it? Should we implement these big changes in Colony Survival, or should we leave the core gameplay intact and reserve these ideas for a potential sequel? Another big change is linked to realistic logistics. When transportation of items becomes more important and challenging, it makes sense to open up a bigger part of the world, to allow the logistics to play out over a larger area. Currently, players are constrained to a relatively small safe zone in a huge open world. Weve been thinking about ways to allow players to make use of a much larger part of the world, without worrying about safe zones and monsters. Imagine a feature that allows players to build a large monster-portal. When its activated, monsters wont spawn in the wild anymore - theyll only spawn at the portal and travel to your banner from there. Youll still need to defeat the same amount of monsters, but youre free to use a much larger part of the world without caring about safe zones, walls and stationing guards everywhere. This could allow us to spread different resources around the world more. Currently, all main ores are available everywhere. But imagine having to mine gold and iron at different places, and growing wheat in a third place, and making sure there is proper transportation between all these places - with paths and bridges for travelling colonists, inns along the way to provide a sleeping place, and perhaps automated ships and harbors, perhaps trains! Were very excited about this idea, but simultaneously realize what a big change to standard Colony Survival this would be. Without the magic stockpile and monsters everywhere, it becomes a different game. Is this a game youre all looking forward to? Do you want this change in this Colony Survival or is it more appropriate for a sequel? Wed love to have your feedback. As always, we read the comments and our Discord is open for discussion, but wed also love to have your feedback on [url=https://forms.gle/xePcLMussDuHUvbw5]the survey! Bedankt voor het lezen! Reddit // Twitter // YouTube // Website // Discord

Survival Lab REC-5, by Littlesproatie Happy New Year! The start of the week saw the release of 0.8.1. It seems not to have caused significant issues. There was a missing button, but that was fixed in a small patch. We hope the new Job Management Menu will be very useful for all of you! This blog showcases screenshots from Littlesproatie's Survival Lab REC-5, a survival map with a unique story. It's available on the Workshop! It requires three mods to function, developed by NACH0, Adrenalynn, Kenovis and Boneidle. These are all linked on the Workshop page for the Survival Lab and can be installed easily. Thanks to the creators for building this world and the mods, and have fun building a colony in this futuristic world! While working on some smaller bugs and fixes, we're thinking of our next big step. What feature should we add? We're discussing a bunch of related ideas. Some have been mentioned before, others not. We'd love to have your feedback. What ideas are you most excited for?

Support for Longer Crafting Times

More ways to earn and spend Colony Points

Industrial Tech

Real Logistics

A Mission/Quest-System

New Guards, new Monsters and Monster Waves

Parallel Worlds

Update 0.8.1 is now live on Steam! It's main new feature is the Job Management Menu. It provides an overview of all current jobs, and allows players to remotely disable and enable them without physically removing the job. This is useful in general, but vital when you've lost a large amount of colonists and want to recover your colony. To help players deal with a shortage of colonists, there's the Set Balanced button, which intelligently distributes your colonists across all available jobs. Apart from the new feature, there's a long list of bug fixes and small tweaks. The "garbage can" has moved from the hotbar to just below the stockpile, to prevent accidental trashing of items. Your health is now properly saved when health upgrades have been unlocked and you exit the game. Colonists don't 'refund' their 'job tool' to the stockpile anymore when they die. See the in-game changelog for more info. Have fun with the update, and let us know when things work and don't work as you hoped! For pressing bug fixes, Discord and the comments under this blog are the best place. Veel plezier :) Reddit // Twitter // YouTube // Website // Discord

This week has been fully focused on bug fixes and other small issues that players have noticed in 0.8.0. In the past, players have complained about Siege Mode activating when they left their colony to explore the world. This happened pretty randomly, and we weren't able to consistently reproduce the bug. This week, we received a savegame where the issue did happen reliably! We expect this will help us fix the problem. Update 0.8.1 will contain these bug fixes, and the Job Management Menu. We hope to be able to release the update on Monday!

2020 - Specific and Without Covid

2020 - Vague and With Covid

A Calm Game?

Dune

Last week, we asked you what it was like to play 0.8.0. We got a massive number of responses and they're all very useful. Thanks a lot! Of course, feedback is always welcome, so feel free to respond with a description of your experience in the comments of this blog as well. The Jingle Jam ended this week. It was a massive success. The event raised nearly three million dollars for charity! We're glad we were part of the bundle. We've continued work on the job management menu. It now has sliders that allow you to easily and remotely disable specific job types! For example, if you've got 8 flax farmers and need only 4, you can quickly disable half of them. Here's what it looks like in our internal dev build:
We've also been thinking about the next updates. Last week, we talked about "monster waves", special assaults that can be manually triggered by the player. Lots of you responded enthusiastically, which was great to see! But.... we're considering to prioritize something else first. Replacing the Happiness System with Colony Points made the game more intuitive and less complex, but for some, it has made the game too straightforward and simple. Lots of job blocks are simple cubes without any requirements, that can just be placed anywhere. We're thinking of adding more complexity here. Since 0.7.0 some jobs require access to water, like the fisherman and the water gatherer . This has often motivated me to dig some kind of "sewer" / canal to my colony. Jobs like that are more interesting and satisfying than "default job blocks". When we released Colony Survival, all jobs were very primitive and the game could have taken place in the Viking era, around 800AD. Later, we moved "forward in time", adding later inventions like the crossbow, the musket and the printing press. This changes the "game era" at the end to roughly 1500AD. We've mentioned it before, even a long time ago, but we're still interested in moving the "end date" of the game to a more recent era, somewhere in between 1800 and 1950. This could coincide nicely with more complex game mechanics. Imagine blocks that need to be connected to an electricity grid, or to pipelines with water, steam or oil. Hopefully, we can turn these new machines into "multi-block job-blocks" - they should be more complex than simple 1x1x1 cubes. To make these new machines useful, we want to make it so that items can have longer crafting times. Currently, every item has a maximum crafting time of 15 seconds. Otherwise, workers can get "stuck" at their jobs too long around sunset, causing them to be attacked by monsters. We hope we can solve this problem by allowing workers to "store their progress". Imagine a musket that takes 300 seconds to craft, but a worker can "drop" it any time with their crafting progress saved at for example 15% (or 37%, if they manage to get that far). There's a serious chance that one of the next updates introduces the "longer crafting times" system, combined with a big overhaul of lots of jobs, items and recipes. Currently, the game contains lots of "workarounds" to make some items take more crafting time than others. For example, silk requires a lot of silkthreads. If we can just make silk itself take longer to craft, intermediate steps like silkthreads could be removed from the game. When that's done, we can work on more complex production mechanics that allow players to build industrial machines to craft complex items more quickly. Of course, we're not merely going to lengthen the crafting times of current items - we want to add a lot of new ones! And when some items take longer to craft, it's also worthwhile to add a Colony-Points-upgrade for the production speed of different types of jobs. The monster waves ideas has not been discarded, but perhaps it's more suitable for development after the new production mechanics. The industrial era allows us to add new weapons, and the longer crafting times are also useful for special ammo. We'd love to know how you feel about this, so feel free to respond here on our Discord! Bedankt voor het lezen :) Reddit // Twitter // YouTube // Website // Discord

0.8.0 has been released two weeks ago. Many of you have tried it, and we've received a lot of enthusiastic replies. We're very grateful for them! We weren't completely certain that replacing the Happiness System with Colony Points was a good move, but it seems to have turned out well. Despite that, we don't know exactly what your experience is like. We've tried it ourselves, and because we know exactly how the feature works, we rushed through the content pretty quickly. For us, it was relatively easy to gain large amounts of Colony Points. On the other hand: we've watched the Yogscast play it, and it took them quite long before they really started using the new system. Which makes a lot of sense: they didn't design the system! We've also received reports from people who say that it takes them a lot longer to set up their colony now, and that they find it hard to earn enough Colony Points. So we'd love to receive more detailed reports. Is the game harder/slower than it was in 0.7.0? Is it difficult to figure out the new systems? And how does the difficulty feel at different "colonist levels": is it hard to get from 0 to 50 but easy to go from 100 to 150, or vice versa? Please let us know, here in the comments, or on Discord!

Job Management Menu

Last week, we released the new update! In general, it seems to have received a positive response. Old worlds required some adjustments but were compatible, there were no serious bugs and a large majority seems to feel like the Points System is an improvement compared to the old Happiness System. Of course, there were minor problems. So we quickly released 0.8.0.1. Colonists got stuck when they couldn't find food on their grocery visit, while their hunger wasn't critical yet. This has been fixed. The "Upgrades" tab received the more fitting name "Colony Points". The Colony Points counter in the top-right of the screen is formatted #/#, to indicate current points / current points capacity. This made the "/" in the ammo counter confusing, so the dividing symbol between different ammo types is now a "-". A couple of days later, we released 0.8.0.2 to fix some other minor issues. For example, the stockpile still had a "Calories" filter button, and this has been updated to "Meals". The "woodcoating" item was still around but was not used anymore, and it has been removed. Clicking on a grocery store didn't properly open the Colony Points tab - now it does. Another important event this week was the start of the Jingle Jam! Colony Survival is part of the bundle, and the Yogscast has been playing the game for many hours last Wednesday. They seem to have enjoyed themselves, but there was one noticeable issue. Someone's colony failed a bit and lost a lot of colonists. Recovering was relatively hard, because there were a lot of empty jobs and it was hard to sent new recruits to the right ones. The same issue has occured frequently for other players, and we're resolved to fix this. We're working on a "Job Priority Menu" that should give players more control over jobs, making it possible to temporarily 'disable' unimportant ones so that new colonists automatically take the important jobs. Developing this shouldn't take too much time, and the feature will be released in 0.8.1! Bedankt voor het lezen :D Reddit // Twitter // YouTube // Website // Discord

Colony Survival is part of the Jingle Jam 2020 Bundle! The Jingle Jam is organized by the Yogscast, who have played lots of Colony Survival since the very beginning. The proceeds will be donated to charity, with some examples being The Mental Health Foundation, The Open Bionics Foundations and War Child UK. Tomorrow, Colony Survival should be part of multiple streams! We're looking forward to seeing them play 0.8.0. Watch their main channel here, and check their schedule below:
Have fun! Reddit // Twitter // YouTube // Website // Discord

The new update is now live on Steam! If Steam doesn't update automatically, use "verify integrity of game cache" to force it download the update. Update 0.8.0 contains fundamental new systems that will change the way you play. The Happiness System has been replaced by Colony Points. They are earned by distributing Meals and Luxury Items. Instead of having to fiddle around with sliders, this happens automatically now. The confusing "calories" sliders is also gone now. Snacks like cake and chocolate have lost their food value, and the colonists require one proper meal per day. The old system strongly disincentivized population growth. Happiness Items provided a set amount of Happiness if every colonist received a certain amount of items, regardless of the amount of colonists in the colony. This meant that bigger colonies needed to produce more items to gain the same amount of Happiness. Simultaneously, recruiting more colonists caused Unhappiness due to overpopulation. This made earning Happiness very difficult and counter-intuitive. Colony Points should do the opposite: they should reward growth. Recruiting more colonists makes it easier to produce and distribute lots of Meals & Happiness Items, resulting in many more Colony Points. These Points can be spent on a range of upgrades. These upgrades have many levels, with rapidly escalating costs. Colony Points are also required for certain unlocks in the tech tree. These core changes also cause a range of smaller changes. The tech tree has been overhauled. Some unlocks have been merged, others have new requirements. Certain minor items, like the separate coating item required for coating planks, and "fishmeal", have been removed. Other items have been rebalanced. The F1-Quickstart-Menu has been updated, and some achievements related to food, happiness and the tech tree have been changed or removed as well. For full details, check the in-game changelog. Now that the game has new core systems, it has become easier to add new content. We're planning to add new sources of Colony Points, and new ways to spend them. And of course, we'll be listening to your feedback! Tell us what works and what doesn't, and we'll use that to improve the game in future updates. Heel veel plezier in 0.8.0 :D Reddit // Twitter // YouTube // Website // Discord

The release of the next update, 0.8.0, is scheduled for next Friday! We've done a lot of testing, fixing and recalibrating this week. The new Colony Points system isn't perfect yet, but it should be better, more rewarding, more intuitive and more accessible than the current Happiness/Calories system. Despite that, last week's blog received a fair amount of criticism. We want to take a moment to respond to these concerns.

"The new system is less realistic"

-----

We're starting to shift from the word "happiness" and the term "HAPs" towards just "points" / "Colony Points". That's what they're currently named in-game. The UI surrounding them has seen some big changes this week! Here's the upgrades-menu:
Two weeks ago we showed you this. I believe the new UI is a big improvement :) We've also added new UI elements that show the distribution of meals and happiness/points items. Here's the one for meals:
And here's the one for luxuries:
Statistics related to the new Points-feature are now also tracked. Here's a graph of the amount of points being scored per item type over a 24-day period:
Fullscreen And last but not least, here is the graph of the history of your Points-amount:
It might look pretty confusing here, with just static images, but we believe it already works a lot more smoothly than the old happiness system did. The old system barely rewarded you, it only punished you when you failed to generate enough happiness items. Recruiting colonists resulted in more "Unhappiness-due-to-Overpopulation", actively working against you for doing what we intend players to do (which is, grow their colony). The new system helps foster a new attitude towards colony growth. Every new colonist is an opportunity to earn more Points: a colony with 100 colonists can gather Points a lot more quickly than a colony with only 10 colonists. When you properly set up the production chains needed to craft new Points Items, this quickly results in a steady supply of Points, which helps you unlock the upgrades you want. So testing the game has been a lot of fun, but of course, we've also noticed issues. Items that weren't properly balanced, science unlocks with strange requirements, Points Upgrades with weird steps in between them, and strange new issues in regards to monsters and guard timing. The new features aren't ready for mass testing and/or release yet, but we're getting closer every day :) Bedankt voor het lezen! Reddit // Twitter // YouTube // Website // Discord

Colony Survival is on sale! Click here for more information. This week, we've done a lot of testing in the internal dev build of 0.8.0. Minor issues are steadily improving, but there are two bigger issues still under consideration. All feedback is welcome! Issue 1: How to make the improved/replaced happiness feature visible? At the moment, gathering HAPs / Happiness Points / Colony Points (recommendations for names are welcome as well!) happens pretty much invisibly, in the background. It should be both clear and satisfying. We haven't found a perfect solution yet. Today, Zun suggested making the points "pop up" above the heads of the colonists when they receive their items from the banner or grocery store, like numbers for damage in a combat game. Perhaps we'll try to implement this; perhaps someone knows a better solution. Issue 2: Should we do something about the better "tech steps" now? The current (0.7.5) version of the game has a lot of small steps in the tech tree. New steps often require ingredients produced in the previous step. This makes learning the game easier, but it also leads to some mediocre, unsatisfying unlocks. For example, the technologist is unlocked without any recipes: basic science bags need to be unlocked separately. We've tried to improve this for 0.8.0. The tech tree is a lot more streamlined now. Some upgrades, like the banner range and the health sciences, have been moved to their own separate category of improvements that have many levels. Other unlocks have been merged together. We believe it's an improvement, but the bigger steps can be difficult for newer players. We might find something to lessen this problem in 0.8.0, or it could be alleviated by releasing for example the "tutorial-mission system" in 0.8.1 or 0.8.2. We'd love to have your opinion: what do you think of the proposed changes to the tech tree, and should we do something about the "bigger steps problem"? Bedankt voor het lezen! Reddit // Twitter // YouTube // Website // Discord

From November 3 to November 10, Steam organizes a City Builder Sale! We fit this category pretty precisely, so we decided to participate. Colony Survival will be 25% off during the entire week. If you don't own the game yet - this is the moment to get it! If you do own the game already - thanks a lot :D And this is a great moment to invite your friends. We're launching a significant overhaul of the game within (hopefully!) a month. This will be update 0.8.0, and it should be backwards compatible with older worlds. Veel plezier! Reddit // Twitter // YouTube // Website // Discord

Last week, we shared detailed plans for the new happiness system. It contained a bunch of mockups and spreadsheets, but it was all hypothetical and not in-game. Today, we can show you the first "true" images of the emerging new feature, made in the internal dev build.
It's very primitive, but it's the new upgrade menu. And it actually works! Distributed meals and happiness items result in "Colony Points", and these points can be spent on the upgrades in the list. Each upgrade has a whole range of "levels" which you'll have to unlock step by step. The four upgrades in the list actually do what they're supposed to do, and we're planning to add other upgrades. The game already keeps in mind the upgrade from 0.7.5-colonies to 0.8.0-colonies. It will automatically unlock the colonist limit to the level required to satisfy your 0.7.5-colonists, and the banner range will adjust to the previously unlocked science as well.
Spending your colony points works, albeit in a very primitive menu. Earning your colony points is also functional, but the menu is literally empty. All the previous content has been removed, and nothing new has been built yet. We're looking forward to rebuilding it!
Last but not least, there has been another overhaul as well. Instead of different food items, each with different amounts of calories, which have to be adjusted by the player to reach 2000+ calories, we're now moving to a system of "meals". Colonists require a set amount of meals per day. Individual food items are not edible anymore, they can only be combined to make "meals". Recruiting new colonists now also costs "meals" instead of calories. This change is reflected in the recruitment part of the menu. We're making steady progress, and hope this overhaul will make the game simultaneously more accessible and deeper. If everything goes well, will be able to release the update before it's December! Bedankt voor het lezen! Reddit // Twitter // YouTube // Website // Discord

PSA: The game will be on sale before the end of the year. This week, we've continued our work on overhauling the tech tree and implementing the new happiness system. Everything you see here is deeply work-in-progress: rough mock-ups and vague estimates. It won't look like this in-game, but it should make the underlying ideas and systems clearer. Let's start with a mock-up of the new happiness menu. It'll be a lot simpler than the current UI. Fiddling with sliders isn't required anymore. Meals will be "one-size-fits-all", without a calories slider and other sliders to adjust it indirectly. For every happiness item, there'll be a maximum that can be distributed per day. Giving every colonist a candle per day makes sense, but they don't need a new fur coat every 24 hours. All happiness items in the stockpile will automatically be distributed until the maximum is reached. Instead of providing a set reward for every category (20 happiness for providing all colonists with candles, regardless of the amount of colonists you've got), every distributed item will increase the amount of "happiness points" (shorthand HAPs, not the definitive name) you earn. This means that recruiting more colonists will increase the amount of HAPs that can be earned. The penalty for overpopulation will be removed.
We made a rough estimate of how many HAPs players will earn throughout the growth of their colony. Here are our numbers:
What "Amount of Colonists" means seems pretty clear. "Average HAPs" is an estimate of how many HAPs are earned per colonist. As you advance throughout the tech tree, you'll unlock more and better happiness items, increasing the amount of HAPs earned per colonist. The third category, "Hap Eff%", is an estimate of the effect of the HAP Multiplier Upgrade. You'll be able to complete many tiers of that upgrade, continuously improving the HAPs-value of your happiness items and meals. "Hap Eff% 1.1" stands for 110% effectiveness, meaning an item with a default value of 10 will provide 11 HAPs. Combining these three categories results in a total HAPs generated per day. This escalates rapidly from ~75 at the start of your colony and eventually reaches many tens of thousands per day! The current system punishes players with unhappy colonies by making it a lot more expensive to recruit new colonists, and by slowing down the science speed. We want to change that to a reward-based system. HAPs will be required for plenty of upgrades and improvements. These shouldn't be a a handful of sky-high thresholds that require massive amounts of HAPs after which the feature is useless. There should be a continual, increasing challenge. We've made some estimates for that as well:
Fullscreen As you can see, these requirements escalate very quickly as well. This discourages "idling" - letting the colony run in the background without attention until you've amassed enough HAPs to quickly unlock a bunch of upgrades. It also rewards growth by highlighting your increased capabilities. Unlocking all of these upgrades should take players quite a long time and encourage them to keep growing. Disclaimer: the fact that the max colonist limit in this example is 500, does not mean we're planning to add a hard limit to the amount of colonists you can have Adding many dozens of similar upgrades to the tech tree will make it very cluttered. We'll probably add a new UI for these repeating upgrades and keep them separate from the rest of the science. Unlocking them will not require a scientist who performs actually work. We've made a very, very rough mock-up for that UI as well:
We know the details are far from perfect, but we're pretty convinced about the fundamentals of the new systems! But we're still open to all feedback: while the system is in construction, we can still keep your concerns into account. So let us know if you want to see something changed or clarified! Bedankt voor het lezen! Reddit // Twitter // YouTube // Website // Discord

Last week, we released 0.7.5! It generally went pretty well, but it also caused a handful of issues. We've released a bunch of hotfixes to solve these problems. The latest version of Colony Survival is now 0.7.5.8. Sometimes, NPCs would get stuck. The compass and the glider had issues. Health wasn't saved properly in certain cases. The Field of View slider has a new max of 130, and the default is now 70 instead of 60. All of the issues above and some other minor ones are now fixed.

Tech Tree Overhaul

0.7.5 is available on Steam right now! The update contains a bunch of much requested features and improvements:

• Major pathfinding improvements. Previously, colonists looking for a destination (a job, a bed, a crate, etc.) chose the closest object in a straight line - completely ignoring terrain, walls, floors and stairs. In small and easy-to-navigate colonies, this didn't matter much. But for complex colonies, with large underground sections and big buildings with many rooms and floors, this could lead to some really bad decisions that resulted in unnecessarily long paths for colonists. Often, this caused cascading problems, with beds intended for one group of colonists being claimed by the "wrong" colonists, resulting in problems for both groups. The colonists are making their decisions a lot more intelligently now!
  
• A compass. The compass will display the location of colony banners, making it a lot easier to explore, travel and find back your colonies, and the colonies you share with friends in multiplayer.
• "Limit groups" for crafting jobs. Previously, changing the production limits of a job at a job block changed the limits for all job blocks of that type. Change the amount of bronze arrows produced at one anvil, and the crafting limits of all other anvils will change as well. That's still the default functionality, but you're now able to create custom "limit groups" and you're free to change which limit group is used by every single job block. For example, you can now have one anvil set to produce bronze arrows, while another only crafts crossbow bolts.
  
• Pausing. The game now pauses when you press escape. The new system that allows us to adjust the "simulation speed" of all the game's systems to 0, also allows us to change the simulation speed to other numbers - both slow-motion and fast-forwarding. You can experiment with this by enabling developer buttons in the settings menu and then using the numpad-buttons. Alternatively, with developer buttons and cheats enabled, use "/debug setsimspeed #", with # being less than 1 for slow-motion and more than 1 for fast-forwarding.

Survey Results

Participate in the Survey by clicking here! Update 0.7.5 will be released next week. If everything goes according to plan, the update will be live on Wednesday. In case of unexpected issues, the release will be delayed one or more days. The release will be announced on all the usual channels. Major new changes in 0.7.5 are:

• The ability to pause the game
• Crafting limit groups
• Improved "goal finding" - colonists should choose more sensible beds/crates/occupations
• A compass to find your way to colonies

Fifty-nine blogs ago we warned players about a significant pathfinding problem. Actually, its more of a goal-choosing problem. When choosing the closest bed/crate/grocery store/job/anything, they do not actually compare the paths they would need to take there. They compare the straight distance between their current location and their goal - ignoring walls, floors, terrain, anything that blocks their path. This is visualized in the image above. The miners will need a bed during the night. They search for the closest bed, ignoring terrain, and find the beds in the house above them. Within that circle, there are no closer beds. Then they calculate a path, which is a pretty long one. That path takes them through another underground room filled with beds. Theyll ignore those and go to the closest beds.
As you can see in the image above, when night falls, the colonists will go to the closest beds that actually require the longest path. This is how it has always been in CS. Weve received a moderate amount of complaints about wonky pathfinding and very weird bed use by colonists. Were pretty sure a large portion of these issues are caused by the problem described above. Well - in the internal dev build, this problem is now fixed :D
This is what our scenario looks like in dev build 0.7.5 - the miners are all in the sensible, closest beds! This wont make a massive difference in small, simple colonies, but it will probably have a major impact on large, complex colonies with twisting mines and multi-level buildings with limited stairs and entrances. Were planning to release 0.7.5 in 1-2 weeks and then wed love to hear how this changes things! Hopefully, a large amount of issues are fixed at once. Bedankt voor het lezen :) Reddit // Twitter // YouTube // Website // Discord

JoeMans Underground Colony / Unterirdische Kolonie The pathfinding has seen major improvements this week! In "debug-world", the closest crate or unused bed can now be found taking into account an approximation of the actual distance to get there instead of just the straight line distance. Now weve got to work to implement the improved code from the debug-world into the actual Colony-Survival-colonists. We hope to be able to show some impressive results in the next few weeks! For a detailed explanation of the pathfinding-problem in CS, please read this blog. One of CS's most active modders, Pandaros, has made some patches to expand the modding functionality of the game. One of these functionalities is to have the client show markers in the world when holding some type in the inventory. These patches have been integrated into the next update and are used for a new tool: the compass. Whenever you wield it, you'll see icons located at the banner of colonies you own. This functionality can be seen in the screenshot below:
To complete the pathfinding-trilogy, Ive also been working on a pathfinding-related programming experiment this week. My C# / Unity skills arent quite good enough to work on Colony Survival yet, but my learning-projects are getting more and more advanced. This week, I worked on and finished a maze-solver that allows people to generate a grid of a dynamic size, and to create a maze in it. That maze will be explored and solved dynamically. Heres a GIF of the project :) Bedankt voor het lezen! Reddit // Twitter // YouTube // Website // Discord

Bogs Starter Colony All changes mentioned in this blog concern the internal dev build, no update has been published to the public branch yet Our current task is improving the pathfinding. The code has been optimized, resulting in better performance. In some situations, the colonists do make better choices in regards to their paths. Theyre better at avoiding winding paths - which means theyll also avoid unnecessarily climbing blocks and stairs. There still is the problem where they choose their targets (beds, crates, etc) based on the straight line between the colonist and the target, totally ignoring the actual path they need to take there. Zun is thinking about this problem right now, and hes considering some options that might fix this. Zuns considered solution will probably be implemented within a couple of weeks, which means we can hopefully release 0.7.5 before the end of September. 0.7.5 will include the new individual crafting limits feature, the ability to pause the game, the (hidden in cheats/dev options) capability to adjust the simulation speed and the pathfinding improvements. Afterwards, well focus on better colony management tools, like the ability to remotely assign/disable jobs. They should be released in 0.7.6 :)

Roadmap

[This block of text was written last Sunday. The roadmap was written even earlier. I should've been spending the past five days on holiday. I might get back home and polish this up Friday evening, but if you're reading this, that probably didn't happen :) ][Edit: Zun was here]

General Disclaimer

Better Colony Management Tools

A Decent Tutorial

Blueprint Builders?

Streamlining and Extending the Core Gameplay Flows

Fixing Happiness

Industrial Content

AI Colonies

Built by SlayerOfLight, available on the Workshop here [All changes mentioned in this blog concern the currently unreleased internal dev build] After adding pausing as a feature, weve granted another common community request this week: individual crafting limits! In 0.7.5, you will be able to create new limit groups. This is a custom set of crafting limits. They can be applied to individual job blocks. For example, you could have 10 anvils, 5 operating with the default crafting limits, 3 using a scheme focused on bronze arrows and 2 focused on crossbow bolts. This should give players some much-requested extra control over their crafters!
Zun has also been working on pathfinding this week. It has mainly been work focused on optimization, but he has some plans to make pathfinding more sensible! There are currently some limitations that cause suboptimal choices in certain situations - especially when the point to point distance is small but the actual path theyve got to take is long. We think this can be improved.

Roadmap

The release of 0.7.4 went smoothly! But as predicted, there was a minor issue. The colony ownership buttons (kick / set to leader / leave) werent working properly. So we released 0.7.4.1 this week, fixing that and simultaneously updating the German and Chinese translations. Zun already had an idea for a new change. We did have a command for changing the time of day, but it didnt affect the rest of the world. He has been working on a new system that alters the speed of nearly all in-game systems. You can make a day pass by 10 times as fast, and colonists will actually walk and work 10 times as fast as well. It also works in the reverse direction, with a 0.1x speed being possible, resulting in extreme slow-motion. Last but not least, it enables us to easily add pausing to the game. In our internal unreleased 0.7.5 dev build, pressing escape now freezes your world. In that dev build, numpad 1 to 5 control the speed, going from slow-motion to fast-forwarding. But this only works when Enable developer buttons has been toggled on and cheats have been enabled as well. For finer control, theres also a new command: /debug setsimspeed #. # can be anything from 0 to infinity. Weve been thinking about making access to the simulation speed available in a more official way, but were not sure whether thats a good idea. Why grow bigger and recruit 10 scientists, when you can have 1 scientist and fast-forward x10 for the same effect? Were worried itll remove a core incentive of the gameplay. Currently, monsters arent saved. When going back to the main menu, monsters are deleted and will not reappear when reloading the world. This happens because otherwise they will try to do things in a half-loaded world, which leads to all kinds of problems. With our newfound ability to change the simulation speed, the monsters can be paused during loading, preventing these problems and allowing us to restore monsters when loading a world. Zun will try to implement this next week! Slow-motion and fast-forwarding are obviously features that dont work well in static pictures. Thats why we made a video! Disclaimer: there's some stuttering/teleporting going on because of the high sim speed (x30), it's a known issue and WIP :) Here it is: https://youtu.be/4F-h0nAUK1g Bedankt voor het lezen! Reddit // Twitter // YouTube // Website // Discord

We've just released a fresh update! It should be arriving at all of your PCs right this moment. Its the most serious overhaul of the UI since the Early Access release three years ago. Weve strived to make the UI simultaneously more intuitive, more beautiful nd more capable. We think weve accomplished all of these goals simultaneously, but wed love to receive your feedback! To view images of some of the changes without launching the game, check this blog or this blog. Heres a partial list of changes. The full changelog can be found in-game.

• Huge overhaul of the Colony Tab, features have moved from pop-ups to the tab itself
• Updated core UI elements: new lists, new buttons, new font. These appear in multiple places.
• Diplomacy menu has been improved significantly
• Trashcan: it appears when dragging items and can be used to delete them
• In-game savegame converter SP<>MP
• UI scaling, which is mostly meant for 4K support but can be useful in other circumstances as well
• Dynamic crosshair, which changes based on your target, and can be modded easily
• Its not necessary to use F1 to disable the quickstart anymore
• Unity has been updated from 2018.4 to 2019.4. This slightly changed some post processing effects, and deprecated Linux 32-bit support (official system requirements demanded 64-bit since the release)
• Added an option to permanently toggle on the block highlight visual

Things got wonky in 4K All mentioned changes in this blog concern the internal dev build that has not been released yet This week's work had quite a lot of visible results, and were eager to share them with you. First of all, weve added a new menu called interface settings. It adds the much requested feature to be able to permanently see the blue block highlight, that during normal gameplay only appears when youre removing and placing blocks. Toggling this option on means youll always see it when hovering over a block. Apart from that, the menu also allows you to rapidly re-enable the developer buttons. These are the functions mapped to the F keys. They were enabled by default in 0.1.0, but too many people accidentally broke their game with them. A while ago, they were disabled and hidden behind a toggle, and that toggle has received a better place in the UI now.
A new option, enabled by default, is the adaptive crosshair. It subtly changes shape and color according to the context. Its small and simple when the crosshair is aiming at the air or a distant block. When clicking will result in mining a block, the crosshair grows larger. When hovering over the banner, it turns red/yellow; when hovering over a colonist; orange, when hovering over a job block; blue. The results can be seen in the following image, with the size of the crosshair 400% enlarged for clarity purposes:
Its a minor change, but it should make the game feel slightly more tactile and intuitive. Last but not least, theres a UI scaling option thats mainly meant to resolve a common issue for people with 4K monitors. Until now, the UI itself didnt scale with resolution. Compare it to plates on a table: when you shrink the table, the plates stay the same size. Thats pretty useful to keep things legible on a small / low-res monitor, but on a 4K monitor it meant you had some tiny plates in the corners of a massive table. We thought fixing this issue was relatively complicated, but some minor tweaks worked a lot better than expected, so weve now got support for UI scaling. Players can choose what they feel is comfortable, and playing in 4K resolution is a lot more viable now.
Fullscreen While Zun has been working on issues like this, Ive kept growing my Unity / C# / VR skills. My projects have been growing steadily more complicated - up to the point that Im regularly breaking them in a way that cant be fixed with some CTRL-Zs. Ive finally decided to learn to deal with Git. It was easier to set up than I thought, and it works very well. Git is a hugely important tool in many organizations that develop software, and it makes collaboration a lot easier and more reliable. Its another small step in the long road of being able to contribute to Colony Survival directly, instead of merely providing textures / 3D-models / ideas :) Bedankt voor het lezen! Reddit // Twitter // YouTube // Website // Discord

Monday morning, Zuns PC broke. It seemed that the motherboard was malfunctioning. It was a relatively old one, and buying a decent new one also involved buying a new CPU and RAM. And while he was overhauling the thing anyway, he also decided to purchase upgrades like a new case. All the parts shouldve been delivered on Tuesday, but one part suddenly went out of stock and thus the entire order was delivered Thursday afternoon. One benefit: Zuns PC is a lot faster now :) So theres not much to talk about in regards to in-game changes, but we think theres still plenty of relevant stuff to say. This week, we were having some pretty extensive internal discussions about suggestions. A common question that popped up again in #general is where is the suggestions channel. We dont have one! A channel for suggestions implies that its for suggestions only. But lists of isolated suggestions, especially for broad features like NPC colonies and war, arent very useful. What we need is more detailed information. How exactly would you implement it? Which new UI elements are needed? How much development time is it worth? What percentage of the community likes it, and how much do they like it? Would it make older savegames incompatible? Thats why wed generally like people to share their suggestions in #general. It invites discussion with the rest of the community, and thats very useful to flesh out suggestions. That doesnt mean the current system is perfect though. We've got a bunch of goals that are hard to optimize for all at the same time:

• Individuals should be able to share their suggestions with us, the devs
• The community should be able to see suggestions made by others from the community
• The community should be able to see the plans we the devs are working on, and the things were planning to add later on
• All these plans and suggestions should have detailed explanations with pros and cons, without turning it into a TL;DR
• Players should be able to easily leave feedback; comments would be good, but quick like/dislike feedback is useful as well
• The list of plans and suggestions should be sortable / auto-sort based on feedback like that

This week, we've implemented and changed some things that should be visible a lot of the time! Firstly, we changed one of our main fonts. It was kinda runic, and we thought it fit the medieval / Viking aesthetic pretty well. But it only had capital letters, so a lot of things in the UI were WRITTEN LIKE THIS. We experiment with a couple of different fonts that support both regular and capital letters, and we found one we were pretty fond of. It lacks the runic inspiration, but we really like how it changes the UI. Its more legible, and calmer - not like someone is screaming at you. Heres an example of the main menu with both the old font (on top) and the new font (below):
In the above example, it's just a simple font change. But in the next example, you can see how it combines with the other UI changes. We believe its a major step in the right direction, and that its both aesthetically and functionally superior. But we still love to hear your feedback!
And while were comparing old and new UIs, heres a final example. Apart from a complete revamp of the style, it also clarifies the old system by dividing it up into infinite and limited trades.
Theres another minor feature thats visible a majority of the time: the crosshair. We have never given it much thought, but are trying to improve it now. Were planning to turn it into a dynamic crosshair, one that changes slightly to fit different situations. For example, here are four states that could be reflected in the crosshair:

• Youre aiming at the air/distant blocks that cant be touched from your current position
• Youre aiming at a close block that will be removed if you click
• Youre aiming at a job block and right-clicking will open a new menu
• Youre aiming at the banner and right-clicking will open the linked menu

Politics on Discord

This morning started with a long call between me and Zun. He thought he had perhaps had a migraine attack in the middle of the night, and he had woken up pretty groggy. Then we talked about the progress of the week and what to write in the Friday Blog. At the end of the call, at the start of this afternoon I suddenly got a migraine attack. Luckily, these rarely last longer than 4-5 hours, so were still able to put out a Friday Blog on Friday - even if its Friday evening :) But this will be a short one. [All changes concern the internal dev build and have not been released yet] Zun has updated the version of Unity that Colony Survival runs on. We were still using Unity 2018, but weve now gone to Unity 2019. Thats the awesome thing about Unity - it makes it possible to actually skip 2020. This new version upgrades some post processing effects like Eye Adaptation and Anti-Aliasing. They also required some tweaking, so the game looks slightly different now. Better, IMHO! The screenshot above is made with the 2019 version. Its not all sunshine and rainbows though. Unity 2019 doesn't support the Linux 32 bit version of the game, so itll be deprecated with the next update. Luckily, this affects only a very small percentage of our playerbase because the vast majority of Linux users are on 64 bit systems. Our stated minimum system requirements already recommended 64-bit Linux for years. It has also caused issues with the torch shader for certain Mac configurations. Zun has found and implemented a workaround! Last but not least, he has also ported the features that used Rust to now use Unity Burst. It won't have a noticeable impact now, but it's a good starting point for future developments. Thats it for today, enjoy your weekend, dont get COVID and certainly dont spread it :) Bedankt voor het lezen! Reddit // Twitter // YouTube // Website // Discord

This week, progress on the interface has continued. Were currently not working on any revolutionary new stuff that totally changes how the game works, but were adding a lot of polish and small little tweaks that fix common demands. One example is the converter that can make singleplayer worlds suitable for multiplayer and vice versa. Another example weve been looking at this week is making the UI properly suitable for 4K monitors. Below is an image that contrasts the old 0.7.3 Colony Menu (first half) with the planned 0.7.4 Colony Menu (unexpectedly, the second half). In our current internal dev build, it does look close to that and the functionality is there! Many other UI elements have been overhauled in a similar way.

Revolutionary New Stuff That Totally Changes How The Game Works

Pathros Last weeks blog announced a pretty dramatic plan to uncouple the amount of monsters and unhappiness from the amount of currently recruited colonists. We still had some questions about the precise implementation though, and we received a lot of comments to help us with that! Were now thinking of determining a Civilization Level that is linked to multiple factors like unlocked tech, amount of colonists recruited, and monster magnets, special monuments that quickly raise your Civilization Level. These monuments take quite some time and resources to craft, and when theyre placed in the world they rapidly raise your Civilization Level. When theyre removed, the monuments are destroyed (so you cant rapidly place and remove them without cost), and your Civilization Level will drop again. A high Civilization Level will allow you to unlock new tech and continue your progress, but it will also attract more monsters and increase the demand for happiness items. Zun has continued revamping the UI. Its going to be a very substantial update that will add new UI features, reorganize older features and improve the look of a lot of UI elements.

Welcome to 2020, Part II

"Borg Invasion!" by Landru In the past weeks & months, we've thought a lot about improving the gameplay flow of Colony Survival. In past blogs, weve already shared a lot of our ideas, and weve received a lot of great feedback. Thanks for that! This week, we were suddenly gripped by a new idea that would shake things up dramatically. We want to uncouple the size of the nightly monster assault and the amount of happiness youve got to generate from the amount of colonists currently in your colony. Currently, the amount of monsters that spawns at night is linked directly to the amount of colonists, and every colonist present in your colony generates +1 Unhappiness by Overpopulation, which requires you to distribute more and more happiness items. We organized things like this to keep the challenge of the game appropriate at all sizes. As you grow your colony, the size of the challenge grows with you. But you run into a bit of the same problem as the one in Skyrim. Enemies in Skyrim get stronger as you increase your level. This makes it very important to make sure you dont waste levels. Imagine boosting your Enchanting very high but not using it to craft powerful gear. Enemies will have become stronger, but you didnt. The same thing happens in Colony Survival. If you recruit a bunch of colonists but you dont put them to work efficiently, youll have made the game quite difficult. On the other hand, if you do work very efficiently and stay relatively small, the game will be a lot easier - while youre missing out on some core gameplay! So were thinking of completely changing that system. Lets give an example. At certain in-game thresholds, we expect players to have roughly X amount of colonists. For crossbows, thats something like 50-100, for matchlock guns more like 150-250. We want to add new stages of the game that will ultimately require players to have around 800-1000 colonists. But instead of making it so that the amount of monsters and the amount of required happiness items are tied directly to the amount of colonists you have, we could tie it to these stages. Around the point you unlock crossbows, youll get assaulted by monsters as if youve got 75 colonists. With matchlock guns, the game will act as if youve got 200 colonists. And when you progress to printing presses and steam engines, itll be as if youve got hundreds of colonists more. You could run a tight, efficient colony that deals with these challenges with lower amounts of colonists. On the other hand, players are free to expand to far larger numbers and brute-force these challenges. Why solve a problem with 500 efficient colonists when 1000 inefficient colonists can do the same?
We really like the sound of these ideas, but weve got a hard time working out the details. Were thinking of multiple approaches. A.) Meta-levels In the overhauled Colony Survival, there will be a Repeating Scientist, and to progress, youve got to upgrade your jobs from level 1 to level 5, 10, 15, 20, etcetera. There could be a meta-level that has to be reached before you can unlock them. To get Guard Level 5 / Health Level 5 / Banner Range Level 5, you need Meta-Level 5. Every time you upgrade the Meta-Level, more and stronger monsters will assault your colony, and youll need to produce more and more happiness items. Pros

• Does the job
• Pretty straightforward

• Adds another level of numbers and abstractions
• How to deal with setbacks? What if monsters overwhelm your defenses and slaughter half of your colonists?
• It strongly favors a balanced approach where everything is leveled to [current meta-level] before upgrading to [next meta-level] above colonies that are more specialized in certain things

• Voluntarism!
• Liberty!
• More rewards/resources/currencies!

• A lot of players are going to set the challenge very low and progress in a very slow, grinding manner, and then complain the game is boring
• If the monsters are so easy to control, the challenge is way less exciting

• It Just Works, doesnt require players to figure out new systems
• Could automatically scale up and down

• What exactly will we tie the system to? It will discourage doing that activity, like it currently discourages recruiting colonists.

Last week, we were talking about the planned overhaul. We were very enthusiastic, but we got quite some skeptical replies! We think we understand your concerns, and we hope we can convince you that we can prevent the feared issues from arising. We believe Colony Survival is the most fun when you grow pretty large. Dont stop at 20 colonists, recruit 200. Or 800. Or 1500! Of course, the game has to stay challenging, so the difficulty of the problems you face scale with you as your colony grows. Monsters keep becoming more numerous and stronger, youll need to produce more and more food, and overpopulation creates growing unhappiness that needs to be countered with happiness items. But that means were punishing you for the thing were trying to encourage - growth. Currently, players are motivated to stay as small and as efficient as possible. Colonists have pretty high upkeep costs in the form of monsters, food and happiness items, so an inefficient colonist is a dangerous liability for the rest of the colony. In last weeks blog, we said we wanted to make things like textiles significantly more expensive. This would make a lot of current colonies unsustainable, with only the most efficient colonies surviving. This is not our goal! While recruiting colonists is punished, there is another form of progress in the game that is actually extremely cheap. There is no durability or scientific regression in Colony Survival. Weapons and job blocks are usable for eternity, scientific unlocks will stay available and/or active until the end of time. While an inefficient colonist is a bad investment, these items and unlocks have infinite time to make a profit. No upkeep, no depreciation. This means that raising the upkeep costs of colonists can literally make the game unplayable, but raising the cost of these eternal improvements could merely make the game slow. And theres a great way to boost your production in Colony Survival - recruit more colonists! Thats exactly what we want to encourage.
Currently, players will spend most of their time balancing things like the production of ammo, food and happiness items - the costs of having colonists. Unlocking things in the tech tree, or producing eternal items like weapons and job blocks, dont require much items or time. A matchlock gun gets crafted in roughly 10 seconds, perhaps less. Im not an expert, and it probably varied from gunsmith to gunsmith, but Im pretty sure it took people a lot longer than that to craft a gun in medieval times, without machine tools or similar modern improvements. So instead of having very high variable costs (punishing players for recruiting colonists and not being very efficient) and very low fixed costs (making it possible to complete the important part of the tech tree quite easily with only ~100 colonists), we want to overhaul the game to be more like the opposite. Crafting advanced items and unlocking end-game content should be a very substantial task that requires a huge colony with many workers, but these individual workers shouldnt be too burdensome. This shouldnt exactly make the game easy or way less challenging, but we believe setting up large scale production is a more interesting challenge than navigating the very unintuitive happiness menu and making exactly the right choices or your colony fails. We hope this is a better explanation, and we hope youre also enthusiastic. If you are, or arent, please let us know in the comments or on Discord!
In the meanwhile, Zun has been continuing his work on improving the UI. He has added some nice small improvements that were pretty common requests: (not released yet)

• You can edit existing diplomacy rules
• You can close the quickstart menu with a close button instead of having to press F1 (was often problematic for Mac users)
• You can delete outdated worlds in the load menu now
• An in-game converter than can change SP worlds to co-op worlds and vice versa

The Arch Temple by Saphrax, again When we recently tested Colony Survival we were shocked to discover two things: [olist]

Different parts of the tech tree have wildly different ingredients and prerequisites: there isnt really a big major production chain that can be improved and expanded from the start of the game to the end[/olist] As talked about before, we want to change this dramatically. Its a major overhaul so were still thinking and debating about the details. One thing we keep mentioning again and again in our discussions is exponential. Youve probably noticed that your expansion accelerates as you keep playing the game. Going from 0 to 50 colonists takes longer than going from 300 to 350 colonists. This is one source of exponential progress. But we also want to introduce industrial tech that speeds up your production, and we want to add the Repeating Scientist who can boost the efficiency of certain jobs over and over again. This means that youll be able to dramatically expand your production. That leads to a pretty difficult problem. We need to find a useful, consistent goal for these enormous capabilities. Something that is relevant both before and after the industrial revolution. Here are a couple of the things were thinking about: Textiles Textiles were a key industry during the industrial revolution. They were obviously important before that period though, and still highly useful today. Currently, making a piece of cloth in Colony Survival goes very quickly, and it has only limited usefulness. We want to make the initial cost of a piece of cloth a lot higher (but with the ability to improve your production) while requiring more of it in your production chains. Steel precision parts Humans have used metals in general and iron in specific for a very long time. Steel is an alloy of iron and carbon that in real life is hard to produce on a large scale - it also took until the industrial revolution until that was possible, although it was invented a lot earlier. We want to make the process of developing steel in Colony Survival more difficult and expensive as well. Large amounts of it will be necessary to develop industrial machines. Another part of the metalworking problem is making precision parts. Think of the complex machinery in clocks and guns. This is something else that we can make more expensive in the beginning, but with the possibility to scale it up dramatically with tools like the lathe. Data The production and sharing of data is something that has been growing on an exponential scale for a very long time now. Just look at this graph of the production of printed books a couple of centuries ago:
Source But thats not a trend that is over, were still in the middle of rapid exponential progress. Heres a graph of the current growth in digital data:
Source We hope were able to combine these trends into a satisfying long term gameplay loop in Colony Survival. Instead of jumping from one disjointed part of the tech tree to another with completely different requirements, and completing all useful science with only 120 colonists, we want to make it so that theres a satisfying path of continuously expanding production - producing lots of textiles for lots of colonists who use many hundreds of complex, expensive machines that assist in the production of more of these machines and in the production of lots of data, which can be used to improve the colony as a whole. We hope this sounds as good to you as it does to us! At the moment, these are still plans, not things we're currently working on. We're still busy improving the interface. Here are two work-in-progress screenshots of changed menus:

Bedankt voor het lezen :D Reddit // Twitter // YouTube // Website // Discord

[ 2020-06-12 11:02:33 CET ] [ Original post ]

The Arch Temple by Saphrax This week, Zun continued revamping the code behind the UI, and his efforts are starting to bear fruit! Some of the standard UI elements that are reused in multiple places look a lot better now - in our opinion, of course. Well continue like this for a couple of weeks - the results until now seem well worth the effort, and there are plenty of other rough spots in the UI that need some tender loving care. Currently, the Colony Tab is a list of ugly buttons. At first, we wanted to make it a list of beautiful buttons. But we just realized that we could bring forward some of the most important elements that are now hidden behind a button, like the recruitment menu and the difficulty settings. They should be instantly visible and usable when you go to the Colony Tab.
Old UI on the left, updated UI on the right Last week, we announced some pretty radical plans to overhaul a lot of the systems in CS. We received a lot of enthusiastic and helpful feedback so thats good news! The overhaul is becoming very likely. Our current roadmap looks roughy like this now:

• 0.7.4: An overhaul to make existing UI elements more beautiful and intuitive.
• 0.7.5 / 0.7.6 / 0.7.7: New UI elements like a better job management menu, clearer messages and alarms, a decent tutorial, and perhaps even blueprint builders!
• 0.8.0: A massive overhaul to the way unlocks and content are structured, with new systems like the Repeating Scientist (To Be Renamed) who processes Data - all planned in such a way that it can smoothly transition to an Industrial Revolution
• 0.8.1 (0.9.0?): Industrial content with new features such as multi-block jobblocks, pipes and electricity

A lot of our menus, like the science menu and the stockpile, are handcrafted in Unity. Other menus, like the colony menu and a lot of the pop-up menus there, are generated from code. This code can also be used by modders for their own custom menus. The old code didnt offer a lot of options, and it resulted in pretty bare-bones menus. Zun is currently working to upgrade this code, giving us more formatting options, allowing us to present them in a more beautiful and intuitive manner. Currently, this doesnt have any impressive visual results yet, but when its done it should pretty much instantly transform a decent part of the UI. Something else this week did have very concrete results. Weve had some intense discussions about the current content. Two weeks ago, we also talked about 0.8.0, but we were mostly talking about content to be added pretty much after the end of the current tech tree. But this week, we were talking about radically restructuring the tech tree thats already in-game. I made a small map that explains how the current tech tree feels to me:
Fullscreen From left to right: 1# The banner range upgrades; #2 The stove and related happiness items; #3 The upgrades regarding metals and weapons, culminating in multiple colonies; #4 The health upgrades The banner range upgrades have a nice, consistent feel to them. Its clear that recruiting more colonists results in a bigger safe zone. But its separated from the rest of the tech tree. Theres a bunch of bad science surrounding the stove. A lot of the unlocks have weird prerequisites related to their predecessors; requiring honey to unlock fish, requiring fish to unlock olives, that kind of thing. And these unlocks are often not useful in isolation: a fisherman is useless without a stove to turn raw fish into edible fish. Thirdly, once youve unlocked all stove-related science, youve got pretty much all of the happiness items you need to get to the endgame. Then theres the health sciences. Theyre pretty much disconnected from the rest of the tech tree. Theyre a fun diversion for the curious, but not much more than that. Theres one main line forward, and it starts with the science related to new ores and metals and how to convert them into weapons, added in 0.4.0. When thats finished, theres a massive threshold added mostly into 0.7.0, with advanced science bags, gliders, colony starter kits and traders. Theyre hard to unlock, and when thats done, they dont offer any practical benefit until youve actually travelled a long distance and set up a second, distant colony. And then the only purpose is new happiness items - which arent really needed when youve got an efficient small colony. The current tech tree isnt the result of one coherent strategy. Over the time of multiple years we prioritized different problems and tried to fix them with different solutions. The tech tree reflects that: its a patchwork thats pretty disjointed in a lot of places. Some parts rely heavily on science bags, others ignore it pretty much completely. Some parts have very light requirements, while others become a lot more costly pretty randomly. We want to fix that. The tech tree should be a more unified whole, consistently rewarding the same type of activities. Steps should be short and simple in the beginning, but should smoothly grow harder but more rewarding over time. Each unlock in the tech tree should be useful by itself, and shouldnt rely on three following unlocks before they have tangible results. The tech tree shouldnt be over when youve got 150 colonists. One way to do this is by extending the tech tree with meaningful, rewarding content, and we definitely want to do that. But we also want to make it more labor intensive to reach the end of the game. Even the current content should require more colonists. The game should still be challenging when your colony grows, so currently, theres a lot of costs that scale as you recruit more colonists. Every new colonist requires food, happiness items and it will attract more monsters (requiring you to produce ammo and recruit guards). But balancing this is pretty hard. Some (more experienced) players will run very efficient colonies, where all colonists spend their time on important tasks. Other colonies wont be like that, with long walking distances, idling colonists and colonists crafting items that arent very relevant. These could just be inexperienced players, or players focused on building a beautiful colony instead of a hyper efficient one. If the game is balanced properly for this second category, the first category will quickly build up huge surpluses and wont encounter much challenge as their colony grows bigger. Theyll also reach the end of the tech tree much quicker. So were thinking of introducing more fixed costs. Instead of pushing for efficiency by making colonists themselves very expensive, we want to make progress itself more expensive: an example would be the Repeating Scientists who use data (talked about it in this blog) , but also by making science and permanent items like job blocks and weapons more expensive (more labor intensive, especially). This should negate the negative effects mentioned above. To balance out these increased costs, we might make the "daily cost" of having a colonist a bit lower, with for example a bit less happiness items being required, especially at the start. Implementing this requires us to overhaul the entire tech tree and the full production chain. Were reconsidering the costs of all science and all items. If were going to do this, itll be a massive overhaul, and we hope itll be worth it. But your opinion is important. What do you think of this analysis? Do you recognize it in your own playthroughs and do you think its important to fix these? Or are we completely missing the mark and/or overstating the negative consequences? Let us know in the comments or on Discord! Bedankt voor het lezen :D Reddit // Twitter // YouTube // Website // Discord

Last weeks blog received a lot of comments! There were many enthusiastic replies, which is awesome to see. Others were a bit more critical - which is also useful! A common request was adding daily production/consumption stats to the statistics menu. This is something we'd also love to see. One of the future updates should add a "Daily Report" with a lot of detailed info on what has happened in the past 24 (in-game) hours: how many monsters spawned, how were they killed, what was produced and consumed? This data will also be presented in the statistics menu. Some other concerns were also mentioned in the comments. Some people want us to polish up the basics a bit more. Working on it :) Others worry that the transition from current tech to industrial tech might be too abrupt. Were trying to make it a smooth, natural progression!
Second half is a mock-up, it's not in-game! This week, work on 0.7.4 has started. Were working to make the UI simultaneously more beautiful and more intuitive. The image above shows the current 0.7.3 UI in the first half and a mock-up for what it could look like in the second half. The menu wont look exactly like that in 0.7.4, but its roughly the improvement were striving for. Weve got quite a lot of UI elements that are looking pretty shabby and/or arent intuitive for newer players. That shouldnt be true anymore when we release 0.7.4.

Covid-19

This Monday, we released 0.7.3! Things seem to have gone quite well. There were some minor problems but they were fixed in a small patch on Wednesday. Check #small-patch-changelog on Discord or the in-game changelog for full details. In the past weeks, both Zun and I have done extensive playthroughs without using any cheats, and our last time doing that was around the release of 0.7.0. Back then, we felt like the amount of content was pretty good, but a lot of the interface around it was rather rushed together. Thats why weve been working on UI updates like statistics, and well continue improving the UI for multiple months. But these recent playthroughs gave us quite some new insights. Here are some of our observations, and let us know whether you agree or disagree with them:

• The UI still has some very rough spots. Some features, like the amount of calories in the diet of your colonists, are in sore need of better explanation. Improving these rough spots is very worthwhile.
• One of the most fun parts of the game is reorganizing the landscape to suit your needs. Building useful structures and efficient infrastructure between them, building defenses, digging tunnels. Making it so that workers and guards can get where they need to be without monsters easily getting to them. New jobs, new science, new challenges are fun not because these features are so awesome by themselves, but because they encourage the gameplay described above.
• At the start, science and happiness accomplish these goals very well. They require you to mine, grow and craft new resources, which requires you to grow your colony larger and build more structures.
• Not all paths of the tech tree are equally fun and rewarding, some are convoluted and/or feel like dead ends
• Its quite easily possible to unlock matchlock guns with only 100-150 colonists and without any shortage of happiness items. After this, the rest of the tech tree is dedicated to exploration and finding new happiness items, which is nice optional fun, but not necessary if youre not facing a shortage of happiness items. Further expansion could be done for fun, but isnt really required or rewarded by the game mechanics - unlike the growth at the beginning thats fundamentally necessary to make progress in the tech tree.

Repeating Science

New Features: Transporting Fluids and Electricity

Your Opinion?

The new update is available for everybody right now! Its 100% compatible with older savegames. The biggest change is the addition of the statistics menu. It displays a wide variety of data:

• Stockpile. It shows how many of each item have been present in your stockpile. Its a useful tool to figure out how much youre structurally under- or overproducing.
• Happiness. A history of all happiness effects. The effects of individual items are tracked, just like the effects of crowdedness, rationing and misc causes.
• Food Intake. Data on the diet of the average colonist. How much calories does he consume, and which food items contribute to that?
• Total Calories. Displays the total amount of calories you've had stored in the stockpile over time. There's a line for the true total, and individual trackers for each food item.
• Idle Job Time. When your workers lack ingredients, or when theyve reached the specified limits, they stop working and start idling. The graph shows how much time has been spent idling in every job category. This way, you can easily figure out which jobs have been the most unproductive.
• Colony. Shows the history of the data in the top-left corner: total amount of colonists, beds and unemployed colonists.
• Inbound & Outbound Trade. This should give a much clearer view of how your trade between colonies is going.

This was a week of testing and finishing touches. Names were changed for cosmetic reasons and clarity. Performance was increased and network usage reduced. Mod support was expanded: modders now have the ability to collect and display custom statistics! Zun is still working on adding a new category of data: total stored calories, including a true total and totals per food type. It shouldnt take long, so the Monday release date is pretty definitive! I must admit, it had been a while since my last playthrough of Colony Survival, without cheats. To test the new statistics, I mostly loaded up pre-existing worlds. This time, I planted my banner in a self-made hole in the side of a cliff. Its a challenging location which results in all kinds of weird paths to make sure workers and guards can get where they need to be without monsters getting to the banner. I had a lot of fun! In the months since my last legitimate, serious playthrough, Ive played quite some other games and done a lot of thinking about UI design. Playing CS with this fresh perspective resulted in a large amount of new insights. There are a lot of things that can be changed or tweaked to make the game more intuitive and streamlined.
Next week, well be listening to your experiences with and comments on 0.7.3, and hotfixes will be deployed when necessary. Afterwards, well start working on new changes to the UI, and implementing those new insights. 0.7.4 is will be mainly cosmetic. A lot of the new 0.7.0 UI features are pretty barebones, like the colony tab and the trading menu. They really need a coat of paint. Lots of places could use a tooltip to become a bit clearer. We need to make the UI look more professional while simultaneously being more intuitive to use. When the current UI looks decent, we want to add some new menus. They will be split among multiple updates (0.7.5, 0.7.6, 0.7.7). For example, there should be a Job Management Menu which indicates how many job slots of each type are empty. It should also be possible to prioritize certain jobs, to make sure they get manned when theres a shortage of workers. Another new menu that Im really looking forward to is a decent Message System. Currently, important messages and warnings are sent straight to the chatbox, where they appear as a simple, single line of text. Were thinking of something thats a bit of a cross between the pop-ups in the traditional Total War games and Gmail. Different icons should appear in the corner of the screen to indicate different messages: lack of workers to fill a job, science completed, colonists killed by monsters. You should be able to click on them or find them in a list of messages to get more info. New players can use this info to learn the game quicker; expert players can use it to pinpoint problems more precisely. When the Message System is in-game, we can also add new kinds of messages that are currently impossible. The one Im really excited for is the Daily Report. Imagine, every day at sunrise, a streamlined report that clearly conveys information like this:

• Congratulations, your colony survived day #!
• In the past night, your guard type A/B/C killed # monster of type X/Y/Z
• In the past 24 hours, you gained/lost # colonists and added/removed # jobs
• # amount of happiness item A/B/C were distributed to your colony, resulting in # happiness

Wil's colony We decided on a release date for the next update! Its Monday May 10. This gives us one big week to perfect the last couple of details. This week, we added the last big new category to the statistics menu: info on idling colonists. When youve got a lack of workers with a certain job, your production chain will break down because of shortages. But the reverse can also happen: too many workers in one job, resulting in a lack of items to craft, or a lack of ingredients to craft those items. Unlike in real life, idling workers dont have any benefits in Colony Survival. It doesnt cause them to relax and become happier; it doesnt make them ponder about their work methods resulting in boosted efficiency. Its a costly waste: these colonists dont produce anything but they keep consuming food and happiness items, and their mere presence attracts extra monsters every night. But determining which workers are truly superfluous is pretty hard. Periods of idling come and go. Many colonies start the day furiously compensating for ammo lost during the day, but these tasks are often finished long before the day is over. Other shortages in the supply chain can cause idling to appear and disappear randomly throughout the day. Accurately assessing this while physically strolling through your colony is pretty difficult, and the statistics menu makes it a lot easier. It counts the total amount of milliseconds spend idling per second, per job category. When lots of workers in a job category start idling, they generate a massive peak that is easy to identify. When you compare these peaks to the trend in earlier days, it becomes very easy to notice structural issues in your job allocation.
Weve made more progress this week. A couple of weeks ago, we added a new system allowing players to use commands in the search bar. These commands can be used to search for specific categories, or to filter out items based on other parameters. To make players familiar with this new system, weve added buttons to the stockpile. In the previously empty space next to the search bar, there are a couple of buttons that put helpful default commands into the search bar. In the screenshot below, you can see how this works with the combat button.
We also spend this week doing seemingly unimportant optimizations that are required to get the update up to release quality. One example is localization, another can be seen in the screenshot below. As you can see, some texts are rendered sharper than others. That has been fixed, but theyre the kind of unpredictable small problems that make the difference between functional and ready for release.
There are still a couple of similar problems waiting to be addressed. Right now, Zun is testing performance on worlds with lots of colonies with lots of colonists - like servers with many players. Weve also still got to look at the way this update impacts mods. And today, were starting a closed beta test that might result in unforeseen problems. But were pretty convinced that well be able to release update 0.7.3 in 9 days, on Monday May 10! Bedankt voor het lezen :D Reddit // Twitter // YouTube // Website // Discord

All screenshots in today's Friday Blog are made in Wil's colony! [All changes concern the internal dev build which will hopefully be released to the public in 1-2 weeks] Lots of new features got added to the statistics screen this week. Happiness data is now separated into individual happiness items. This makes it a lot easier to figure out problems with unhappy colonists by analysing historical trends. The same has happened to the calories data: you can track the individual components of the diet your average colonist eats. Two other categories track inbound and outbound trade. Its a lot easier to keep track of trade relationships between colonies now. Last week, Comrade Matt left a comment with a good suggestion: Honestly features like statistics, if they work without particularly bad bugs should just be released as they develop. On first sight, I agreed - why are we waiting so long to release this feature? So, I asked Zun. The answer is twofold. Firstly, as always, updates often generate a lot of work for mod developers and server hosts. But lots of people dont use these features, so they dont really care about that. For these people, a relevant part two: the statistics menu is pretty sensitive. After only a minor change, it needs to reload all data. Pretty much every Friday for the past weeks, I start the day by idling a colony for an hour to get new data in the most recent build. To get data for the full 24 days, the max time range you can see on the graph, youve got to play for five hours! Were pretty sure that people will be disappointed when we release the stats screen and we erase all their hard-earned data one or two weeks after the update. So were making sure that all the important data is in there, and that bugs and problems are fixed as good as we possibly can before releasing.
Theres one big category left that we want to include: % job idling. When a certain type of job has reached the limit of every item they produce, or if they lack the ingredients to produce a single in-demand item, all colonists with that job will be idling. Sometimes, this happens pretty randomly because youre messing with supply chains. But in a lot of situations, there are clear patterns to recognize: for example, colonists start by crafting lots of ammo and reach the recipe limit around 2PM - resulting in these colonists idling for most of the afternoon. We think the statistics graph can help immensely to make this clearer.
When job idling has been added to the graph, the update needs a couple of finishing touches. We need to check the impact of big colonies on performance - bigger & more colonies = more data. Currently, all the data is gathered in one frame, and it might be useful to smooth that out over a couple of frames. We must allow proper localization of the new menu, and weve got to see how it works with mods. 0.7.1 added a lot more advanced mod support. 0.7.2 changed the lighting, but barely had an impact on mods. This could be the first time were going to break mods with the new mod support system, so we might have to add some UI for outdated mods. Last but not least, we want to add some buttons in the empty space next to the search bar of the stockpile to explain the new system with options like searching for categories by adding cat:. We hope all of this can be done in 1-2 weeks, but theres always a risk of unforeseen problems. Bedankt voor het lezen :D Reddit // Twitter // YouTube // Website // Discord

Colony Survival is always split in two. Theres the client: the part of the game that runs on your PC, which renders the game and the UI. Then there is the server. When you join a multiplayer game hosted by a friend, your friend runs the server. But even in singleplayer, theres always a CS-server running - just in the background on your own PC. This means development for singleplayer and multiplayer is pretty much identical, which is very useful. But it also means that developing new features is quite a bit harder than it would be for a purely singleplayer game. Its a bit comparable to driving a car with two persons - one using the gas pedal and the brakes, the other one using the steering wheel. Its possible, but itll require quite a lot of communication and itll always be less efficient than just one driver. Like the two drivers, the client doesnt automatically have all the information the server has. One of the limitations of the client was having knowledge of only one colony. The server only sent the information for the currently active colony. We wanted the statistics menu to display info for other owned colonies as well, so that had to be fixed. It took a couple of days, but its done! In the internal dev build, its now possible to switch to the statistics of your other colonies. Now that the client has data from other colonies, its possible to improve other small problems as well. Previously, the safe zone of other owned colonies wasnt shown (because the client didnt know about them). Thats already fixed in the dev build. Another quick improvement would be to the trading menu. You can remotely start trading from distant colonies to your active one, but where the UI should display the remote colony's stockpile, it displays the active colony's stockpile. The problem was already on our bug tracker and should be easily solvable now. Zun also added support for negative values in the statistics graph this week. Stockpile items cannot possibly be negative, so it wasnt useful there. But of course, happiness can drop into negative numbers. It resulted in some strange results with the logarithmic scale, but that was fixed as well. We still want to add some extra data sets to the graph, like the percentage of the time that jobs are idling, and the happiness stats per happiness item. Then the menu still requires a bit of polish, but the update should be ready in 2-3 weeks!
Last week, I wrote about the arrival of my Valve Index VR headset. We asked whether you were interested in Colony Survival VR, and we got a lot of enthusiastic replies! I hadnt expected VR to be so widespread already. This week, I did some small tests trying to get VR to work in Colony Survival. To my surprise, it was relatively easy to get head tracking and hand representation in there! GIF 1 / GIF 2 Gif 1 shows one of the first VR experiments, with broken shaders. Gif 2 shows proper textures for blocks, but broken textures for non-block objects. Its promising, but dont expect VR anytime soon. Converting all the controls and UI to have decent, consumer-friendly VR-support is a lot more work than just glitching some VR-headtracking into the game. Well first overhaul the regular old non-VR UI, and well probably do some content-updates afterwards. VR might come afterwards, depending on surveys. Bedankt voor het lezen :D Reddit // Twitter // YouTube // Website // Discord

Bog's submission for the Artificial Extinction contest, one of the winners This week, Zun has added statistics for happiness and food consumption. That cost about 1.5 or 2 days of work. I spent a roughly equal amount of time making mock-ups for the new UI. The rest of the week wasnt very productive - at least not directly for the next update. Weve been working pretty much non-stop since Zuns trip to Japan in September, and it seems this week was mostly some kind of non-planned holiday. We worried a lot about the coronavirus and the lockdown does impact our lives. Weve calmed down quite a bit now, but of course, coronavirus is still a dangerous and deadly problem.
But for the past 48 hours, I was distracted by something totally else. The VR headset I ordered, a Valve Index, finally arrived! :D VR has been amazing until now so Ill spend the rest of the blog talking about that. If youre only interested in the next update, please stop reading now. If youre interested in the future of gaming and our company - enjoy! ;) I was expecting pretty complicated hardware that took a decent time and lots of fiddling to set up - and that was not true! The package (headset, controllers, base stations) is very easy to set up. I think it took less than fifteen minutes from opening the package to my first VR experience. Steam has an entirely new mode especially for VR, predictably named SteamVR. Every time you launch SteamVR, you appear in your SteamVR Home. Its a fancy apartment with a big backyard in the middle of mountains. You can get used to VR there: walk around, spawn some items, grab them and throw them around. Theres an airbrush you can use to draw 3D-images in the air. And there are some big screens on the walls. One screen has a list of VR-compatible games you own, another has info on popular and top selling VR games. My expectation for VR was for it to be pretty clunky. Theres this weird teleportation-style of movement, and strange controllers. But the teleporting feels very natural in no time at all, and the controllers are super accurate. Navigating UIs with a regular controller can be a pain, but you can use the Valve Index controllers to point at in-game objects and menus, similar to a laser pointer. Its very quick and intuitive. Apart from using them as laser pointers, the controllers know when individual fingers grab them. This means that you can do normal grabbing motions with your arms, hands and fingers IRL and they will be translated very accurately into in-game motions.
Your hands in Half-Life Alyx This allows you to experience completely new things in VR that are just impossible to reproduce in normal keyboard+mouse games. Do you remember Surgeon Simulator? Lots of people loved it for all the wacky stuff that happened when your clumsy hands interacted with all the objects in the world. To some degree, every VR game is Surgeon Simulator, but except for the controls being clunky and messy, the controls are pretty much perfect. My first half hour of Half-Life Alyx was purely messing about. You spawn on a balcony with all kinds of objects. Ive grabbed every single one of them, rotated them around to inspect them, followed by throwing them away and hopefully breaking them. Every bottle, every flower pot, every brick. Its incredibly satisfying, and Ive never done something like it before VR. Eventually, you get into combat. And its super intense and exhilarating. To reload, you dont just press R, youve actually got to remove your empty magazine, grab a new one, insert it and cock your gun. Throwing a grenade isnt just pressing G, you actually need to grab it and make a throwing motion. Crouching isnt C, to crouch in-game youve got to crouch IRL! VR takes regular gaming and adds way more detailed input and output. It adds the motion of your head and the details of your hands to the input, and instead of the output being a monitor that only takes up only a small of your IRL field of view, the output is a VR headset that immerses you into the game completely. This opens up a new near infinite range of possibilities in gaming.
VTOL VR In the past, there have been a couple of trends that claimed to be the future but ultimately seemed to peter out again. Motions controls like the Wii and Kinect are one example, 3D movies another. Pokmon GO was very innovative in 2016 but similar games havent achieved popularity since then. But we are starting to become fairly certain that VR or something highly like it will stay and keep growing for a long time. In 2030, it might even be roughly the same size or bigger than regular old WASD+mouse gaming. There are a couple of barriers to VR but I think most of them can be overcome or will shrink in the future:

• Cost. VR headsets (and requirements like controllers and base stations) are still pretty expensive. But the costs of similar tech like desktop PCs and smartphones has dropped rapidly in the past, so I expect the same to happen here. Currently, you also need pretty high-end hardware in your PC to run VR: VR requires consistent 90+FPS to feel smooth, and it needs to be rendered twice (once for each eye) in a pretty high resolution. But as hardware gets better, VR-ready PCs should become more affordable.
• Quality. The first VR headsets were pretty primitive - like the first mobile phones. There was too much delay between head motion and the movement of the image and the resolution was low. But like mobile phones, VR headsets get better every year. More resolution, quicker response times, more accurate tracking, more comfortable headsets. The Valve Index is very usable and a lot of fun, but in this new paradigm of gaming, its clear where progress can be made. Even more resolution, less effects like glare, less bulkier headsets. If current trends continue, VR headsets in 2030 will be very detailed and comfortable.
• Practical problems. Youre pretty much blind to the world when gaming in VR, and you need at least enough space to stand, to crouch and to swing your arms around you in all directions. There are probably quite a lot of people gaming in cramped bedrooms and home offices without space to do the things mentioned above. You can play Colony Survival on a laptop in an airplane and that will be impossible with VR games that require significant arm motion - private jets excluded ;) But people have made space in their homes for big flatscreen TVs, so I expect more and more people to leave space for a VR corner as well.

Landrus submission, one of the winners of the contest! This morning, we reached the deadline of the contest for Artificial Extinction! Weve picked the 10 winners and sent them all a Steam Key for AE. A lot of the submissions were very creative and impressive, so thanks to all participants! Boneidle, a winner whose submission was already featured in last weeks blog, even put his huge and detailed world on the Steam Workshop, so all of us can explore his spaceship. Other winners might do the same this weekend, so keep an eye on the Workshop! Check an album of all the winners here. You can also still open #submissions-only on the Discord for more info.
We've also made decent progress on the update this week. The search bar from the stockpile has been refactored, improved and added to the statistics menu. And thats also how we added categories. The search bar is a bit smarter now: it accepts commands like cat:, < and >. Cat: searches for entire categories, so cat:food will return a list of all food items. The angle brackets can be used to search for items that are below or above a certain threshold. For example, >1000 will return all item stacks that are larger than 1000. As you can see in the screenshot, these commands can also be combined! And these commands work in both search bars, the one in the stockpile and the one in the statistics menu. There are now three things left on our to-do-list:

• Theres quite a bit of empty space left next to the search bar in the stockpile. We want to put some buttons there that automatically put useful commands in the search bar, like cat:job. That should help to explain the new feature a bit.
• There should be a tab with non-stockpile data in the statistics menu, data like the amount of colonists, % idling of different jobs, and happiness.
• Wed like to add a drop-down menu where you can select other colonies and see their statistics

Impressive Work-In-Progress Spaceship by Boneidle Last weeks contest for ten Artificial Extinction Steam Keys still lasts another week! Until now, weve had five submissions, not counting Boneidles unfinished project above. That means that youve got a good chance of winning even without a megabuild that costs dozens of hours to build! You can find the details on how to participate here. Weve kept making good progress on the statistics menu and its getting close to a quality that is ready for release. There are now icons on the right side of the map to indicate which items lines represent. That makes the graph a lot more usable.
Zun also added numbers and lines on the x-axis, and lines to indicate midnight on the y-axis. Theres also a new button to switch between linear and logarithmic scale. The logarithmic scale inflates the lower end of the graph, which is often crowded by plenty of items. This makes it easier to recognize and distinguish trends there while simultaneously keeping track of more plentiful items. To demonstrate this effect and others, we made a short and simple video: https://youtu.be/m8pyi0G1bCg The basic features of the graph seem mostly done. It still needs a search bar with the option to filter categories. And wed like to add a second tab with non-stockpile information, like data concerning happiness. When thats done, the update will be released! Bedankt voor het lezen :D Reddit // Twitter // YouTube // Website // Discord

A couple of months ago, someone from our Discord sent me a PM with some questions about Steam Announcements. He was asking for a friend who was developing a game. Thats how I got into contact with the developer behind Artificial Extinction, a new game that released exactly one week ago. The game quickly scored a Very Positive rating according to the Steam Reviews, and its well deserved, especially for a game developed single-handedly in 14 months! We decided to team up and were both hosting contests. Here, you can win 1 out of 10 free Steam Keys for Artificial Extinction. At their place, you can win 1 out of 10 Steam Keys for Colony Survival! Artificial Extinction takes place on a distant, alien planet. If you want to journey there, youll first have to make the world of Colony Survival look remote and extraterrestrial. Here are the exact rules:

• The contest lasts nearly two weeks, until Friday April 3, 10AM Amsterdam time.
• You participate by uploading one image of your most alien looking Colony Survival world to #submissions on our Discord
• Discord allows you to add a text description to images. Youre allowed but not required to make use of this
• Youre allowed to use Photoshop to adjust, manipulate and merge screenshots
• Youre allowed to use texture packs and mods
• Youre certainly allowed to manipulate the terrain generation
• Zun, Vobbert and I will be the jury and pick our ten favorites. The winners will be announced in April 3s Friday Blog!

Statistics

Last week, we had screenshots of the work-in-progress Statistics Menu in the blog. It was a messy combination of many thin, pixelated lines. It required a lot of technical work behind the scenes to make it work, but it wasnt very clear or beautiful. Well, thats obviously a problem so weve tried to improve that. Its going in the right direction! Heres a screenshot of the current menu (only available in an internal testbuild):
Youre now able to select and deselect individual items. That makes it a lot easier to discover the specific trends youre looking for. Using this system for a moment does instantly lead to the desire for a decent amount of improvements:

• A search bar to find specific items
• A button to toggle between a linear and a logarithmic scale
• More info on the axes, changing the color of the background to indicate whether its day or night
• Displaying information thats not # in stockpile, data like total amount of calories
• Making it clear which items youve selected even if they arent visible in the window on the left: perhaps something like the mock-up below

Virtual Reality

Covid-19

• 15,113 confirmed infections in Italy, 1016 deaths - nationwide lockdown, enforced isolation
• 804 confirmed infections in the Netherlands (+31% since yesterday), 10 deaths (+50% since yesterday)- smoothly following a curve that results in Italian situations in ~2 weeks
• And new since last week, 6 infections in the province where we live, 3 in the city where I live

We made good progress on statistics this week! Its definitely not finished, but the underlying systems are mostly functional and they're giving interesting results. Theres an increasing number of options. Its now possible to display results from the past 24 hours, the past four days, or the past 24 days. Theres an Auto-scale option that automatically adjusts the graph to the size of the most numerous item. But theres also the alternative option to use a custom scale, limiting the graph to only display items up to a number like for example 100 or 2000. Many older colonies will have large excesses of certain items like straw or leaves, making an alternative to auto-scale very useful! Last but not least, theres a toggle to Only show changed. Some items like dirt and torches can stay unchanged for a long time, resulting in pretty meaningless horizontal lines across the graph. This toggle allows players to quickly remove them from the results.
The image above is an example of the current work-in-progress menu (only available in internal testbuilds). You can see that the first one-third of the graph covers nighttime, and its clearly visible when colonists start working. Most lines are stagnant during the night, but you can see the amount of gunpowder pouches and lead bullets drop, while the amount of linen pouches rises: the clear effect of musket guards. But other data is pretty unclear, a lot of the lines are hard to read. So thats our task for the coming weeks: make this more useful and legible. There will be an option to turn on/off specific items and categories, you should be able to highlight items by hovering over them, well update the look of the lines and the colors and the background. Theres also some other data wed like to track and display. One thing Zun really wants to know is the %-idleness. How many of your cooks/blacksmiths/etc are idling because they miss ingredients or have completed all orders, and when? You can imagine some jobs working hard at the start of the day to make projectiles, but spending the rest of the time idling. Having that data would be very useful to optimize your production.
A longer period of time is visible in this graph

Corona

Last week's blog again generated quite a lot of feedback! We've read a lot of useful suggestions. Thanks everybody for the continued support! Sadly, we didnt make much progress on statistics this week. On the weekend, Zun got an idea about Unitys Burst Compiler, and he spent much of the week trying to get it to work. The image below is a screenshot of that little project. Like Zun, Ive been working on a little voxel project. Its teaching me a lot about Unity and programming! Heres a GIF of the project.

Corona & the Netherlands

This week, we released the last two 0.7.2.x updates and started working on 0.7.3. The updates contain some minor fixes (check #small-patch-changelog on Discord) and an overhaul of the personal torch. It now uses the same system as stationary torches, significantly improving the visuals. When youre playing with others and they activate their own personal torches, this will actually be visible in your world! And that includes the colored effects of the lanterns. An example of this can be seen in the screenshot above. For 0.7.3, Zun has started working on statistics! They should give you a lot more insight into the long term trends of your colony. Which resources are increasing, which items are depleting? The image below is very primitive work-in-progress after only one day of work; the end product will look very different.
Last weeks blog was a long complicated rant about some of the weirder aspects of game design. It got quite a lot of comments - thanks for all the feedback and encouragement! :D So by popular demand, Ill try to write Into Weirdness II. Its a complex and fuzzy subject, so be warned: this might get vague. Zun and I havent done any formal study related to game design or development. But that didnt mean we were completely unprepared. We did have lots of experience with computers and games, including messing around with videos, websites and audio. I had quite a bit of experience with photography and Photoshop, which proved highly useful for making textures. I studied history and have always been interested in the general development of civilization - focusing on long term trends instead of specific kings and generals. We think that definitely shows in Colony Survival. What this means is that we found useful information and inspiration in all kinds of random and unintended ways. One clear example: Fort Bourtange. Its a star fort located close to our birthplace and weve visited it often. Heres a photo:
Source I dont think I was conscious of the link between Colony Survival and Fort Bourtange until literally five minutes ago. But now that I notice the link, it seems extremely relevant. Weve spent plenty of time exploring a small historical village surrounded by multiple layers of walls, moats, gates and bridges when we were young. And then we decided to spend years working on a game thats focused on building a village-fortress with walls and moats. I dont think these two things are unrelated! So obviously, inspiration like this is extremely valuable. But you cant just order a manual that contains pure concentrated 100% Extremely Valuable Game Design Inspiration. Youve got to go looking for it in all kinds of random directions. In the past, I was inspired by random places, hobbies, games and TV/movies. In 2017/2018, Ive barely played any games that werent Colony Survival. But in the past twelve months, Ive played a lot of new games. Not just for entertainment (although that was certainly part of it), but with a deliberate aim to study and learn from them. One could do this in a very careful and systematic fashion. Make a list of games, make a timetable, play each of them for 25 hours and write a detailed report on UI / gameplay / graphics / sound. But that can get boring and because I did this in my free time, I didnt want to make it too much of a burden. So I played randomly and erratically. Ragequitting one game and binging another. So perhaps it became more a study of me than of the games. Why do I want to keep playing game X? Why am I bored of Y? Whats frustrating me in Z? Giving detailed, realistic and accurate answers to these questions is harder than you think! A majority of human decisions and preferences are unconscious, and fully explaining them verbally/consciously is very difficult. Of course, this mindset can be applied anywhere. Weve got a lot of options in the way we run our company. How do we communicate, how do we use marketing, how do we build a community, whats an interesting story, what is a beautiful building, what is great music, whats a good trailer - all of these questions have relevant answers that would be useful to us. I notice that nowadays, Im constantly deconstructing a lot of what I see nd my own reactions to that, and seeing what I can learn from that. A while ago, I watched a video that I still regularly think about and that seems highly relevant. Its a one hour talk by Jeff Vogel at the GDC. I didnt know him or his games, but hes been an indie dev since 1994 - and has kept his small company afloat that entire period. Instead of promising some Quick Tips to Instant Fame and Wealth, Vogel just talks about his experiences and lets you do the concluding. In some ways, hes extremely different from us. He gets really demotivated from online criticism, so he barely has any interaction with his community. He releases a game, checks bug reports, fixes that, and goes on to the next game. We work in a completely different way - we read pretty much everything that is directed towards us and even scour the internet for discussions about Colony Survival. But if it works for him - it works! There doesnt seem to be one perfect way to approach this, with all others paths being invalid. Here's a link to the video: https://youtu.be/stxVBJem3Rs So, lets act like all these things are related and write a nice summary for this. In 2017/2018, the sudden success of Colony Survival was a bit of an emergency, and we worked hard to pick all the low-hanging fruit, all the simple improvements that could ASAP boost the fun of the game. Since then, things have started to shift more towards long term mode. The emergency is over so were establishing a routine. Simultaneously, the low-hanging fruit is gone so weve got to build a ladder, allowing us to reach higher than before. Making this transition requires us to go Into Weirdness into some areas. Does that make sense? :) Bedankt voor het lezen! Reddit // Twitter // YouTube // Website // Discord

Zun's colony that he built in the past week Zun and I are pretty big fans of logic, rationality and research. Before committing to something, e.g. a diet, exercise, buying a product, we're used to doing a decent investigation. What are the "rules" of weightlifting? What are the best and worst food options, and why? Of course there's a debate about these subjects. But there are still very important truths out there. Having some muscles and endurance is good for your metabolism and hormonal systems. Deadlifting with an arched back is terrible. Processed food with lots of added sugars and fructose aren't good for you. I've got a background as a historian, Zun mostly has programmer experience. These are pretty rational and constrained fields. It's very clear when the performance of a code has been optimized - or when it has gone in the wrong direction. Napoleon didn't use tanks or weaponized dinosaurs; the Romans didn't have an electrical grid or airplanes. You know the direction in which you want to go, and you know how to get there, you've just got to do the work. For a large part, this still holds true for Colony Survival. We've got a relatively clear idea of where we want to go, and there are standards for success or failure. There are some 'rules' in regards to which games are good and which aren't. But parts of the job are pretty vague. We're not making a product with a clear purpose like "transport persons/goods", "provide shelter", "generate energy" or anything like that. We're producing "entertainment". And where stories have to be engaging and theater productions have to be visually impressive, games are... weirder. It's perhaps closest to a puzzle. Although solving the puzzle is the goal, this shouldn't be an easy straightforward task. Having to put quite a lot of time and effort to overcome the puzzle is a big part of the appeal. Now, if you get a bit disappointed when we describe Colony Survival as a puzzle game: I understand you completely, I'm not a fan of explicit puzzle games either. I love a good challenge, but it needs to "dress up". Crusader Kings could probably work as some kind of "pure" puzzle game where you've got to fill an abstract map with your color with some clever maneuvering, without any historical theme. But a big part of the fun is imagining that youre a royal family thats marrying, scheming and backstabbing their way to power, wealth and fame.
In fifteen years of time, roughly our youth, we went from Wolfenstein 3D (1992) to Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare (2007). Wolfenstein was an experiment in 3D graphics and severely limited in all kinds of aspects. In CoD4, everything was possible. Loads of enemies, crashing helicopters, nuclear explosions, multiplayer. Now, I dont want to insult CoD4, its very impressive in lots of ways. But this stunning technological progress mightve also led to some wrong ideas about good games. The value of a game cant be measured in the amount of polygons, the size of the explosions or the length of the cutscenes. Ultimately, its 100% subjective. A theme that might fascinate one person might repel someone else. Something thats difficult to solve for one person might be very easy for another. One person might like the fact that its easy while the other hates the lack of challenge. One and the same person might be interested in a challenge some periods of the year or times of the day while preferring easier games the rest of the time. The sane answer might be to look for averages, to appeal to majorities, or to look at whats popular. That might be wise to do when youre selling for example a house. But heres the catch: every house is unique by the virtue of its location. If you want to have a home with size X in Manhattan or near that awesome forest in the mountains, theres only a limited amount of options. But thats not true for games. Weve got to compete with tens of thousands of different games, and theyre all infinitely available - Portal is not going to run out of copies this year. So if were going to do the sensible, average thing that appeals to majorities, we might be in direct competition with dozens or hundreds of similar games. This turns things around: the sensible thing might be to do the insensible, to do the thing that nobody else does, so that we can fill a niche that has been underserved. And if this isnt problematic enough, heres the next weird thing to deal with. This entire industry is brand new. Videogames themselves are still young, but large scale digital distribution has barely reached puberty. Ten years ago, I was still prowling through the streets, moving from store to store to find good deals on videogames on discs. My current PC cant even play discs and I havent missed that feature once. The fact that games can be continuously updated with new content instead of having one specific release date is a massive revolution and we dont know how it plays out yet. Its been less than three years since Steam was opened for the masses. We dont know what the industry will look like in 2025 or 2030 - yet its what my mortgage (end date: 2049, four years post-singularity) depends on. For a long time, weve been looking for the manual of objectively good game development. Now we've realized that there is no tried-and-trusted in this industry. Everything is constantly changing and theres no perfect metric that can be trusted 100%. The best game isnt necessarily the one that makes the most profits, or the one that has the most views on YouTube, or the one with the highest Metacritic score. Whether the Early Access labels helps or hinders us, whether free updates, DLC, a sequel or an in-game market for skins and other cosmetic items is the best option for long term revenue: nobody knows the answer with any definite certainty. With this lack of clear, objective rules, we need other sources of guidance and inspiration. Theres a lot I could write about that, but this blog is already getting quite long! If theres any interest, Ill gladly continue the rant in a future blog :)

Last Week

Update 0.7.2 is now available for everybody! The biggest change concerns lighting, especially torch/lantern lighting. Torch lag was a frequent complaint. Torches arent significantly faster per torch now, but they do cover a bigger area. This means you need less torches per colony, which does improve performance. Ambient lighting has also changed - its dynamic now. The game will constantly analyze your surroundings and determine the appropriate level of ambient lighting. This means caves are finally dark!
Another common complaint was the too much bloom / blocks like sand being way too bright in the sun. This has also been dramatically reduced. 0.7.2 contains a bunch of other simple fixes and improvements like this. For example, you can now activate your player light by selecting a torch or lantern in your hotbar. Colored lanterns each have a unique effect! Text rendering in the chat menu has been improved, and theres now a scrollbar allowing you to check older messages.
For a full list of all changes, see the in-game changelog. Let us know how you feel about the update in the comments or on Discord! Does this fix common issues? Do you like or hate the new lighting? How is the performance? Did new bugs appear? Bedankt voor het lezen en veel plezier in 0.7.2! Reddit // Twitter // YouTube // Website // Discord

PatateNouille's castle with the new lighting With the new lighting done, focus has shifted to some small but necessary tweaks. The biggest changes happened to the chatbox - it finally has a scrollbar, among other improvements! Heres a full changelog of this weeks progress: ----------------------------------------------------------------------

• Added "/debug texturecheck" - spawns all blocks that have no mesh but have a texturemapping set around you (requires cheats on)
• Added "/debug generateiconmapping {path/to/icons} {path/to/mapping.json}" - generates a types json file filled with overrides for types where the icon file name matches an icon file in the indicated folder (requires cheats on)
• Added "/debug generateiconmapping {path/to/albedo} {path/to/emissive} {path/to/normal} {path/to/height} {path/to/result_mapping.json}" - generates a texture mapping json file filled with mappings overriding existing ones where the texture files match files in the indicated folders (requires /cheats on)
• Added "/colony printhere" - prints a list of unique colonies overlapping your position
• Added "/colony setleader {player} [colony]" - sets the player as the leader of the colony (duh)
• Fix mods not being shown in the server browser if they did not have a dll associated with them
• Redid client chat box: -- Use the new render method for text (no more blurry text) -- Add the ability to scroll, and keep some history
• Added the ability to scroll to the server interface log, and keep some history there
• Added "/teleport player {name}" - teleports you to that player if found (even if offline)
• Added "/teleport spawn" - teleports you to .. spawn
• Added "/setspawn" - sets .. spawn
• Added rotation support for sending positions to the client
• Added rotation support to spawn position setting
• Saved player rotation on exit & load it back
• Fixed trading menu breaking when making a rule with a few added zeroes to the standard billion item limit
• Vary chatbox transparency based on how it's opened

There's now a reasonably functional internal development build of the game with the new lighting system! As explained a couple of blogs ago, Colony Survival has two lighting values: one for direct lighting and one for ambient lighting. These values change throughout the day - to make sure that sunrises aren't as bright as the middle of the day. The ambient lighting affects everythings in the shadows. These all had the exact same shade of darkness, whether it was the interior of a house or a deep mine. And this also means that you could track the day/night cycle while in that deep mine: the ambient lighting would pretty obviously change during the day. The new flexible system analyzes your surroundings and tries to choose an appropriate value based on that. This means that mines are finally properly dark!
Choosing the right values is tremendously difficult. We've got to rebalance the strength of direct lighting with the flexible ambient lighting nd eye adaptation. We don't want to change the look of the game too much, but of course we'll improve things whenever that's possible. I feel like sunrises and sunsets have become a bit 'softer' - something I mostly like and slightly dislike.
Bloom has been reduced. This is something that got quite a lot of complaints as well, with things like sand being very bright. I actually kind of liked that, so we'll probably rebalance it a some more in the coming days. Together with the floodfill torches/lanterns, this is quite a big change to the lighting system. Performance has been optimized a lot. Update 0.7.2 is nearly ready for release, but we'd still like to do some minor UI improvements before we release it.
Bedankt voor het lezen! Reddit // Twitter // YouTube // Website // Discord

Last week, we've asked you to participate in our survey. Over 400 people did so. Thanks a lot to all of you! The data is very useful, and lots of you left kind words and/or insightful comments at the end :) Lets jump right into the results.
94.8% of the voters can see the benefits of our current course, so thats good news. Only a very small minority was vehemently opposed to our plans.
Its a tight race between satisfaction with the current art style, and a desire for a bit more realism. The opposite of the last option is a relatively popular third: some players would instead appreciate a more abstract look. Only a handful of players want a radical change from the current style, but this group is split between those who want a lot more realism and those who want to go in the opposite direction. Weve also asked a complex question about potential methods of monetization. You had the option to agree with multiple options, so you could simultaneously vote for example very positive and contribute, or awful, cringy and would not contribute. It was a bit hard to understand, but the results are very interesting - and polarizing!
We proposed two methods of voluntary donations: we could set up a Patreon account, or share a PayPal/Bitcoin donation link. Patreon was considered to be way more cringy and awful than PayPal/Bitcoin - yet the amount of people that voted they would contribute to Patreon was a lot higher than the amount of PayPal/Bitcoin-donators. The price raise had polarized results as well. Out of 4, its #2 in the categories awful, very positive and would contribute. It also has the lowest score in would not contribute - which is positive. Merchandise had more positive results than we had expected, scoring #1 in would contribute and very positive (and #2 cringy). Were going to think about it and see if we can come up with something that would be fun.
The last three options are a lot less likely than the first four, certainly at the current stage of development. They all scored high in the awful category.
In general, a majority of players tend to agree with us, so thats good news. An exception is the third question about the length of Early Access. We got a lot of detailed responses about that specific question. Some players argued that the Early Access label has a negative connotation for a lot of gamers. Because weve already got a decent amount of content and relatively few bugs, they thought that it would be better to lose that label as soon as possible. Others argued that taking your time in Early Access is fine, and that the definitive release would lead to a lot of new players, and that it would be wise to provide them with the best, most polished, most impressive experience possible. We understand both viewpoints, but we tend to lean towards the latter. The last question led to quite the discussion. It would have been better phrased as A moderate price with rare discounts is better than a high price with frequent discounts. Apart from a discussion about the phrasing, there were also interesting responses about this dilemma. Those who left feedback about this question often shared that moderate prices are more consumer friendly, but that the frequent discount strategy does tend to lead towards more visibility and more revenue. We havent had a sale since July 2018, and I think were going to take a more balanced approach after the UI updates. When we raise the price to $24.95, theres room for more frequent 10%/20%/25% off discounts. The last question allowed voters to input a long written answer. Hundreds took the effort to write useful, kind and often long feedback. Ive read it all and I really appreciate it! I hope you all know that I read every single comment on every single blog, so if theres anything specific you want to share, thats a good place to do so. Of course, were also very active on Discord and try to follow Reddit/Twitter/Facebook, but its a bit easier for things to fall through the cracks there.

This week's progress

• We hope to be able to share some great pictures/videos of the new flexible ambient lighting in the next blog
• We hope to release 0.7.2 1-3 weeks later, which should include torch/lantern floodfill, improved ambient lighting and some minor improvements to the UI (like new sounds in the main menu)
• Afterwards, we want to start working on bigger changes to the UI

We'd like to start the year with a fresh survey! Answering it really helps us, and "more surveys" was much demanded in the last survey :) Zun was happy with the look of the new floodfill lighting for torches, so he worked on optimizing the code behind it. He spent most of his time converting the code to Rust. Rust is a programming language that Zun himself will explain here: [Zun] Code written in C# in Unity is quick enough for most uses, but it has some trade-offs which limit it from reaching the "maximum" performance similar code can reach when written in a different language. Prime example of this is that C# is compiled to machine code every time you run it and there are strict time limitations on doing so (you don't want the game to take 2 minutes to launch), which limits the possibilities for optimizing. Another "problem" is that the C# environment is not especially aimed at maximum performance, so there are circumstances where the code could be quicker but there is no proper way of expressing what you want to do in C#. So there are some programming languages more aimed at performance, notably C, C++ and Rust. We're using Rust because the environment around it is much more modern compared to C and C++; building on different platforms is easy with "Cargo", it has built-in systems for testing, it comes with a decent standard library. Unity itself is also developing their own language (Burst compiled C#) to use for this exact use case, but at the time of writing it seems to be somewhat work in progress. Of course C# has it's merits as well - it is generally easier to write, maintain and distribute. So the usage of Rust will be limited to some small parts of the game that run a disproportional amount of time, like terrain generation and now preparing the data for torch lighting. A relatively straight forward translation of the updated torch lighting turned out to be more than 5 times as fast, which adds up to seconds of processor time saved over many torches. [Zun out]
Zun is our programmer, and I busy myself with most of the other tasks; writing these blogs, making textures and models, thinking about game/UI design, checking and responding to messages, etcetera. But the current and next updates dont require new textures/models, so I can focus my energy on other tasks. This week, Ive returned to learning more about Unity and programming in C#. Im still not experienced enough to contribute to Colony Survival itself, but Im getting closer! I suddenly got inspired to make a simple game about firing a howitzer. Ultimately youd be firing on distant targets surrounded by targets you explicitly shouldnt hit. Heres my progress in five GIFs:

• Its alive!
• Those things shouldnt be connected
• Thats what it should be like
• Now with sound, explosions and smoke :D
• More smoke, more physics

New Hobby

Happy New Year! In 2019s last blog, we looked back at the history of Colony Survival. Here, in 2020s first blog, well discuss our plans for the future. They havent changed too much since this blog we posted a couple of months ago, but wed love to talk more about the underlying reasons, and we think we can properly visualize them in a single image now. Imagine a graph that plots both complexity and time played for a game. In a lot of games, more complex features are introduced only after youve played the game for a while. Think of a shooter which starts with some simple missions with simple weapons and targets, and introduces a stealth mission or guided missiles later on. A guided missile is obviously more complex than a basic pistol, but how complex it appears to players also depends on the interface. Does the game explain how to operate this new weapon? Or are you expected to press all kinds of hidden buttons and navigate complex menus? The complexity measured in the graph is a combination of the actual depth of the mechanics nd how difficult it is to figure out for players.
Now imagine plotting Colony Survival 0.1.0, the version we released on Steam in June 2017, on this graph. After one or two hours, you could have seen all the content. There was no science system. But the UI wasnt very advanced either. If you werent experienced in FPS and RTS games, you had a pretty hard time learning the ropes. So Id visualize 0.1.0 on the graph like this:
We got quite a lot of complaints about the lack of content, and we could see why. The next updates all focused on adding more items and features.
0.7.0 was a big overhaul of the game. It wasnt merely adding things on top of the pile, the early game was overhauled as well. New features like happiness, co-op and trading have given the game more functionality and depth, but theyve also added extra menus and buttons that arent always explained that well and can confuse new players. This is the result in the graph:
Obviously, our intention is not to make the game more difficult and confusing for new players. A couple of months ago, I watched someone who wasnt really experienced with first person games try the game, and it was heart-wrenching. It suddenly became very obvious how complex Colony Survival is for people who havent extensively played first person and strategy games. Our goal is to make CS accessible for persons like that as well. Were not going to dumb stuff down and were not going to hand-hold experienced players - no worries about that! Our three main strategies are:

• Make existing interfaces clearer. For example, the Colony-menu, the one right next to the Happiness menu, is a mess and truly work-in-progress.
• Make game mechanics more easily visible. A statistics menu that allows you to track your stockpile, workers and guards. A happiness menu that displays relevant info way better. A top-down menu that allows you to click on job-blocks, colonists and monsters for extra info.
• A mission system that gives players a framework for setting up a colony and developing it to its maximum potential. For new players, there would be basic missions like plant a banner, recruit a colonist and recruit a berry farmer, and each would have a description with detailed explanations on how to do that. For more experienced players, there could be missions like start a colony in the New World and recruit 1000 colonists.

This Week

Today is Zun's birthday! He is now 25 years old. He's the one who started the project; he's our programmer and Unity-expert. Without him, Colony Survival would not exist! Feel free to join our Discord, to tag him by using @Zun and to congratulate him :D Two years ago, we released a video showcasing the progress from the first test versions in 2013 to the Early Access release in 2017. Since then, a lot has happened. Wed love to do a short look back at our own history before we start the new decade. https://youtu.be/gtRRsLLMXHc At the start of 2017, we werent full-time, professional developers - just two guys who had been working on a hobby project. Despite that project reaching its fourth birthday that year, we hadnt earned a single penny with the game. But all of that was going to change dramatically. We were nearing the Early Access release, and were looking for testers. A couple of big YouTubers, starting with GrayStillPlays and shortly later Draegast, decided to showcase the game on their channels. Within no time at all, they racked up more than a million views. Suddenly, thousands of people applied to become testers for the game! Strike while the iron is hot - we decided to release the game as soon as possible. We were very lucky - the game became an instant hit. We were one of the top sellers on Steam. We found a loyal playerbase, who helped us and are still helping us with all kinds of support: finding bugs, making translations, sharing suggestions, developing mods and of course fun and serious conversations about all kinds of subjects. The game at the release was very shallow. You could unlock all the content within an hour of playing. Buying flax seeds in the shop was the most complex thing you could do. There was no tech tree or other progression system.
The first, primitive iteration of the science system In the first six months, we released a flurry of updates, picking as much low-hanging fruit as we could. New items, new resources, new guard types, new monster types and the science system. Im still a big fan of this trailer for the Christmas Update at the end of the year: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n-YF948Wrns

2018

2019

Young or Old?

Lots of Thanks

• Vobbert. Our first tester, our Head Admin on Discord, our PR Advisor, and our tiebreaker when Zun and I disagree!
• Pandaros, Boneidle, Kenovis, Adrenalynn, ImRock, Nach0 and all of the other modders. Youve made some very, very impressive mods and a significant part of the community relies on them!
• Everybody who has purchased the game. We like roofs over our heads and food in our stomachs, and that stuff is pretty expensive here in the Netherlands. Thanks for making it possible to dedicate ourselves to this project full-time :D
• PatateNouille, Aljetab, Bilzander, JoeMan, Tjohei, Saphrax, Rain_Shadow, Zeta-Primette, Sirdragonov, Malicious, GLaDOS, Karkess, Semegod, Bog and all the others who provide us with beautiful worlds and a lot of fun and support on Discord!
• All the countless other people whove supported us in other ways: those who recommended the game to friends or who wrote a Steam Review, those who participated in the 0.7.0 Open Beta, those who voted in surveys, those who left comments - theyre often small acts, but when done by thousands theyve got a huge impact!
• Steam/Valve, for making all of this possible by providing us with lots of tools and solving lots of administrative tasks for us with minimum hassle. We've heard many complaints from professional YouTubers about YouTube's seemingly arbitrary demonetizations and other punishments. We don't have such fears on this platform. It could have easily been otherwise, so we do appreciate what we've got!
• You! You must be pretty dedicated to this game if youve made it this far into the blog so thanks a lot for that :D

Last Week

'Weltenbume' by JoeMan This week, Zun started working on an option to change the texture quality settings. All blocks in Colony Survival have relatively high-resolution textures of 256 by 256 pixel textures, and each surface uses multiple textures: albedo maps, normal maps, height maps, specularity maps, etcetera. Players currently don't have a way to downscale these textures, making the game quite difficult to run on very low-end hardware. Zuns solution not only supports textures with lower resolutions, but also textures with higher resolutions than we currently have. Of course, I wanted to test this immediately. I added some 2048x2048 pixel textures. We were torn by the results.
Very, very low texture settings Of course, the high-res textures look very fancy, detailed and realistic. But simultaneously, they do lead to problems. The world of Colony Survival is fundamentally not detailed and realistic - it consists of blocks the size of a cubic meter. Our lighting isnt realistic either. Is superrealistic textures where you can see every grain of sand combined with unrealistic big blocks and primitive lighting really the look we want? To quote Jurassic Park: [they] were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didnt stop to think if they should. We dont want to be like that, so we stopped and thought if we really should upgrade to the highest possible resolution textures. It makes it harder to add new textures. Not all players have hardware that can run them properly. Superrealistic textures downscaled from 2048x2048px to 256x256px look worse than textures designed specifically for that resolution. And last but not least, superrealism is probably not the best style for Colony Survival. One problem with realistic textures is that they highlight how unrealistic the lighting system is. It basically consists out of two values: -Direct lighting, for the surfaces of the game that are hit by the sun -Ambient lighting, a darker shade for other surfaces (shadows)
Its a pretty sensible system, but it ignores a lot of real life complexities. IRL, there is no magical ambient lighting that equally lights all surfaces in the shadow. Particles of light bounce across surfaces and the atmosphere, ultimately providing nearly all surfaces with a variable degree of light. When youre outside in an open field on a sunny day, most of what youll see is hit directly by bright sunlight, and shadows all appear to have roughly the same darkness. This is something that Colony Survival can simulate relatively well, and thats where the game looks best. But currently, IRL, Im not in a sunny open field. Im sitting indoors on an overcast day. The sunlight is scattered by the clouds, and a diffuse light hits my window. Shadows are vague. Items closer to the window are brighter than objects deeper into the room. This is way, way harder to simulate in real time. For those of us who dont have IRL lighting available nearby, I made a render with some realistic lighting on very primitive shapes:
As you can see, there is no clean divide between brightly lit surface and deep dark shadow. Both lit surfaces and shadows are a lot brighter on the right than on the left. The entire scene looks pretty realistic, despite the complete lack of textures and the very primitive shapes. Now, compare this to two screenshots from Colony Survival.
This is a sand dune with pretty big height differences. In real life, the lower parts of the dune would get less sunlight than the highest parts, making them a bit darker and accentuating the height differences. None of that happens in Colony Survival. Everything gets an equal amount of sunlight, which makes this screenshot look flat, boring and unrealistic.
Here's another problem. Once the sun gets to a certain angle, a large part of the world is suddenly thrown into the shadows. Because there's only one value for ambient lighting, it's hard to fix this. If we make the ambient lighting brighter, shadows where you'd realistically expect them would be bright and boring. But if you make shadows properly dark, you'll also have to accept the effect in the screenshot. Some of these problems are specific to voxel worlds. Luckily, the solution might also be possible solely because we're using a voxel world. Calculating more realistic lighting in a detailed, realistic world is very difficult, because the world is complex: you've got to keep track of millions of light particles bouncing through and around small holes, cracks and crevices. But because our voxel world mainly consists out of pretty large boxes, it's possible to write some clever algorithms that keep track of the surroundings when calculating how bright a surface should be. One of these methods is called floodfill lighting, and Zun is currently experimenting with that. A complaint weve often received is the fact that deep, underground mines are so bright. Thats caused by the fact that weve got only one value for ambient lighting. Floodfill lighting should completely fix that issue. The support for high resolution textures will be added in the next update, so modders will be able to experiment with them. For the 'official' version of the game, we believe better lighting is more important and practical than 2K/4K textures. We hope to be able to share the results of our experiments soon! Bedankt voor het lezen :D Reddit // Twitter // YouTube // Website // Discord

'Weltenbume' by JoeMan The Colony Survival Steam Workshop has been available for one full week now! It has already proven highly useful. The most popular mod is Pandaros Settlers Mod, which has received over two thousand subscribers. In total, there are now more than two dozen different mods available. Apart from the mods, its also possible to share worlds via the Workshop. Only 7 have been uploaded yet, but theyre very impressive. This blog uses screenshots from JoeMans Weltenbume savegame, which contains three huge custom trees that contain all the requirements for starting a colony, like ores and water. But the Workshop also contains Pathros by PatateNouille, the castle visible in the background of the main menu. Last but not least, there is an insane world uploaded by Bog, which contains a colony with 50,000 colonists. Zun has regularly used that world to test performance optimizations :)
Technically, the release of 0.7.1 was the release of 0.7.1.7. Were now at 0.7.1.10. In the weekend, we were on standby and continuously monitoring reactions to see if there were any significant problems that required a hotfix. There were, so Zun released 0.7.1.8 on Sunday. To compensate for the busy weekend, we mostly took Monday off. Wednesday we released a bigger patch with a bunch of small changes. Co-op worlds started from a workshop were marked wrong, and thats fixed now. Translations were updated, a problem that caused freezing was solved, just like another problem that caused some glitching terrain. Yesterday, 0.7.1.10 was released, which should fix a problem with mods on Ubuntu, and which refactors torch lighting a bit. It shouldnt make a visible difference, but if it does, please notify us! 0.7.1 did exactly what the plan published a couple of months ago promised. We've discussed our future plans some more, but our 'mental roadmap' hasn't changed significantly, so the linked blog is still accurate and relevant. The plans can still change though, so if you really like/dislike a certain feature in the list, let us know your opinion! And if you want your world to be featured in a future Friday Blog, upload it to the Steam Workshop :) Bedankt voor het lezen! Reddit // Twitter // YouTube // Website // Discord

New items in mods made by Boneidle The update should be available for everybody right now! The biggest new change is Steam Workshop support. This should make it a lot easier to find, install and update mods and texture packs. It's also possible to upload your savegames to the Workshop! Straight to the Workshop Modders have had access to the Workshop for a week now, and they've rapidly filled it with all kinds of new features and items. Some of these mods have literally been worked on for multiple years, like for example the Settlers Mod. There are many mods that add collections of new items. They add things like doors, windows, spiral stairs, new lights, furniture and a long list of other stuff to the game. There's a "Schematic Builder" available, which allows your colonists to build custom blueprints like cathedrals and castles. There are also mods with grief protection and other new multiplayer features. There's plenty of other stuff available, and the list is constantly growing!
Functional monorail and manapipes in the Settlers Mod by Pandaros For reasons explained in last week's blog, Workshop-savegames work a bit different than regular ones. Instead of appearing in your regular list of savegames, they're available to choose from when you start a new world. This feature was added literally today, so there's not much choice on the Steam Workshop yet. We hope you'll help us change that! We'll regularly check the worlds on the Workshop, and feature them in Friday Blogs and trailers.
More from the Settlers Mod But Workshop support is not the only change - it's part of a larger overhaul of our mod support. In the past, mods affected the entire game. You had to make sure you did not have conflicting mods, and if you wanted to switch to another mod or vanilla, you had to go to the game files and manually adjust them. It wasn't very user friendly. In 0.7.1, mods don't affect your worlds until you explicitly tell them to. This means you can switch from a vanilla-world to a world with mods by Boneidle to a world with mods by Pandaros to a world with mods by Kenovis, without ever having to exit the game or fiddle around with folders. That should make it a lot easier to experiment with mods! In the coming weeks and months, more mods should appear on the Workshop, and we can't wait to see all the worlds you've been working on appear there. We're going to see how the Workshop gets used in the coming period, and finetune things based on that. We're planning to add customizable settings to the mod selection menu, which we want to use for a standard terrain generation settings mod, allowing people to easily change the scale and shape of the world. When you've tried the Workshop and the new features, please let us know your opinion! What's working well, what isn't? Which mods are your favorite? Nearly all modders have joined Colony Survival's Discord, so that's a way to reach them if you want to praise their mods and give feedback :) Bedankt voor het lezen en veel plezier! Straight to the Workshop Reddit // Twitter // YouTube // Website // Discord

We were planning to release 0.7.1 today, but at the last moment, decided not to. Mod creators have now had ~24 hours to upload their mods to Colony Survival's Steam Workshop, but that didn't give them a lot of time. More mods are expected to be added in the weekend. Another problem is the fact that the Linux version of the game seems to be broken. Non-Latin fonts cause some issues and are in need of an alternative, and there's a big problem with loading .ogg audio files. There's also a last feature Zun wants to add before releasing 0.7.1: savegames/scenarios. We'd love to allow people to easily promote and share their most beautiful colonies. We've seen a lot of highly impressive ones. But doing that via the Steam Workshop is slightly problematic. The Workshop allows creators to update their assets even after they've been downloaded. That makes sense for texture packs, new items and other utilities. But imagine using a world from the Workshop, working on it for dozens of hours, and then losing your progress completely because the creator updated his savegame. That's obviously not ideal. So we've got to make some kind of system where you can choose "scenarios", custom maps, when you start a new world. If the creator of the savegame decides to update it, it only affects new maps. We've already seen players make maps that are meant to be played as "scenarios" / challenge maps, with for example a huge tree that contains ores and all the necessities to run a relatively large colony high in the sky. So that's the solution we've chosen, and Zun is working on it now. He expects to have it finished in a couple of days, and that's when we want to release 0.7.1 - combined with a Steam Workshop filled with a lot more content than it currently has! Bedankt voor het lezen :D Reddit // Twitter // YouTube // Website // Discord

The flat world, created by a testmod that will probably be available as a default This week, we created our very own Steam Workshop page! Screenshot available below. It's only available internally, but it's relatively functional. Integration of the Workshop was slightly easier than expected. A lot of the required settings can be adjusted in default Steam Workshop menus, so we don't need to develop our own UI for them. In our private testbuild, it's now possible to upload mods to Steam Workshop from Colony Survival, and we can also download them into the game again. And of course, another important new functionality is the fact that it's now possible to select only specific mods to use in a world, making it a lot easier to regularly play both modded and unmodded worlds, and to experiment with combining multiple mods. We've received multiple reports of people who missed the flatness of 0.6.3 worlds. As a result, Zun's testmod is an adjustment of the world generation, resulting in a nearly entirely flat world. We might make this option available as a default mod. For 0.7.2, we'd like to make extra settings available to modders, which will allow us to upgrade the flat-world mod into a full terrain generation customizer. A release date of Friday next week is a definitive possibility. The Monday afterwards is another option (December 1) or the following Friday. This will give modders the possibility to configure their Workshop pages in time for Christmas :)
To make myself more useful for updates that rely mainly on programming/Unity skills instead of new textures and objects, I've continued to 'level' these skills and I really do feel like I'm making progress. I got quite a lot of encouragement as a result of last week's blog so thanks a lot :D My little project is far from perfect or complete but I'd like to share some GIFs again:

• Lots and lots of projectiles
• Making custom smoke/explosions
• Crazy experiment

Our internal unreleased testbuild now has a nice in-game menu that allows you to select and deselect specific mods for individual savegames! There is a screenshot below. The same options appear in both the 'new world menu' and the 'load savegame menu'. While working on the UI, Zun decided to refactor, optimize and improve some underlying systems. The main menu should work smoother in 0.7.1, and fonts should be rendered more clearly. This work should pay off in the next couple of updates, because we're planning quite a big overhaul for all UI systems. There are a couple of things we still want to do before we release the update. In the mod settings menu, modders should be able to give a couple of options to players. An example of this would be a mod that allows players to customize terrain generation, to for example change the size of the world or the amount of hills. It would require a couple of sliders that players can use to provide custom input. More mods would benefit from such functionality. Another thing we've still got to deal with is edge cases. What if someone installs a mod, starts a world with it, and then removes the mod? We'd think a warning would be appropriate. Last but not least, we need a visual UI to connect the game to the Steam Workshop. We hope to be able to finish that in 2-3 weeks. We can't wait to see how the Workshop will be used! Plenty of mods and texture packs have been developed for CS in the last 2+ years, and many of them add useful functionality or impressive new content and features. Nowadays, they are spread between different GitHub pages and Discord servers and relatively hard to install and manage. 0.7.1 should make that a lot better!
For the reasons explained in last week's blog, I've continued to increase my programming/Unity skills last week. Last week I was working on a simulated ecosystem, but this week I've decided to focus on a more game-like project, with opposing teams of cubes fighting each other. On one hand, working on it felt very smooth some days. I'm starting to understand the combination of Unity and C# a lot better. On the other hand, there were plenty of weird behaviors and bugs I had to deal with and the GIFs I made throughout the week reflect that:

• GIF 1: The cubes track and fight each other properly, but the projectiles are off
• GIF 2: Trying to fix the projectiles made them even wonkier
• GIF 3: Things start to work more as intended, with the player being able to smoothly place opposing cubes on both sides

• GIF 4: The ugly version with broken explosion effects at the end

Last week's Friday Blog was written right before the new Steam Library UI dropped. I'm pretty sure we haven't added all the new assets yet, but we did quickly make a design for the new 'card' in the library. The new UI looks pretty good! A change with major impact is the new 'review-request' in the Steam Library. Players get more encouragement to write a review now. This was very noticeable in our review rate. Normally, we hover somewhere between 25-50 reviews per month, with 80-90% of them positive. We're now at 95 reviews in the last 30 days, with a 95% positive review rate! We're very grateful. Since Zun's return from Japan, he has mostly focused on the "input" part of mods - for example, the ability to select which mods you want to use per savegame, instead of mods affecting the entire game. This week, he has switched to the "output" part. How can players put mods on the Steam Workshop? How can worlds be saved on the Steam Cloud automatically? Apparently, mods can't just be uploaded to the Steam Workshop directly, we've got to make an in-game menu.
The things Zun is correctly working on don't require new models or textures - my specialization. So I've been working on improving my skills with Unity and programming, allowing me to eventually support Colony Survival in more ways. Two weeks ago I wrote something about my own little project, a simple simulated ecosystem with growing grass and cube-rabbits that eat it. The basics functioned pretty well, but there was a big problem. After ~5 minutes, all of the cube-rabbits started dying rapidly. I struggled for a while to solve the problem and could not find it. Even Zun could not identify the bug. I pondered about it some more (while lying in bed at 1:30AM) and thought of a solution that could help identify the bug. It did help to find bugs - we discovered that the NavMeshAgent failed right before the cube-rabbits started dying. So we fixed that - and the cube-rabbits still died. We thought the female rabbits might be inheriting the age of their mother - making them incapable of having long lives. We changed the procreation-code, but the same issue kept happening. Eventually, Zun spotted a very very simple and silly mistake in the code. The only thing I had to do solve the problem, was change this: if (thisgrass.isProtected == false) ...to... if (thatgrass.isProtected == false) That simple error meant the cube-rabbits failed to check properly whether grass still had "foodvalue" left. After fixing that, the simulation (sped up 2000%) looks like this! The three blue spots on the ground are meant to be infinite sources of water. The grass is their food source. Over time, it grows, but it shrinks when rabbits eat it. The cube-rabbits are divided into two genders. They both have increasing hunger, thirst and age. When hunger and/or thirst exceed a certain limit, their HP starts dropping. Eating increases the scale of the rabbit to a certain degree, and it restores damaged HP. When rabbits reach maturity, they get the ability to procreate. Female rabbits can get pregnant and after a couple of moments they give birth to a male or female rabbit. Above a certain age, their HP starts dropping. The color of the 'main cube' is determined by gender+HP, and the color of the tail-cube is determined by age. It results in a pretty interesting simulation, and it has teached me a lot abouty programming and Unity! It's not relevant to Colony Survival at the moment, but that should change in the future.
A word of our own creation that Zun and I throw around pretty often is "the Day of Defeat - effect". Day of Defeat: Source was the first Steam-game Zun and I owned and we played it quite a lot. Here's some random footage from YouTube. In contrast to many modern shooters with pretty round, open maps and fluctuating spawn points, DoD's maps were pretty lineair and static. While these words often denote something that's negative, it actually had a pretty positive effect. If your team was doing well, the battle started happening at a larger distance from your spawn. But if you were on the losing side, the reverse happened of course: the battle got closer to your spawn. Which made it easier for you to get there, and harder for the enemy - lessening the consequences of your death, and increasing the consequences of your enemy's death. This made the battles in the game pretty balanced, even if the teams were not. But it didn't feel like a 'fake' mechanic, some artificial limit like increasing the HP of the losing team. It was a very natural and organic balance. If your team was on a succesful offensive, your weapons were still equally powerful, the stakes were just a bit higher. The reverse is true in quite a lot of RTS-games, like for example Supreme Commander (a brilliant game that we played again very recently). A player that is marginally better than another player, let's say 5%, sees that same boost everywhere. 5% more resources, 5% quicker development, 5% less losses in battles. These improvements stack on top of each other, and can of course be used to destroy for example the resource gathering units of the other player, completely hamstringing them.
Marginal differences in skill cause exponential differences in base growth, amount of resources and amount of units. Of course, that is fun in some ways, but it also causes massive balance issues. Of course, Colony Survival is not a competitive multiplayer game. But we believe the same effects are still very relevant. On one hand, players need to see that their choices have impact, and it's fun when things stack and increase and cause massive advantages. On the other hand, players also want a challenge - when they have 10 colonists, when they have 100 colonists, and also when they have 1000 colonists. To continuously keep providing overcomeable challenges, for new players and for experts, for small colonies and for large colonies; that's pretty difficult. We often had this discussion in regards to the happiness system. Of course, players need to be 'punished' when they fail to keep their colonists happy. But a failure to provide enough happiness items is probably also proof that the colony isn't doing too well. We could easily make it so that colonists start crafting less and less when they're unhappy, but that would result in even less ammo/food/happiness items, causing an inevitable collapse. That's why we decided to mainly penalize progress: make science slower and the recruitment of new colonists more expensive. To us, "the Day of Defeat - effect" means a game should become a bit easier when you're on the brink of collapse, and it should become more difficult when you're doing very well, without giving players the impression that their choices don't matter (your weapon does more damage? Nice, we're going to add an equal amount of extra HP to enemies). It's a difficult balance to strike, but a highly important one! Bedankt voor het lezen :D Reddit // Twitter // YouTube // Website // Discord

Work on mod support has continued. In the unreleased dev build, it's now possible to have multiple mods installed and to select specific ones to use per world. This makes it a lot easier to switch between modded and unmodded worlds, and to combine multiple mods. At the moment, this functionality exists only in the server, we've still got to add new UI elements to the regular in-game menu. Zun did a couple of highly technical things this week, but.... they're highly technical. It's important but hard to explain. But there is something else we've been discussing for a longer time, and we think we can decently explain that! We're always listening to our community, but there are common suggestions that we seem to ignore, or at least, that we're not working on. The steps that an idea has to go through to be implemented can be pretty difficult. We think it can be best explained by a concept of three filters, or three 'lenses', that all 'distort' an idea and affect the end result. Here are these three filters/lenses:
Fullscreen

Lens One: Interpreting your Experience

Lens Two: Checking Relevancy to Target Audience

Lens Three: Technical Difficulty

Conclusion

Work has continued on Steam Workshop support. Currently, every mod you've installed affects the game in its entirety. We're changing that. You should have the ability to enable and disable mods for every individual savegame. You should be able to play both non-modded and modded worlds without having to deinstall & reinstall mods. This means mods have to load after you've selected a world, not when they currently do: when you launch the game. Rearranging this is going well. We've also taken the first steps in adding client mod support. At the moment, we only support server side mods. A lot of things can be done there: adding new blocks, new monsters, new science. But other things are impossible to accomplish: you can't overhaul the interface, for example. We want to make this possible in 0.7.1. It's difficult to predict precise timelines, but we expect 0.7.1 to be ready for release within 1 to 2 months - perhaps 3 if testing shows a pressing need for certain other features.

Potential Progression

After 3,5 week of holiday in Japan, Zun is back in the Netherlands! He arrived here last Friday, so this week was a regular workweek. Our first priority is Steam Workshop support. There are awesome mods available for Colony Survival, and we want to make it a lot easier to discover, install and use them! Zun has focused on a relevant technical issue. Players automatically download audio, textures and meshes when joining modded servers. This requires servers to send hundreds of files, and players have to cache each of these individually. It's suboptimal, prone to problems and relatively unsafe. Zun is revamping all these systems, making them quicker, safer and more robust. During his absence, I made a list of potential improvements. These mainly concerned the UI. We've discussed this now and have agreed on which ones to implement. Much of the UI is pretty barebones and primitive. The Colony-tab is a disorganized chaos. Some buttons are merely white rectangles, sliders are very primitive shapes and menus don't have borders. We feel like a major improvement is to add some 'lighting/shading'. With some minimal effects, we can make it look like the UI has some 'depth', with for example the top and left of borders and buttons being a bit brighter, while the bottom and right side are darker. Doing this consistently should make the UI feel clearer and more professional. Another thing we've talked about a lot is something we're now calling "alt-mouse" or "free mouse" internally. Currently, while playing, the mouse is used to steer the direction of the player character. In top-down view (which will always be optional, we're not going to remove first person view), players could be free to use the mouse to hover over the world and click both in-game items and UI elements. This could make the game both easier to control, and more accessible to new players. Take for example the statistics in the top-left and top-right corner. You can't hover your mouse over them while playing, so we cannot display a tooltip. When "the mouse is free", we could consistently add tooltips to UI elements nd in-game items. Imagine hovering your mouse over a colonist and getting some info about him and his path, or imagine hovering over a monster and getting some details on his health, speed and special abilities. Imagine checking and changing jobblocks from a distance. Instead of developing a new UI for top-down view only, and keeping the old one for regular first person gameplay, we'd like to develop a consistent UI that can largely be used from both perspectives. By pressing a button like "alt" in the first person perspective, the mouse would be "freed" and allowed to roam the screen - letting players select colonists and jobblocks from a distance. Imagine quickly going to the top-right corner of your screen and adjusting which items are tracked and displayed there. The consistent tooltips should make the game more intuitive and easy to learn, while the free mouse simultaneously alllows us to add more complex mechanics for advanced players. We're very enthusiastic about it and would love to hear your opinion! Steam Workshop support is a technical issue that doesn't require new models or textures, so I can't help Zun a lot there. That's why I've decided to continue learning about Unity and programming. I've really noticed that things that seemed complex and barely understandable initially are becoming pretty intuitive. I've been working on a simple ecosystem, with growing grass and hungry animals finding and eating them. Here's a small GIF. I hope to have expanded it further next week!
[End of the regular Friday Blog. If you think climate change is too political, you're free to stop reading here, you won't miss important game-related stuff] Zun and I live in the Netherlands. It's a small, densely populated country. Despite that, we're the second-largest agricultural exporter after the US. Apparently, letting lots of people, lots of agriculture nd some patches of nature coexist in a small country is pretty hard. The government claims there is too much nitrogen pollution, which disrupts natural preserves. The farmers get a lot of the blame, and one of our ruling politcal parties says they want to get rid of half the amount of livestock in the country. Of course, this has angered the farmers. In the past few weeks, they've used their tractors to disrupt highways and city centers. Last Monday, they occupied the main squares here in Groningen, and they even used a tractor to breach the doors of the building where the provincial government is seated. Here's footage of a tractor driving over fences in the city center and here you can see them shooting straw on police officers. Simultaneously, activists from Extinction Rebellion are blocking important streets and infrastructure in Amsterdam, and they seem to be doing the same thing in London and other major cities globally. Lewis Hamilton posted a depressing story on social media: climate change is such a major problem for him that it makes his entire life feel meaningless, and he wants to shut down completely and give up on everything. And finally, Greta Thunberg's "how dare you-speech" is very recent, and it's still the target of daily memes.
The centre of Groningen occupied by farmers So the subject seems very important and divisive, already affecting lots of people in their personal lives. We feel like our own opinion is pretty underrepresented and love to share it. We feel like there are two major groups in the world. On one hand, there are those who care a lot about the subject. We often hear calls from them about giving up all kinds of luxuries and conveniences. Stop eating meat, sell your car, stop using airplanes, only buy used clothes, don't have children. We're not very enthusiastic about that. Most people are not going to give all of that up voluntarily. And even if people in Western countries did that, lots of non-Western nations are still developing rapidly, with growing populations who are using more energy and consuming more products. We don't want to go back to a medieval standard of living, and we don't want to deny developing nations a higher standard of living either. On the other hand, there are those who completely deny climate change and act like there's nothing wrong. That seems naive and unwise. Our society and our economy have changed a lot in the past one - two centuries, and that definitely has adverse effects. The only viable solution seems to be technological. We need better, cheaper batteries to power cars, planes and homes. We need safe nuclear energy. We need lab-grown meat. There are lots of potential optimizations that allow people to keep comfortable lifestyles while dramatically reducing our impact on the environment. Scientists are already working in these directions. Humans have made major progress in the last decades. Creating awareness for climate change is a good thing, but we should make sure not to make people hopeless. There is a road forward - a road of progress and improvement, not one of restrictions and asceticism. We would love to see less division and polarisation, and mre humans working on a better future. What's your opinion? Should our Friday Blogs touch subjects like this? Do you worry about climate change, and what do you think about potential solutions? Let us know in the comments or on Discord! Bedankt voor het lezen :) Reddit // Twitter // YouTube // Website // Discord

This is the last day of Zun's trip to Japan! He should be back in the Netherlands this evening. Last week, we asked you to participate in our survey. 390 people did so - thanks a lot! Lots of people have asked us to share the results, so we'll do exactly that.
Most people seem to quit playing the game after reaching at least 250-300 colonists, but right before hitting 500. Multiplayer is more popular than I thought, and quite a lot of you have tried mods! It's interesting to see how many of you are on Discord. Especially in the first hour, nearly all participants had joined it. I do wonder how exactly the cycle works. Is Discord the best way to keep in touch with fans of the game who like reading the blogs, or is Discord just the best way to reach fans? Do we lead fans to Discord, or does Discord lead fans to the blog? I think there's a bit of both. Last but not least, only a small minority of you has written a Steam Review for Colony Survival! We do appreciate them - but it's also fine to wait with the review until the definitive release :)
Fullscreen Here's a list of all the major features and changes we're currently thinking about, and a ranking of their priority by players. They're roughly in the order we want to implement them, although the mission system probably comes earlier. We're glad to see that Industrial Content has become pretty popular! It was more controversial in the past. We held another survey shortly after releasing 0.7.0, and new content was in relatively low demand at that time. Interesting to see how that has changed as well. It's interesting to see how some features aren't merely considered "very low priority", but are actually opposed. For example, better visual effects for placing blocks, top-down view, controller support and splitscreen. We often hear that lots of people miss splitscreen in modern games (and we consider ourselves part of that group) but it's clearly unpopular.
You were quite a bit older than I expected! I noticed lots of people in the range 16 to 21 joining the beta a couple of months ago. I'm surprised by the amount of 26+ year olds - but a mature audience is certainly welcome! Especially the earliest responders were relatively old. The total playtime is also very high! Nearly half of everybody who responded played for more than 100 hours, nearly three quarters played 50+ hours. The last part of the survey were two forms where participants could leave custom suggestions and answers. I won't share them, both for privacy reasons and because there's no room here for literally 500 answers. But the answers were very interesting, helpful and encouraging! Lots of good insights, new suggestions and very kind words :D
So, Zun's holiday is over. He has enjoyed his time there, and in the meantime, I've been learning a lot of new things and gained a lot of insight into programming, Unity and game design. We're looking forward to developing new updates next week! Bedankt voor het lezen :) Reddit // Twitter // YouTube // Website // Discord

We've got a new survey! We'd love to see your answers. Here's the link. Zun is currently entering the last week of his holiday in Japan. He is scheduled to arrive back in the Netherlands next Friday! This is the first month-long break in development since releasing the game more than two years ago. While practical development is paused, we're still thinking about the game a lot. I do it pretty much all the time, and Zun mainly while visiting castles and when he's reading all of my rants / discussions with Vobbert when he returns to the hotel. The combination of the break, and having access to like a dozen new games on both my PS4 and PC, has really changed my way of thinking about Colony Survival. We've been working on and playing the game for more than five years now. We know how all the systems work and have deep experience with them. It has become very, very hard to imagine what a new player goes through. But being a new player in a different game, with an eye for gamedesign, is extremely useful. Instead of trying to extend the endgame by adding new content and features, I'm now highly motivated to redesign the early game to be clearer, more fun and more intuitive.
All photos in this blog made by Zun in Japan Some improvements are obvious, but some parts of UI design / QoL improvements can be very counterinuitive. For example, both Classic Runescape and Classic World of Warcraft are making a resurgence. Why, when there's a more polished, more modern alternative of the same game available? One reason is the lack of Quality-of-Life features. When trading is hard, you need to assemble at an in-game location and compete with others who are "physically" present. Adding a digital Auction House where it's easy to offer and purchase goods is technically an improvement. It makes gameplay smoother. But the point of games is not to offer smooth rides - players often want interesting challenges. And to many, the old way of trading was exactly that. Another example is raiding and guilds, mainly in WoW. In early WoW, raiding was hard. You needed to find a group of like-minded players, determine which dungeon to attack, determine a date and time, and make sure everyone starts travelling there early enough. This was relatively hard to accomplish, and it encouraged people to join guilds and communicate outside of the game. Throughout the years, the developers have tried to make raiding easier, allowing people to team up with strangers from other servers automatically and making travel less restrictive. While I 100% understand why the devs have tried to do this, it has partly removed the challenge that players loved, and made guilds way less important. This makes people less likely to make friends and thus less likely to stick with the game in the long term. The same idea holds true in singleplayer games. In the past week, I've played a couple of hours of both Metal Gear Solid V and the new Ghost Recon Breakpoint. On the surface, they're pretty similar. Open world stealth games with vehicles and gadgets. But one big difference is that MGSV has no mini-map and no automatic objective markers, while Breakpoint has both. At first I missed the mini-map in MGSV, but then I realized how it impacted gameplay. In MGSV, I actually take my time scouting, using my binoculars to mark all enemies. I look at the physical, in-game terrain to find enemies. In Breakpoint, I look at the mini-map, and when I see a red blur on the map, I align my character to watch straight at the blur and then try to spot the enemy. No surprises, no extensive scouting, just running/driving forward and pausing a moment when I see a red blur. It obviously makes the whole stealth gameplay less immersive and exciting. The game itself sort of realizes this. When I got tasked to visit a distant harbor, the game explained that I could toggle off objective markers and try to find the harbor myself based on some descriptions. On one hand, I loved the idea. On the other hand - I didn't do it! So why didn't I turn off the mini-map and the objective markers if I like that so much? Metal Gear Solid V was meant to be played without them. To compensate for this, they added features like interrogating enemies, an advanced binoculars with many zoom levels, and enemies that stand out from the terrain. It was designed, tested and reviewed like this. But Breakpoint isn't like that. Enemies are often hidden in foggy and hazy swamps, and you don't start out with great binoculars. Disabling these features might be interesting when playing the game for a second time, but during my first round I'd like to play the game as intended. We're not trying to trash WoW, Runescape and Breakpoint here! We're just trying to distill some principles of game design. I'd say these are two counterintuitive rules:

• Quality-of-Life improvements can make your game less fun to play
• Simply allowing players to turn these features off is not a perfect solution

All pics in this blog made by Zun in Japan, who is halfway his holiday Fifty blogs ago, I wrote a vague rant about chaos and order keeping games interesting. Nearly a year later, I've reached the same conclusion again, but I've started applying it to more and more stuff. I've spent this week learning about programming, discussing potential improvements for Colony Survival, and playing new games on the PS4. The more I thought about the fundamentals of these things, the more they seemed the same. Let's start with a summary of last year's theory, brazenly stolen from Jordan Peterson. Chaos = The unknown, the undiscovered, darkness, evil, pain Order = The known, the discovered, light, goodness, pleasure It seems that nearly everything we do in life seems to fit the description of turning chaos into order. We eat to turn hunger into satiety, we study to turn the unknown into the known, we travel to turn the undiscovered into the discovered. This cycle causes a couple of interesting problems. Firstly, once we've read a book, or watched a movie, or been in a location long enough, it's fully/mostly known and we grow bored of it. So that leads to the second problem. We don't crave order - we crave turning things into order, so we actually need chaos. What's a videogame without enemies, a movie without a compelling villain, a life without any kind of struggle? That's the origin of the yin and yang symbol - the realization that these opposing forces complement eachother, and that you need a nice balance of both of them. Too much chaos, and you can't understand anything, can't make any progress. Too much order, and you're bored or stifled. I think the relation to game design is obvious. We've got to make sure that Colony Survival is exactly that engaging mix of known systems and interesting threats, from the first ten minutes onwards, as long as possible. We believe there's currently too much "chaos" for a lot of new players, so we're going to work on improving the interface. But there's not enough of it for experienced players, so we'll also add new threats that only appear for larger colonies.

Programming

"Have you gone mad?"

[Zun is in week 1 of his 3,5 week holiday in Japan - making this blog an intercontinental collaboration!] Since launching the game on Steam two years ago, we've received many requests for a console port. We've always held the stance that we don't want to release Early Access updates on multiple platforms simultaneously. We're going to finish the game first, and only publish on consoles once that's done. But that doesn't mean we aren't thinking about it. Changes that are necessary for a console port, like controller support, benefit PC players as well. We'll be adding features like that before the port itself happens. Combined with Zun's holiday, I used this as a good excuse to purchase a Playstation 4. We hadn't really experienced modern consoles since purchasing an Xbox 360 more than a decade ago (I feel old now). I also purchased a good amount of PS4 games, mostly exclusives that I had been unable to play. I'm not just sharing this because I'd like to talk about how I spent my spare time. As a game dev, knowledge of game platforms and modern games is highly important. What do other games do well that we can use for CS? What do other games lack, leaving a niche for us to fill? What are the benefits and drawbacks of other platforms? There is no fixed set of rules, no standard manual for developing a great game. Experiencing lots of games and analyzing them seems to be the best way to get some insight.

On the PS4 itself

On Red Dead Redemption II

On Spider-Man (the 2018 PS4 game)

What I've learned

Exactly one month ago, we made a how-to video for 0.7.0. It was finished on a Tuesday, and we were planning to use it in the Friday Blog. We forgot to share it again, and again, and again, but finally remembered it at the right moment. Here it is! https://youtu.be/QnWmjBGpT4M This week, Zun was focused on a couple of technical issues. The game is split between a client and a server for various reasons. While connected, they will regularly send messages to eachother to indicate everything is going okay. If such messages are not received on either side for a certain period, the connection is broken and the player is returned to the main menu. In most cases this is a very useful feature. Since 0.7 there were some people where this system would be triggered during loading a world (in both singleplayer and multiplayer). This would mostly happen on lower end pc's and especially with older harddrives - they would be occupied for too long a period during which they wouldn't send the required messages. This is now fixed partly by smoothing out lag spikes in the loading screen and reworking the system to be more lenient towards such spikes. Together with some other fixes and optimization in the last couple of builds, the game should now be more stable than ever! The fixes were necessary, though: two of the four most recent reviews on Steam contain complaints about frequent freezes and crashes. We hope these issues are improved. If you're still running into technical issues, please let us know! Preferably on Discord, but we also check the Steam Forums and Reddit.
As you might know, Zun is our programmer. He's the technical one who writes our code, works in Unity and uploads new builds. He's responsible for the fixes mentioned above. In a couple of days, he's leaving the Netherlands for a 3,5 week long holiday in Japan. That also means no updates or hotfixes in that period. So if you're on 0.7.0.144 and run into new, major technical issues - let us know ASAP! It can't be helped on Monday. I tend to go by the nickname Pipliz now, because I'm manning our social media accounts. I work on the textures and models for the game, and I'm behind most gameplay decisions and design choices. I also write the Friday Blogs and make the trailers. This has been a great job in the past two years, but for these specific tasks, the near future is a bit desolate. Our focus lies now mainly on interface enhancements, and that doesn't require models or textures. Theoretically, we could keep adding new jobs, items and recipes, but it seems a bit pointless now. Nobody is complaining about a lack of them, while we've heard from lots of people that they want better insight into their colony and better tools for managing it. For the long term future of Colony Survival and our company, it seems best if I learn some of Zun's technical skills. It would be very useful if I had some programming skills, and if I could work in Unity to for example enhance the UI or add basic new features. But going from "barely any programming experience" to "enough skills to add something that's releasable in Colony Survival" is quite a long road. I set my first steps at the end of 2018, and I've continued this week. I'm planning to continue to experiment and improve the next couple of weeks and months. If anyone else is interested, here are some free resources that I have found very useful:

• C# Programming Yellow Book
• Noobtuts Unity UI
• Catlike Coding
• Brackeys

At the start of the week, we finished updating our storepage with the new 0.7.0 content. We had already updated the text, and we've now added new images and a new video. After that was finished, Steam decided to overhaul how storepages work as well, especially the announcements - the thing you're currently reading! It looks different, doesn't it? Well, we're also trying to figure out how this works exactly. We noticed we're now able to distinguish between different categories of announcements: more mundane blogs like this one, patch notes for smaller updates, releases of big new updates and more. That could be very useful. The biggest change to the game this week occured in the diplomacy/trading interface. It was reorganized, with a clear separation between rules for different colonies. We also added icons to make it clearer. It looks like this now:
Apart from the update that reworks this menu, there were two other updates this week. They're a bit more technical so I'll just share the full changelog right here:
Fullscreen In last week's blog, we shared our plans for the future. We've thought and discussed the subject more this week and realized we probably forgot a large group of players. We came up with three different groups of players that are all important but have distinct needs and preferences. [olist]

Since the release of 0.7.0, we've been doing a lot of thinking. How is 0.7.0 received? What works, and what doesn't? What are the best improvements we could add to the game in the next one to two years? Our ideas are steadily getting clearer and we'd love to share them. We'd love to have your feedback! Disclaimer: the exact order and content of the updates is not set in stone: it is prone to change

0.7.0.138+ - Minor Changes

0.7.1 - Mods!

0.7.2 - Better UI

• Enhancing the happiness menu to be clearer
• A menu that keeps track of how many of each job you've got
• A menu that allows you to set the "priority" of empty jobs: when you've got 25 empty jobs and you recruit a new colonist, should he be a guard, farmer or crafter?
• A statistics menu that keeps track of your production stats per day, and your stockpile stats over time
• Integrating these statistics into the science menu: for example, kill 250 monsters with bronze arrows before you can unlock the crossbow, or harvest 1000 olives to boost the productivity of olive farmers

0.7.3 - Decent Tutorial

• Place a banner
• Place three beds
• Recruit three colonists
• Place a berry farmer
• Place a night slinger
• Place a copper miner
• Unlock bread production
• Distribute 10 candles to colonists
• Unlock the crossbow
• Unlock the glider
• Start a colony in the Far East

0.7.4 - Top Down View

• Blueprint builders
• Multi-block jobs
• Secondary banners to expand the safe zone

0.8.0 - Industrial Revolution

• a job that requires electricity
• a steam engine that is multiple blocks tall and wide and that requires a pipe with filled with steam and 4 working colonists to generate electricity
• a boiler that requires a pipe filled with water and fuel to generate steam

In other news

Lots of you have participated in last week's survey and we'd like to thank you for that! We've received over 300 responses, giving us a good insight in what people think of the update, the future of the game and the Friday Blog. We'd like to discuss the results in detail.
Fullscreen In general, most changes receive five or four stars, and we're very happy with that. But it's good to take a look at the weaker parts of the update. The happiness system and the glider are the least popular. As far as we understand, those who are critical of the happiness system think it's complex, complicated and tedious. The glider has also generated some confusion about how it functions, and we've heard complaints about both specifically the glider being slow and travel in general being a hassle. We think these are the main issues we've got to adress. More about specific solutions later in the blog!
Fullscreen When we first released Colony Survival, everybody was demanding more content. Over time, it mostly disappeared as a vocal criticism, but people kept asking for more content in surveys. This seems to be the first time that has changed. Improvements to for example the UI are now more popular than actual new content. That's good to know - we have shifted our priorities as well!
The people have spoken. The blog will continue during Zun's holiday (mid-September to mid-October) !
Fullscreen The most chosen answer for every subject is "perfectly balanced", with "more" being the second most popular option. That's pretty much the best result we could have hoped for! We'll aim for a bit more explanations, mod-highlights and surveys :) At the end, there was the option to share your own message, and many of you used that opportunity to give us some feedback or compliments. A lot were positive, but some also contained polite but harsh criticism. Here's an example:
We're of course not going to revert back all changes of the past year - happiness will stay part of the game. But we do agree that in some aspects, the game has become more complicated and perhaps more tedious. We're going to try to improve this by adding more systems that give players insight into for example their colony's economy, and other systems that reward growing colonies. A new system that could help to improve clarity is a top-down view. One of the big drawbacks of a first-person strategy game is that the mouse is used solely to move the camera and navigate your character. You can only use the mouse for other tasks when you've opened a menu that blocks the center of your screen. Imagine playing Colony Survival from a top-down perspective, with for example the command tool being a bar in the bottom of your screen, and a slider on the side that allows you to make blocks above a certain heigt invisible to help visualize interiors of buildings and underground mines. There could be some shortcuts on the edge of the screen that quickly allow you to check statistics and colony mangement menus. And of course, you can seamlessly transition back to a first person view. We'd like to add "blueprint-builders" - colonists that can build a specific structure, first made by the player or downloaded from the Steam Workshop. We're also thinking of adding larger machines that are significantly bigger than 1 block, like a steam engine or nuclear reactor that's at least 6x6x8 blocks large and employs multiple colonists. Deploying such structures from a first person perspective will be hard and awkward, but we think we can make it work decently from a top-down view. This new perspective could make playing the game a lot more streamlined and intuitive, something that is desparetely needed because of all the new content from 0.7.0. We've got other ideas to accomplish this as well and will explain more about them in future blogs. For now, we'd like to know how you feel about an optional top-down perspective. Is it exciting, are you neutral about it, or is it a waste of development time? Let us know in the comments or on Discord!
In the past week, we've released two new updates. 0.7.0.136 adds more options to trading. You can now limit trading based on the inventory of the target colony, and you can limit the total amount of items that will be traded. 0.7.0.137 reworks a significant part of the client scene management. This is important because we received reports from people who encountered multiple menus overlaying eachother. That issue should be fixed now. There are a couple of other minor changes in the update. To see the full changelog, visit #070-changelogs on our Discord or GitHub. Bedankt voor het lezen! Reddit // Twitter // YouTube // Website // Discord

New update, new survey! Let us know what you think of 0.7.0, and what you'd like to see in the future! Last week, we were at 0.7.0.127. We're currently at 0.7.0.135. That's more than one new version per day. Most changes were fixes to technical issues. The glider should be less glitchy and the void issue from for example this Yogscast stream should be fixed. There's a new shortcut to open the colony tab: "C". But the biggest and most noticeable thing is a new menu.
You're now able to remotely select colonies. This allows you to manage some simple things, and to find your way back to them.
It's not the prettiest interface, but it should prove itself useful! We've also spent some time reworking the storepage, describing the new features of 0.7.0. It isn't fully done yet, but we intend to make the changes public before I leave on holiday. That's the other news: I'm planning a short holiday starting next week. I intend to leave around Wednesday next week and am planning to return between Wednesday and Friday the week after. I'll write a Friday Blog about the poll results before I leave, and Zun will publish it at the appropriate moment, perhaps adding some words as well. When it's time for the subsequent Friday Blog, I should be back. If I'm not, you should look for me in Germany's forests or somewhere in the Alps! Bedankt voor het lezen en vergeet de enqute niet :) Reddit // Twitter // YouTube // Website // Discord

During last week's Friday Blog, version 0.7.0.123 was the most recent version of the game. Currently, the main branch is at 0.7.0.127! Firstly, the new broken achievements are fixed. You should be able to unlock all achievements related to 0.7.0 now. Secondly, we've patched some older achievements. The bloomery and the kiln were merged in the tech tree, just like the health improvements. This broke the achievements related to them. Everything should work as intended now! In last week's blog, we discussed issues regarding beds and the way colonists selected them. A fair share of players complained that colonists chose distant beds for unclear reasons. We explained the semi-broken way bed selection works (straight line through walls instead of actual path) and hoped this could help players solve their bed problems. But it turns out that is not the entire story. The bed selection in 0.7.0 was worse compared to 0.6.3. It was caused by a simplification that could easily lead to weird choices. So, that has been fixed. Bed selection still isn't perfect, but it shouldn't be incomprehensibly bad either. For those who had "bed problems": please let us know if you notice a difference!
When we released Colony Survival, wheat and flax were probably the only crops. It made sense that they required wheat seeds and flax seeds. In the past two years, we added plenty of other plants. Especially 0.7.0 adds a huge amount of crops: cabbages, barley, rice, sugar cane, tomatoes, potatoes and many more. In 0.1.0, wheat seeds were an important part of your economy. But we didn't think it would be fun to have to worry about dozens of different seeds in 0.7.0. So, we decided to remove the necessity for seeds entirely. You're still able to purchase them from the shop, but for example unlocking bread production doesn't grant 400 wheat seeds anymore, as it did in the past. This had one important negative side effect that we didn't think about: players are no longer able to revive a colony that lost its food supply by growing and harvesting their own wheat. We received some serious complaints about that, and decided to release a simple patch: the first five colonists are free. Set them to work as berry gatherers and you'll be able to restart a fallen colony! It's not a major change to the game, but it should be very useful in specific situations. Apart from these noticeable changes, there's a longer list of smaller improvements that might not affect gameplay directly but are still important. Some changes help with debugging, others improve networking. The full changelog can be found on Discord or GitHub.
In the middle of September, Zun is going to embark on his first big holiday since the release of Colony Survival more than two years ago. He'll be going to Japan for a month. While he's gone, it'll be very hard to release updates. We're planning to release some useful new features before Zun's holiday. One feature that we expect to be finished in time is a "Job Priority Menu". Currently, if you've got multiple unfilled jobs, it's impossible to determine which one will be picked by a newly recruited colonists. That's pretty unhandy in general, but can be dramatic in certain situations, especially when your colony is struggling, you've lost a bunch of colonists and you desperately need more guards or farmers. The Job Priority Menu will by default prioritize these jobs above for example scientists, and allow players to tweak it. Another thing we'd love to add is decent statistics, so players can better understand and predict what they need. We're planning to combine these statistics with the science menu, requiring for example 1000 bronze arrows to be fired before you can unlock the crossbow. We're unsure if this can be finished before Zun leaves though, so it might not be added until after he's back! Bedankt voor het lezen :) Reddit // Twitter // YouTube // Website // Discord

It has been a week since 0.7.0 was released! It feels like a much longer period. We've received lots of feedback, and nearly everybody had a positive view of the update. There have been some issues though. Twenty minutes before the release of the update, Zun uploaded a new build with optimized networking. Sadly, it introduced major problems when trying to load a world. So shortly after releasing 0.7.0, we had to release a hotfix that reverted back the networking. A problem that hasn't been fixed yet is broken achievements. The achievements for colonizing new biomes and the 100+ happiness achievement cannot be unlocked. This should obviously be resolved. The most pressing issues that Colony Survival still had in 0.6.3 are resolved in 0.7.0. FaceIt doesn't break the game anymore and savegames are way less likely to corrupt. But there are still some wonky behaviors that can cause issues. One of them is pathfinding. Colonists look for the closest bed, crate and grocery store in a straight line, right through the ground, walls and floors. They do not care about the actual path they have to take. Generally, in large colonies where jobs, beds and crates are spread out evenly, this doesn't cause any issues. But it can create lots of confusion in specific scenarios.
Let's take a look at the example above. There's a house with beds for guards and farmers, and there's a mine with a couple of colonists. Inside of the mine, there's an underground room with beds where the miners can sleep.
When nighttime arrives, the miners leave their jobs and walk towards the underground room with beds.
...and they walk straight past it to claim the beds in the house. They even go past the beds on the ground floor and go to the basement. They deliberately search out the farthest beds possible. But actually, they're the closest beds! They're right above them when they're working. So these are the beds they claim, and then they calculate a path towards them, not caring about available beds along the way. These issues can compound and cause further issues. There might be colonists working right next to the house who lose their beds. If other nearby beds are also claimed already, they might have to walk a long distance towards beds on the other side of the colony. It's pretty easy to prevent these problems: [olist]

Don't make very complex paths with beds hidden behind difficult mazes.[/olist] Follow one or both rules and you'll probably be fine. But if you're building complex structures with difficult entrances and exits, and you're placing a limited amount of beds for specific groups of colonists, you'll run into problems. We could of course change it so that colonists don't merely look for the closest bed in a straight line, but let them compare beds while keeping in mind the distance they are forced to travel. But this would dramatically increase the required computing power. Imagine hundreds or thousands of colonists, each calculating paths to multiple beds every night. It would be way less optimized, for something that is only a problem in a relatively small minority of worlds. Still, it's a problem that we can work on. There is probably a middle ground between the current way of selecting beds and fully realistic, detailed pathfinding every night. We've also thought about other solutions, like special beds for certain jobs. Green beds for farmers, black beds for miners, grey beds for guards. If that's something that appeals to you, please let us know!
In general, we had a pretty relaxed week. We listened to feedback and watched pretty much all new Colony Survival videos on YouTube. We've discussed plans for future updates, but we haven't actually worked on the game a lot. For more than a year, we lived with the idea that we'd release 0.7.0 in a couple of months. The release really did feel like a burden was lifted of our shoulders. We're recuperating for a bit and are looking forward to the next updates! Bedankt voor het lezen :) Reddit // Twitter // YouTube // Website // Discord

[ 2019-08-02 14:17:09 CET ] [ Original post ]

RELEASE TRAILER

Usability & Polish

• You can still recruit a single colonist
• You can enter a number and recruit a specific amount of colonists in one click
• You can fill the amount of empty beds
• You can fill the amount of empty jobs
• You can toggle auto-recruitment, which automatically recruits a colonist when the colony is happy, there is enough food left, and there's an empty bed & job.

Savegame Improvement

Mod Support

Unity Update

Renders and models

Conclusion

-------------IMPORTANT INFORMATION------------- Here's how to join the beta Official Release Date for 0.7.0: Friday July 26, 10AM Amsterdam time / 4AM NYC / 1 AM LA / 5PM Tokyo --------------------------------------------------------------- We've finally decided on an official release date! 0.7.0 will go live for everybody within a week. We can't wait to see how everyone will respond! This week, we've done something that we should've done a long time ago. Zun wrote some simple scripts that calculate how much time it takes to create a specific object, keeping in mind the costs of all required ingredients. We found quite a lot of very unbalanced recipes, and we released a big update on Wednesday that overhauled a lot of them.
Old data from before the big balance patch Fullscreen In the 'Time/item" column, you can see how much seconds are needed to craft one item. As you can see, some items like the luxury meal and the perpetual stew take an enormous amount of time. This is mostly compensated in the next column. It shows how many items colonists need to reach 100% distribution of that happiness type. Berries are easy to harvest but colonist need more than 4 of them, while they only need 0.03 luxury meal per day. In the third column, these numbers are multiplied to show how much effort is required to provide all colonists with each happiness item. The next column shows how much happiness is provided to the colony when the happiness item is distributed sufficiently. At the end is the most interesting column. It's a division of the two previous columns, effectively showing how much effort is required to produce 1 happiness. This number is highest for berries. They're barely worth the effort, but that makes sense: they're a very primitive food source, not an effective happiness item. On the other hand: books are a very advanced happiness item, and they have a relatively low "happiness output" as well. Happiness items that are unlocked later in the tech tree should be more effective. We've done a lot of rebalancing to make the numbers more sensible. But instead of merely looking at the output, we've also looked at the input. What jobs are necessary to produce all happiness items?
On the left the required jobs before the big balancing update; on the right the same but afterwards. Fullscreen Chicken meat and eggs require a lot of barley, and for example the luxury meal required three chicken meat and ten eggs. This made barley farming way too important. We've decreased both the required amount of barley, and the amount of eggs and chicken meat required as ingredients. We've changed some other recipes as well. This should make the distribution of jobs a lot more sensible, and make production a lot smoother.
Fullscreen After some iterations, Zun decided to also count the food values. The higher the number in column H, the more effort is needed for one calorie. That number does not have to be identical: some food items are hard to unlock, other are primarly meant as happiness item. But especially the exotic food items were very unbalanced. Bread was nearly four times more effective than the rice meal. On the other hand, foofoo was even more effective than bread.
Fullscreen In the end, we settled on this balance. The amount of effort to produce calories and happiness is a lot more consistent now, with better values for items further along the tech tree.
We're working on the final preparations for releasing the update now. We've got to redo the tutorial and manual. We're working on a splash screen with some important info and disclaimers. To make clear you're in a big new update (and that you didn't suddenly lose your savegames), we've changed the background of the main menu. Thanks PatateNouille for letting us use your creation! We're perfectionists, and 0.7.0 isn't perfect yet. The new features and complexity increase the demand for other new features. Faster ways of transport, better tools for navigation, better ways to manage your colony, tools to remotely manage colonies, more purpose for large colonies. We'd love to add those things, but we can't justify postponing the update any longer. We do want to add these features in future updates! We're going to film the new trailer next week, so this weekend is your last chance to submit your world to #trailer-worlds-only on Discord. Bedankt voor het lezen :) Reddit // Twitter // YouTube // Website // Discord

-------------IMPORTANT INFORMATION------------- Here's how to join the beta Expected time of official launch: in 1-2 weeks --------------------------------------------------------------- Zun is back! He left the hospital on Saturday and has been feeling a lot better. He's had an MRI scan today and a doctor will discuss the results with him soon. We're suspecting gallstones and hope it's nothing worse than that. Thanks a lot for all your well wishes! There was an outpouring of support for Zun, in the comments on Steam, on Discord, in PMs. We deeply appreciate the kindness of the community! We've released multiple new builds this week, containing all kinds of changes, improvements and fixes. Here's a partial list from the Discord:
Fullscreen Now that we're getting very close to the release, we've been talking about our plans for after the release of 0.7.0. Here's what we currently think we're going to do. At first, we'll probably be releasing multiple patches for small things like balancing issues, translations and bugs. These updates will be numbered 0.7.0.1, 0.7.0.2, etcetera. Our next priorities are:

• A new menu to display graphs that make a lot clearer how your production is going. See how many items are consumed and crafted, how many monsters are slain and how much days have passed. This is very important because of all the new jobs, items and complexity in 0.7.0.
• Integrating these statistics in the tech tree, with requirements like "Fire 500 bronze arrows before you can unlock crossbow bolts", "Distribute 100 luxury meals before you can unlock Colony Starter Kits". It won't be a full replacement, it'll be a mixed system.
• Add Steam Workshop and Steam Cloud support, with an in-game mod manager and support for specific mods per savegame

Mod content by Pandaros and Xweert -------------IMPORTANT INFORMATION------------- Here's how to join the beta Expected time of official launch: in 2-3 weeks --------------------------------------------------------------- A couple of days ago, Zun started suffering a pretty severe stomach ache. He's been having this problem once or twice a year for a while now, but the pain mostly seems to disappear after a couple of hours. But not this week. The pain kept coming back in waves. Eating seemed to increase the pain. Yesterday, late in the evening, he decided to visit the after-hours doctor service at the local hospital. They completed some scans and are suspecting gallstones. He slept at the hospital and they're performing more tests and scans now. They're currently planning to keep him there until at least Monday. Suffice to say, progress was less than hoped for this week. We haven't changed our expected release date though. We're pretty happy with the state of the beta. While there are definitely things that can be improved, there do not seem to be any major problems at the moment. Here's a list of things we still want to do before release:

• Balance recipes: change the cost, food value, happiness value
• Add a compass, to make it easier to find your colonies
• The updated science menu is way more clear in regards to what you actually unlock. Unlocks that were in the past separated for clarity, can now be merged. For example crossbow bolts + crossbows could be one research, same for matchlock guns and their ammo. Kilns and bloomery can be combined too.
• Update the F1 help-menu
• Update the UI to explain why players cannot access their old worlds anymore and how they can fix that (use the 0.6.3 branch)
• Add a splash screen with some general info
• Make a new trailer

-------------IMPORTANT INFORMATION------------- Here's how to join the beta Expected time of official launch: in 2-4 weeks --------------------------------------------------------------- In the past week, we released multiple new builds with all kinds of small optimizations, fixes and improvements. At the start of 2019, in January, we started counting the amount of "builds", new versions of the beta branch. In 171 days, we've released exactly 100 builds. That's more than one update per two days! Here's an example, the changes in build #98:

• add ability to cancel started cycles based research
• send a "Science xyz is ready to complete" message when it's ready
• fix incoming trade deal text using the wrong colony
• remove "type" word from trade deal description
• add a header name to the trade deal creation popup
• reduce monster spawn distance a bit more aggressively when closer to sunrise
• add a server log message for when near-banner chunks are done loading post-startup
• fix siege mode being enabled upon loading a world for a moment (while near-banner chunks are still loading)
• fix uncompleted science dependencies being completed without being marked as such when loading an savegame with manually edited science

We've got code that can change colors of sliders based on a ratio[/olist] Why not use the same system at every job block to make clear whether an item is produced enough or not? So we copied the system, adjusted it a bit and applied it to all crafting jobs. It looks like this:
We think this makes it a lot easier to sort out problems in your production chain! It's very satisfying to adjust things and see red sliders turn green. An other important change this week is new content in the tropics. You've got to bring items from the New World there to unlock crops like cacao and vanilla. You can use them to craft happiness items like chocolate and cookies! Banana farmers also use a proper mesh now.
In other news, the Yogscast has started a new YouTube series where they play Colony Survival! Last week, we wrote about their livestream, but now they've decided to also run a YT series. It has received a lot of attention. The first video has gained over 300,000 views in less than a week, and they've already released four videos. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dKJBFPpGKF8&list=PL3XZNMGhpynPANjExSrWHmOVVSMg9WjPx We've immediately noticed results. One of the consequences is a large spike in beta testers. There are now 1419 of them! Their feedback is very important for the release of update 0.7.0. The Yogscast has also had an impact on the forester. They noticed he planted the same trees in all biomes. That has now been improved: he plants local trees now. For example, in the Far East he will grow cherry blossom trees!
Last but not least: we've decided not to participate in the Summer Sale. One of the reasons why is that we don't want to "push" people into 0.6.3, we'd rather wait until 0.7.0 is released. We're also thinking of adjusting the price. A rule that Zun, Vobbert and I often keep in mind when deciding to purchase a game is "One Dollar per Hour". A game is worth $60 when we expect to play it for 60 hours, or $10 when we're done with it after 10 hours. When we released Colony Survival two years ago, it was very barebones and only very creative people spent 20 hours in-game. Completing the "tech tree" happened a lot quicker. Nowadays, we're noticing lots and lots of players with 50+, 100+, 250+ and even 500+ hours in-game. We believe we're at a very reasonable price point at the moment, and are considering to raise the price after 0.7.0 has been released. Currently, buying the game gives access to all content. There is no DLC, there are no in-game microtransactions and we will not release Colony Survival II in 2020. Personally, we're in favor of that strategy and we know we appreciate other developers who take that approach. But we'd like to know how you think about this. Do you prefer a higher price but no DLC and other costs, or a lower price but content locked behind new purchases? Bedankt voor het lezen! Reddit // Twitter // YouTube // Website // Discord

[ 2019-06-28 20:30:46 CET ] [ Original post ]

Last week, we started a discussion about replacing the old science system. We gave you a choice: would you like to see the old system with the scientist and technologist, or a new system based on counters? We argued in favor of the latter. A majority was in favor of the new system, but there was quite a lot of opposition. A common reply was "neither, why can't you mix the systems and have the benefits of both"? At first, we though this was unwieldy and hard to create. Well, Zun continued his work on the new system and last Saturday, we had a useable system. But it wasn't fully finished yet. It was... a mix. Exactly the kind of mix that many of you proposed.
So that's what the current system looks like. The UI has been enhanced a bit, it now also displays which technologies a recipe unlocks. And the counters are integrated in the old science system, that still includes scientists and technologists. Science unlocks can now require a combination of both ingredients and "counters" like "total amount of colonists"! One of the reasons why we wanted to fix the system before last weekend was the Yogscast. They've made dozens of videos about Colony Survival, and last week we received a message from them. They wanted to livestream the beta! We allow everyone to share videos of the beta if they make clear that it's a work-in-progress that changes rapidly, so of course they were allowed to do so as well. They've played the beta for five hours last Saturday, and have uploaded the footage to YouTube: https://youtu.be/m4iE0-IHrKk There weren't many technical problems and they seem to have enjoyed the update quite a lot, so that's good news for 0.7.0. An issue we've pondered about this week is the workbench. Some jobblocks have only a few recipes of which many items are crafted, like bronze arrows, bullets or gunpowder pouches. But the workbench has dozens of recipes, many of which are seldomly crafted. It has become quite cluttered, and can be hard to understand and confusing. When we proposed changing that, the reply on Discord was enthusiastic! But we're not sure how to fix that. Transferring all the seldomly required recipes to a new job would create a pretty useless job, especially for smaller colonies. We could split the workbench in two jobs that both have an even mix of common and rare recipes, but it's hard to think of an intuitive split that makes some sense from a real-life perspective. If you've got a good idea, please share it with us in the comments or on Discord!
Last but not least, we've spent a lot of time this week fixing the food system. In the past, there were only a couple of food items, they had a "food value" and they were consumed automatically based on a set food consumption per day. 0.7.0 contains a lot of new food items, and "food value" became pretty confusing. It's now measured in calories. 2000 calories per colonist, per day is now the standard food consumption. But players can adjust this in the happiness menu, by distributing more or less food items. Distribute more than 2000 calories and colonists will be "well fed", leading to extra happiness. The reverse is also true. These systems were quite glitchy at the start of the week. The statistics regarding food in the top-right corner of the screen were incorrect, and colonists consumed less food items than the happiness menu indicated. It was a lot of work to diagnose the exact problem. It has mostly been fixed now. The only "problem" left is good news for the colonists: they don't seem to starve anymore when they receive very low amounts of calories. We'll "fix" that (: In general, progress is going pretty much according to schedule and we expect to release 0.7.0 in 3-5 weeks! Bedankt voor het lezen :) Reddit // Twitter // YouTube // Website // Discord

This Sunday, Father's Day, the Early Access release of Colony Survival will be two years ago! The game was a lot simpler back then. There was a handful of jobs and items and the progression was very shallow. The game was meant to be played with a couple of dozen of colonists. To introduce some much needed depth and complexity, we quickly added the current science system. It has served us well, and a similar system will always be in Colony Survival. But the current version has quite a lot of drawbacks. On one hand, it's the center of the game. It constantly needs new resources and items, encouraging players to expand. But in 0.7.0, with the happiness system and the exotic biomes, expansion itself is way more complex than it was in the past. Colonists now need an ever increasing variety of items instead of merely bread and ammo. So science has become less central to the game. In the past, producing hundreds of science bags was one of the most complex things you could do. In 0.7.0, you'll be producing thousands of happiness items per day for large colonies. But the game ignored that. It only rewarded you for the science items you made. This felt wrong. We wanted to reward players for expanding, despite its challenges. We'd like to recognize and reward players when they recruit hundreds of colonists, distribute thousands of happiness items and fire tens of thousands of [strike]missile[/strike] projectiles. The current science system purely relies on items in the stockpile. The scientist grabs and consumes them for his science cycles. It's very difficult to add statistics like "# of colonists in the colony", "# of luxury meals distributed" and "# of crossbow bolts fired" to that system. We considered replacing the science system with a system that relies more on "counters". Instead of your scientist consuming 10 flax, you'll have to harvest 100 of it - but you can keep the flax and use it for other purposes. That shouldn't change gameplay much in the early game, except for preventing people from accidentally starving their colony by consuming food as science items. For the end game, instead of asking players to make "science bags" with arbitrary end-game items, the focus will lie on distributing large amounts of end-game happiness items. Fundamentally, the system is not very different, but we feel it fits 0.7.0 a lot better. One final improvement is the fact that it allows us to use stats like "# of bronze arrows fired". We'd like to add some of these requirements where they're appropriate. It would be weird to skip bows and go straight from slings to crossbows without ever having fired an arrow. It's a very big decision, and we did not want to implement it without asking feedback from the community. We didn't want to wait a week before working on it either, so we posted this message. We received a lot of feedback! Over 400 people voted in the poll. Thanks a lot :D Here are the results:
A majority of the voters supports adding the new system, but a large minority is still skeptical.
The ratings for the old system are pretty low. A rating of roughly 5 to 7 is most popular.
The new system does a lot better! The rating seems improved to 7 to 9.
Nearly half of the community is unreservedly in favor of the new system. More than a quarter leaves the choice to us. The last 23% wants us to leave the science system alone or at least think of a better alternative. Lastly, we asked about the priority of potential new features. Here are those results:
The priorities of the community seem to align pretty strongly with our plans for post-0.7.0-content! I'm very excited about industrial content, new guards and new monsters. The new save system was made with Steam Workshop in mind. Better animations and PVP certainly have benefits, but other things currently have a higher priority for us. We were just surprised about the lack of enthusiasm for splitscreen. We love that feature, but that might be the result of being brothers :)
We've decided to go ahead with the new progression system! Zun has worked very hard in the past couple of days and we think we've now got a pretty functional build with the new version. When the blog is released, I'll go test it and later in the weekend it should be available for all open beta testers. It was a busy week, but we feel like the new changes mitigate most of the issues described in last week's Friday Blog. This is the last big feature change planned for 0.7.0. For the next couple of weeks, we'll mostly focus on polishing, balancing and fixing smaller issues, and then we'll be ready for the full public release! Bedankt voor het lezen :) Reddit // Twitter // YouTube // Website // Discord

In last Friday's blog we describe the biggest problem we've encountered. It can be hard to get 'into the flow' of the game, and it ends pretty abruptly when you've unlocked most of the tech tree. We've done a lot of thinking and discussing. We're thinking of replacing the current science system with a lot of "counters". For example:

• Gather 100 berries - Unlock bread production
• Gather 50 copper ore - Unlock bronze anvil
• Kill 100 monsters - Unlock archers
• Reach 100 colonists - Unlock banner range increase I
• Fire 5000 bronze arrows - Unlock crossbow bolts
• Reach 500 colonists - Unlock banner range increase III
• Produce 3 gliders - Unlock colony starter kit
• Consume 100 tea - Unlock health upgrade IV

The response to the Open Beta has been overwhelming! We're currently at [strike]662[/strike] 663 testers - only counting the ones who've joined since the last blog. It has been extremely useful. 0.7.0 contains many new features, recipes and UI elements. Playing the game from start to the last science unlock without using cheats literally takes days. It's very different from the game we released nearly two years ago. We could playtest that version in it's entirety in 90 minutes. We've received an immense amount of feedback. Small bugs, typos, glitches, inconsistensies in the tech tree, balance problems. The testers are doing a great job, despite many features lacking explanation and the quick-start-menu not being updated. We immediately took care of many of the smaller problems. But there are some larger issues that will probably only be solved in later updates. The issues are best explained by dividing the game in three stages:

Stage 1: Setting up your first colony

Stage 2: Growing your colony

Stage 3: Endgame

• Place the banner
• Place three beds
• Recruit three colonists
• Recruit a berry gatherer
• [...]
• Unlock matchlock guns
• Build a colony in the tropics

After nearly a year of work, we've finally got a relatively playable version of the dev branch! Here's a list of some of the new features and content:

• Happiness mechanic - As your colony grows from a quiet farming village to a bustling city, their demands increase. Feed them well and give them luxury items to keep them happy. Or don't, and watch your science speed & productivity plummet while recruitment costs dramatically rise.
• Co-op - It's now possible to share a colony with friends!
• Dozens and dozens of new items and jobs - fishermen, cooks, diamonds, tea, coffee, silk, and last but not least, potatoes!
• Entirely new world generation - It uses a combination of temperature and "rainfall" (not visible, but a lush forest obviously has more rainfall than a desert) to determine what the area should look like.

• Three exotic regions - There's now a Far East, Tropics and New World, each with their own unique science, jobs and research!
• Multiple colonies mechanic - Craft a Colony Starter Kit and start new colonies.
• Glider - Research and craft a glider and take to the skies for rapid exploration and travel!
• Trading - Set up traders to sent items and science from one colony to another, or to other players in multiplayer.
• New Unity Version - Includes a multitude of updates which solve common problems
• Dramatic optimization - Terrain should load a lot quicker, and you ought to be able to have a lot of extra colonists!
• New save system - Savegames are 10 times smaller, making saving and loading 10 times as quick. They're also 10 times less likely to corrupt! It's also prepared to deal with the Steam Workshop.
• Easy co-op hosting - It's no longer necessary to browse through the installation folder and find a separate server. Set up a multiplayer server with friends right from the main menu!
• LAN support - By popular demand.
• Plenty of other small optimizations - You can now recruit as many colonists as you've got unfilled jobs or beds in one click, or enter a custom number. A lot of old and ugly hand drawn icons have been replaced with rendered icons. Some job blocks have been replaced as well.

The blog concerns changed to the 0.7.0 dev branch, which is not publicly released yet A couple of blogs ago, we mentioned one of the last glaring holes in 0.7.0. Starting new colonies was possible, but it was pretty "cheaty" and there was no proper way to do it through normal gameplay. That has largely been fixed this week! Players now need a "Colony Starter Kit" to start a second colony. There's currently only one in-game, but the UI has a drop-down menu that can be used to select a different one. Eventually, there will be multiple Colony Starter Kits, ranging from small to huge. Larger starter kits are more difficult to create, but they'll provide starting colonies with a larger amount of items.
There was another problem for later colonies. You had to unlock every technology all over again. That's very boring and annoying. We tested it by using cheats to complete all science, but that's not how 0.7.0 ought to be played. We had to add a system to transfer science from one colony to another. Instead of using this system merely to unlock old science at the start of a new colony, Zun made this system in a way that allows players to "trade science"! When player A has unlocked something, he can send it to player B. 0.7.0 has also received a bunch of new rendered icons this week. We wanted to replace the old, pretty ugly, hand drawn crown icon that's used for the command tool. I tried to make some kind of "Imperial Orb" (first image of the blog), but with some help of the people on our Discord server we decided it wasn't clear enough. If someone has a good idea for the icon for the command tool, we'd love to hear it! Progress is going well. We still hope to release the open beta next week, and we feel like we're on track for a full release in June/July.
Interfaces are work-in-progress

Blog 100

The next update, 0.7.0, is still on schedule for release during the end of June or July. We hope to release an open beta before the end of the month!
Thanks to Pantouflee for letting us use his world Hartelijk bedankt voor het lezen van de honderdste Friday Blog! Reddit // Twitter // YouTube // Website // Discord

One year ago, we wrote a blog called Stitching Up Colony Survival, in regards to update 0.6.0. It contains this paragraph: "We feel like in the past two months, we removed and replaced multiple major organs. Last week, we celebrated successfully inserting the last organ. But the patient still lies on the operating table, with the body cut half open. This week, we've been working on stitching everything back together. Updating interfaces, cleaning things up and fixing the last problems." That's pretty much how we feel today, but instead of the 'surgery' lasting two months, it lasted a year. With airships / gliders now being present and functional, the last big new feature of 0.7.0 is done. That doesn't mean everything is ready for release. Plenty of things are okay for internal testing, but lack the polish required for public release. One example is the way to start multiple colonies. In the current testbuild, you can just walk up to any spot and click on it to place another banner which automatically contains a new "initial stockpile". That's too simple, and easy to exploit. What we're currently working on is a new item, which we'll name something like the "Colony Starter Package". This item has to be unlocked with the science system, and it's place in the tech tree will be behind matchlock guns. Once you've unlocked it, your colonists will have to craft a new Colony Starter Package. This will require at least all the resources that will appear in the stockpile at the start of the new colony. The Colony Starter Package will contain more items than merely the ones present in the stockpile of the very first colony. The first colony contains relatively few items, forcing players to learn about the new jobs and items step by step. That's useful for the first colony, but boring to repeat over and over again. That's why the Colony Starter Package will include quite a lot of basic materials, to quickly get later colonies up to speed. Our current goal is one Colony Starter Package. But we're pretty sure we'll add more variants later one. Perhaps even custom ones, designed by players themselves! Zun is keeping this in mind while programming the current system, trying to keep things future-proof.
Moderation in an Age of Censorship Yesterday was the birthday of our moderator, Vobbert! He's 27 years old now. Apart from nearly single-handedly managing Colony Survival's Discord and its over two thousands members, he has been a lifelong friend who has offered invaluable advice to me and Zun. If Zun and I disagree, which we do regularly, Vobbert is the one to cut the Gordian knot. This week, we had a serious discussion about moderating the Discord. We've got an amazing community that provides great insights and help in the development of Colony Survival, that in general needs little moderation. Most of the work consists out of giving people the "verified" rank, and sometimes pointing people to the appropriate channel. But there was a growing problem. The off-topic channel #not-so-serious received a large daily influx of memes. Some of them were absolutely hilarious, some of them were highly offensive and others were questionable. We often had to have a discussion whether a certain meme was acceptable or not. In general, we're strongly in favor of free speech. We've never removed criticism of Colony Survival anywhere, unless it contained explicit insults like "retard". We try to moderate our Discord, not by outright removing content, but by sending it to the right location. For example, we've got off-topic channels, and when users engage in off-topic chat in the #general channel we'll point them there. There has been an intense discussion about free speech outside of Colony Survival as well, this week. Facebook/Instagram banned "dangerous individuals" this week. Facebook said something about banning people who promote or engage in violence or hate. Hate is hard to pin down - should we ban people who hate nazis and homophobes? Recognizing calls to violence is a lot easier, and I'm pretty sure that Paul Joseph Watson and Milo Yiannopoulos did not encourage their fanbase to engage in violence. We're very skeptical about large companies removing individuals from their platforms for vague reasons. As Lord Acton said: "Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority, still more when you superadd the tendency or the certainty of corruption by authority." So we had some pretty ironical discussions. On one hand, we were worried about the threat of large companies being able to remove anyone from online platforms just because they have an opinion that is disliked. On the other hand, we were thinking of the best way to remove offensive content from our Discord. In the end, we decided on this solution. We made a new off-topic channel called #memes. #Not-so-serious was renamed to #less-serious-no-memes, to clarify the change of rules. Slowmode is enabled in #memes, meaning users can only post one message or image per minute. This prevents spam and encourages players to post only their best content. We'll finetune these rules in the next few weeks. Slowmode can easily be set to a shorter or longer amount of time. We have to see how it works out. What scares us most about censorship is vagueness. Having unclear rules and sneakily removing content without properly stating the reasons for it just feels wrong. We're trying to do the opposite by writing about it in this blog. We'd like to have your input. What is it that annoys you the most online? Harmless opinions being removed by powerhungry corporations? Or tasteless trolls ruining the signal-to-noise ratio? Where's the line between a controversial opinion and hatespeech? Is "punch a nazi" a bannable call to violence? Is "punch a communist", "punch a socialist", "punch a liberal"? It might seem unrelated to Colony Survival, but these are the decisions we have to make when judging content on the Discord. Bedankt voor het lezen! Reddit // Twitter // YouTube // Website // Discord

The flight mechanic is not available in a public build yet and will be released with the rest of 0.7.0 - hopefully during the end of June / July The flight mechanic has improved a lot in the past week! We made another video to demonstrate the changes: https://youtu.be/MLqoJrafuII We were planning to add some kind of mini-zeppelin. It would just gently float from one place to another. But the first prototype was less stable - and more exciting! We thought we could make the 'airship' better by turning it into some kind of glider that can actually be aimed up and down. The technical term is angle of attack. While writing last week's Friday Blog, I already had the idea, but I didn't expect us to be able to actually add it to the game, so I did not mention it. I'm very excited to be able to say that it's in-game and functional right now :D Aim the glider up and you'll gain altitude. But the higher you aim, the more speed you lose. Aim down to rapidly gain speed! You steer the plane by aiming with your mouse. While the old prototype always followed your mouse, the new one only does so when you're using your 'motor'. This allows players to look in all directions while flying forward in a straight line. Obviously, the prototype_flying_box has received a new model in the past week. Most of our week was focused on issues related to it, like making sure player models are attached to the vehicle properly when viewing them third person. All of these efforts can be easily reused when adding other vehicles in the future! What's your opinion? Does the flying mechanic look like fun? Do you like the model? Would you change things? Bedankt voor het lezen! Reddit // Twitter // YouTube // Website // Discord

The airship is only available in the internal test branch, which isn't publicly available yet We tested the first functional 'airship' this week! It's suitably called Prototype_Flying_Box. It's ugly, it's primitive, but it contains the basics of flight in Colony Survival. The flight mechanics will be improved next week, but we'd love to show you the current state of things: https://youtu.be/I_6aKvzQaUk Our original plan was to add some kind of zeppelin / hot air balloon. When we tested the first prototype, it felled more like some kind of powered glider. We realized we actually preferred that! It's more fun to glide over hills and treetops than to float at a stable high altitude. The current 'airship' is pretty slow and we believe we can make the flight mechanics more exciting. But even in this primitive state, it feels like a game changer. Traveling the world by foot, dodging trees and climbing hills block by block, gets old and boring fast. It makes many 0.7.0 features, like the new world design, different biomes in distant areas, multiple colonies and trading, less fun and relevant than they ought to be. But now that we've got a decent option for transportation, it really feels like the update is coming together!
Here's our intended 0.7.0 gameplay, and how far these parts are done: [olist]

I've spent most of the week testing 0.7.0, while Zun was working on the airship/transport-code. He encountered a pretty significant coding problem. Colony Survival is fully split in a server and a client, both in singleplayer and multiplayer. We already used collision code for the player movement, but this ran fully on the client. The airships need collision code as well, but this code has to run on the server. Making this work was pretty challenging, but that part is done now so we're making good progress on that feature!

Test Results

You want to boost happiness and need to recruit new colonists to produce more/new happiness items[/olist] I'm having a lot of fun when multiple of these reasons intersect. You get in a nice flow where you're expanding for one reason, causing more monsters to come / unhappiness to increase, leading you to grow some more, and more, and more. But reason 1 is an assumption, not a guarantee. Reason 2 ends where the big items in the tech tree are unlocked, probably the matchlock gun. Reason 3 & 4 are vicious cycles - if you're not growing, the amount of monsters and the amount of (un)happiness is pretty much stable. Currently, exploration and secondary colonies in exotic biomes are only necessary for happiness items - and if you're not growing, you don't need them. The moment where we're expecting players to explore the world and start secondary colonies is roughly at the end of the 0.6.3 tech tree, but because the tech tree has mostly come to an end, there is no reason to grow anymore. If you're interested in growing and exploring for their own sake, the current state of the game is pretty satisfying. But we expect a decent amount of players to miss a "pull forwards". The most obvious solution is new science in the tech tree. Perhaps we can reuse the transport mechanic from the airship to create a jetpack, and make this an expensive end-game unlock which has upgrades to increase its power and duration. A second solution is a new feature that requires players to recruit a lot of colonists during the end-game. We'll be working on both before and after the release of 0.7.0.
Things are going well and we feel like we're still on track for a release in June/July :) Bedankt voor het lezen! Reddit // Twitter // YouTube // Website // Discord

[ 2019-04-19 14:02:41 CET ] [ Original post ]

This weekend, as a form of relaxation, Zun enjoyed one of his favorite pastimes: optimizing the performance of Colony Survival. He thought of a way to dramatically optimize terrain rendering. CPU use dropped by 60 to 80%. In a test world with max view range, the amount of frames per second jumped from 65 to 178! With medium view range, the effect is roughly +10% fps. During the week, he spent most of his time writing new transport vehicle code. That's right, it's not specifically airship-code. A lot of people commented on last week's blog that they'd still like to see boats, and we agreed with them. Update 0.7.0 will probably only contain airships, but a later update will hopefully contain boats. We're even thinking about using the transport vehicle code for minecarts :) I spent multiple days testing and balancing the game. We were afraid we'd encounter an unbalanced mess of glitches and inconsistencies, but we were positively surprised! Problems were way more minor than expected. We've still got good hope of reaching the June/July release date!
A lot of people have suggested either gates or monsters that can destroy walls ('better siege AI'). We've thought about these options sincerely, and we have not found ways to implement these features in the near future with a reasonable cost/benefit balance.

Better siege AI / wall breaking monsters

Gates

Conclusion

All changes in this blog concerns an internal dev branch that is not publicly available yet The tropics received a bunch of new content! I've spent most of my time this week making new icons and crops. Zun focused on trading. It's functional now! There's a new interface that allows you to set up trading with any other colony, even colonies owned by other players. If you own both colonies, the trade deal will be automatically accepted. If the target colony is owned by a different player, he'll have a chance to confirm or reject the deal. Once you've established how many items you'd like to send, colonists will start working to fulfill the deal. The more trader-colonists you've got, the quicker it goes.

Travel options

Paradox

Disclaimer: this concerns the internal dev branch, no public updates have been released This week, I've been focused on adding content to the tropics. There has been a special tropical biome in-game for over two years, but it was never relevant. It's a lot of fun to do something useful and unique in the tropical area for the first time, while tropical birds are chirping in the background!
Currently, sugarcane is the only new tropical crop that's visible in-game. There are more meshes and icons waiting to be added, but Zun has been busy focusing on something else that's very important: trading!
The entire idea of multiple colonies with unique happiness items and ores is useless if you cannot trade these items from one colony to the other. So trade is fundamental to tie 0.7.0 together. While I'm writing this blog, Zun is working on the first functional trade deal in Colony Survival! During the past year, we've become used to having a long, long list of unfinished features and content in front of us. But this week, I spotted light at the end of the tunnel. When the new world / tropics content is done, and trading is functional, there's only one last new feature that needs work: transport, in the form of little boats and / or airships. Afterwards, a lot of polishing, beta testing and balancing is still necessary. It's not the end, but you can see it from here!
Bedankt voor het lezen! Reddit // Twitter // YouTube // Website // Discord

[All changes mentioned in this blog concern the internal dev branch - no updates have been released publicly] This week, we've made our definitive choices for new content in the tropics and new world. Here is the first wave of content that is 99% certain: New World:

• Potatoes, for food
• Tomatoes, for food
• Cotton, for textiles
• Fur, available at the merchant, for winter coats in the Arctic

• Cassava, for food
• Bananas, for food
• Papyrus, for paper
• Sugar, for happiness items
• Coffee beans, for coffee
• Diamonds, for jewelry, as a happiness item

• Vanilla, for cookies and candy
• Cacao, for chocolate
• Rubber, for industrial content after 0.7.0

Deadline

This week, we've continued work on the new content in the Far East. Last week, all NPCs were still wearing pink and they lacked a lot of icons. That has changed, nearly all icons are done. Kaolinite is now present in the ground. Photoshop is acting up though, and it's brightening the color of the stone around the ore. We're still looking for a fix.
We had planned to add content to the New World and Tropics as well, this week. But we're having a hard time selecting appropriate items. Colony Survival is definitely not a hardcore realistic 100% accurate historical simulation. But when thinking of new jobs and new items, we do try to keep real life and history in mind. Both of us love Factorio, and while that's partly because of the brilliant gameplay mechanics, I believe the feeling of producing realistic items and learning something about how they're made is crucial as well. To me, gathering copper ore and oil and producing plastics and solar panels is more fun and interesting than gathering a generic fantasy resource and using a made up mechanism to craft it into a clich magical item. It's also easier to remember recipes and ingredients if they make sense in real life. (Not trying to insult fantasy - huge fan of Lord of the Rings here!) The central area, the temperate biome where every player spawns in Colony Survival, is obviously inspired by Europe and European history. We want to have a different continent in every direction. The east is inspired by Asia, the south by Africa, the west by America and the north by the Arctic.
Doing it like this divides the map into 9 blocks. What to do with the center and the blocks above, below and to the sides of it is obvious. Deciding to make the north-west and north-east "Arctic" just like the mid-north was an easy decision: Alaska, northern Scandinavia and Siberia are pretty similar visually. But what to do with the south-west and the south-east? The south-west contains South-America, and the south-east Indonesia and Australia. Indonesia is home to a lot of spices and other resources that were very popular with merchants. South-America is the origin of important crops like cotton and cacao. We don't want to force people to start six different colonies, but we don't want to overlook these regions and crops either. What we're very probably going to do, is consider all three southern regions (south-west, south, south-east) as "tropics", but lock certain crops behind items from for example the New World. Imagine a New World Science Bag that requires potatoes, tomatoes and corn, which can be used in the Tropics to unlock cotton and cacao. So, problem #1 is probably solved. Problem 2: manufacturing. The three-sector model divides the economy into, surprise, three sectors. The primary sector is extraction of raw materials, the secondary sector is manufacturing and the third is services. We don't want to merely add new resources like crops and ores, we'd like to add some secondary sector jobs as well. In the Far East, it's the production of silk and porcelain. Historically, these were important products with a big impact on world history, see for example the Silk Road.
But what products were made in the secondary sector in America/Africa during the Medieval and pre-Industrial Period, and traded around the world in significant numbers? There was a lot of trade with these areas in the 16th/17th/18th century, but mainly for raw materials and crops like gold, coffee beans, sugar and cotton. The contrast with the Far East makes sense. During this time period, Europe and China were both densely populated and contained many large cities with complex economies. But North America and large portions of Africa were much more sparsely populated, mainly by hunter-gatherers. While there were certainly cities with a secondary sector in (South) America and Africa, they mainly focused on items that are already in-game, like food and weapons. There doesn't seem to be a unique one-on-one equivalent of silk/porcelain in pre-Industrial North-America / Africa. One option for a unique 'happiness item' from the tropics with realistic roots is jewelry. There seem to have been pretty advanced smiths in historical Africa, and it makes sense to make the tropics the source of for example diamonds and perhaps rubies. These could be used to make valuable jewelry with a large happiness boost. A possibility for the New World could be cotton, and processing it into different textiles. We're giving this subject a lot of thought, because we want all regions to have unique, fun, semi-realistic and coherent tech trees. So if you've got any ideas for materials/crops/secondary sector jobs in the tropic and New World regions of Colony Survival, please share them here or on Discord this weekend! We'll be adding content in these regions next week.
Bedankt voor het lezen! Reddit // Twitter // YouTube // Website // Discord

No content has been released publicly, this concerns changes to the internal dev branch For the first time, we've added unique non-central-biome content! We've started adding content to the Far East biome. The Far East has received a unique crop: rice. It can be combined with chicken and cabbage to create a full meal. There are three new production chains for happiness items. Firstly, there's tea. Grow tea leaves, process and dry them and your cook will be able to make tea.
The workers are still default-pink, that should be different next week Secondly, you can make porcelain. There's a unique ore in the Far East: kaolinite. When it's mined, a stonemason can use it to make raw porcelain. This should be fired twice in a kiln to make glazed porcelain. The last new production chain concerns silk. You need to grow special bushes that cater to silkworms. Harvest their cocoons and process them in a special spinning wheel to make silk threads. A tailor can use the threads to make silk, which are required to make for example silk pillows.

Pathfinding

Realistic Stockpile

This week, I moved to a new apartment. It took a bit more time than expected, but I'm mostly set up now. Zun has continued to fully focus on working on the game, but because of my absence, he focused more on 'background technical issues' than significant new features. Because there aren't a lot of exciting game-related things to write about the current week, it seems appropriate to talk about the past and the future. Most Friday Blogs assume you've read a decent amount of other blogs, and we notice that they can be confusing to new players/readers. Let's start with a decent summary of the past so we know where we're standing. Prior to Spring 2017, developing Colony Survival was just a hobby. We had barely any players, received no attention and earned no income from the game. But that changed rapidly. After some YouTube videos, we quickly got a massive amount of attention. We decided to release the game ASAP, and the launch was very successful. Colony Survival become our full-time career. Colony Survival 0.1.0 was a glorified tech-demo that was tested by a handful of people. There were lots of improvements to be made. We focused on releasing as many small updates and patches as we possibly could. Quick, simple fixes that didn't break existing structures and had a big pay-off had the priority. Fixes that took more time or required people to start a new world were postponed. After more than a year of doing this, we started working on 0.7.0 in the Summer/Autumn of 2018. Starting a new world is absolutely required in 0.7.0. That's why we want to combine 0.7.0 with many "background fixes" that also break older worlds; we don't want to break savegames regularly. Initially, we wanted to release the update "feature by feature", instead of combined as one massive update. But most new features depend on each other: multiple colonies are useless without trading, happiness items are useless without the happiness mechanic, etcetera. We don't want to break people's worlds and force an update on them that feels half-finished. 0.7.0 features that are finished, but unreleased:

• Every player can start multiple colonies
• Players can invite other players to share ownership of a colony
• An entirely new world with new biomes, new trees and other improvements
• The happiness mechanic: recruiting colonists generates unhappiness, provide them with special items to boost happiness.
• The ability to set up a server from the main menu without having to browse folders for colonyserver.exe
• Full LAN support
• Entirely new save system that fixes crash corruption and prepares the way for Steam Workshop/Cloud Sync
• Lots of new jobs and items
• Lots of technical fixes and improvements, solving many common problems

• Unique content in far away biomes

• Trading
• Transport, like little boats
• Small things like "what are the requirements/costs for starting a new colony, does it require the banner tool?"

It's Friday in Japan and Australia, that's Friday enough for a Friday Blog Last week, we explained that we had to make a difficult choice. Streamlined, accessible inequality versus complex and potentially repetitive equality. The blog resulted in a lot of discussion, and we had some tough discussions about the fundamentals of the future of Colony Survival. The game is getting more complex every day, and it becomes harder and harder to get a clear overview of both the details and the overarching gameplay. We pondered a lot and gained valuable insights. 1.) Exponential growth
Many months ago we published the graph above. We expected each happiness item to have a similar cost and impact, e.g., tea adds 25 happiness, coffee adds 25 happiness, etc. But now that we're actually adding those items, something else seems obvious. In the early game, your colony is simple, you don't have many things unlocked, and happiness items are necessarily relatively simple. As you progress, happiness items become more advanced with complex production chains. It makes sense for these items to produce more happiness than the items from the early game. So instead of producing a bunch of relatively similar happiness items, you're actually progressing through some kind of tech tree, making more and more advanced and 'powerful' items as time goes on. 2.) A solution to repetition We don't want to make 0.7.0 any more complex by having the same item have different happiness values in different biomes (for example, ice cream being more valuable in the tropics than in the arctic). But combined with point #1, this would necessarily mean repeating the same "happiness tech tree" in every biome again and again. That was one of my biggest fears regarding 'equality' between colonies. A relatively easy fix would be restricting happiness items to certain biomes. An example could be winter coats made with cotton from the New World biome. These coats could be restricted to the Arctic biome, but with a +200 happiness effect. It adds an interesting challenge to colonizing the Arctic, it makes colonization more "equal", without requiring players to go through the same "happiness tech tree" five times. 3.) Overcoming challenges What's fun, both in life and in games, is overcoming challenges. It mustn't be easy to overcome, or it wouldn't be a challenge. But if it is not overcome, it isn't fun either. The current public version of the game, 0.6.3, is relatively challenging at the start, but once you've got 300~500 colonists, the challenge is pretty much gone for most people. That's why we added the happiness mechanic, to create a dynamic challenge that scales with the growth of your colony, similar to the monster threat. Reintroducing challenge is a good thing, but the happiness mechanic isn't something that players really overcome. At times, it's pretty self-contradictory. I noticed I was recruiting colonists to produce new happiness items, in turn increasing the demand for happiness items. Currently, the only thing that is really "permanently overcome", is the tech tree, and it's main function is... unlocking weapons to fight monsters, and unlocking new happiness items. You're recruiting lots of colonists, just to solve a problem that only exists because you've got lots of colonists. We were already planning to add science that has nothing to do with either monsters or happiness. Perhaps something like jetpacks, airships or teleporters. The importance of it is becoming more obvious. But we don't want to postpone 0.7.0 any longer than necessary, so this content will probably arrive in 0.7.1/0.7.2/0.7.3. We've also seriously discussed some kind of wave-based mode. Imagine preparing your colony for a giant wave of monsters, coming at the moment of your choosing. Defeating the wave yields unique rewards, either items, something like XP or unlocking new science. Each wave is bigger and more powerful than the previous one, encouraging players to build up their colony as strong as possible. This could be a great incentive to grow your colony, despite the increased cost of happiness items and more monster attacks.
What's your opinion? If you've survived the wall of text above, we'd love to have your opinion! Are the insights above things you agree with? Do they make you enthusiastic or upset? Let us know in the comments, or on Discord! (Or Reddit, or Twitter, we read everything) Reddit // Twitter // YouTube // Website // Discord

[All changes discussed in this blog concern dev branch 0.7.0, which is not publicly available yet] During the weekend, Zun completely redid the player movement code. We've had an issue for years where players would sometimes glitch into the ground. This update should fix that problem. Another big change is the addition of a new tabbed menu next to the stockpile and science. It's the Colony Tab, and it allows you to change the name of your colony, invite other players to be co-owners (or leaders!) of your colony and to recruit large amounts of colonists.
We've had to make another major decision this week. What's the relationship between the biomes going to be? Are they all on "equal footing", with similar capabilities and opportunities? Or will it be more similar to the world of The Hunger Games, where exploited districts serve the wealthy Capitol? Both systems have benefits and drawbacks. 'Equality' is more 'free form': players are free to choice where to build their biggest colony. The end-game (19th/20th century tech) will be available in every biome. But we're afraid 'equal biomes' will cause the game to become repetitive and boring. Colonists in every biome will need similar amounts of happiness items, so the challenge of building a 2nd/3rd/4th colony will not be very different from the challenge of building your first colony. Trade between colonies will probably become extremely complex, because the same kind of items need to be spread to every biome (tea needs to go from the east to north/west/south/center, coffee needs to go from the south to north/west/east/center, etc.).
Distant biomes serving the center versus biomes on equal footing So we're drawn to a different solution: inequality. Colonists in distant biomes should need less happiness items compared to the central biome. Colonies in distant biomes serve as outposts for the capital in the central biome, providing it with exotic happiness items and resources needed for modern tech. To prevent people from ignoring the central biome (with its 'expensive' colonists), end-game content is only available in the center. We aren't 100% sure, but we mostly believe that 'the inequality option' provides players with better, more enjoyable gameplay. We did ask our Discord community to vote on the options. Here are the options and the results:
There's potentially a third option, where there's still inequality between the capital and the outposts, but where the capital can be built in any biome. It sounds good in theory, but will delay 0.7.0 even further, and it makes it more difficult to streamline the tech tree. We haven't made any definitive decisions yet. What's your favorite? Leave a comment here or join the Discord and share your feedback there. As usual, here are the changelogs of the dev branch. There was a new build every workday, this week!

Bedankt voor het lezen! Reddit // Twitter // YouTube // Website // Discord

[Disclaimer: we're talking about changes to the 0.7.0 dev branch here, which is not yet publicly available] Last week's announcement that we removed seeds & saplings generated quite a bit of controversy. Some complained, rightfully so, that this removed the ability to plant crops and flowers as decoration. That is a feature we do not intend to remove. We'll add seeds & saplings to the merchant. They won't limit expansion anymore, they won't be needed by colonists or any core gameplay mechanics, they won't clutter the stockpile of players who've just started out, but experienced players who want to decorate their colony will still be able to use them! The biggest change in the dev branch last week is the addition of biome dependent science. The location of the colony now determines which science is available. For example, we can now make it so that only colonies in the far east can unlock tea farmers, while sugarcane can only be unlocked in the tropics. We've thought a lot about how to structure the tech tree in other colonies, this week. We realized we do not simply want to make it like the standard colony with some extra crops. It would be good if each colony had a relatively unique development. For example, colonists in arctic areas could require more food and happiness items. Potatoes would replace wheat as the main crop in the new world. Bamboo could be part of many recipes in the far east. Basically, we've got to reinvent Colony Survival four times: unique foods, happiness items, recipes and tech trees in the north, east, south and west. This is not a task to approach lightly. We've been extensively pondering and discussing how to structure this exactly. We hope to be able to show you the first unique colony in an exotic biome next week!
Last week, we were at build 21. Now we're at build 27. Here's a comprehensive list of all the changes that we've made on the dev branch this week:

Bedankt voor het lezen! Reddit // Twitter // YouTube // Website // Discord

Playing the game during the past few weeks felt like playing a scrappy tech demo. It was fun to see the new jobs and items, but it didn't feel like a game. But this week, playing the most recent dev branch actually felt like a fun and immersive experience again! We've made many changes to the tech tree, crafting recipes and food/happiness values. Balancing the production of happiness now feels like the fun challenge it ought to be. Recruit a bunch of colonists, and the total happiness level drops, while the amount of happiness items needed by your colonists increases: providing everyone with a piece of cake everyday requires more cake when you've got 100 colonists compared to 50 colonists. Fiddling with the sliders and checking your production chains to rebalance happiness works perfectly now. One major change is the removal of nearly all seeds & saplings. Having to buy wheat seeds at the shop if you wanted to expand more rapidly was an interesting mechanic when the game lacked content in June 2017. But the game now contains a lot more content, and 0.7.0 adds a lot of new seeds & saplings. Barley seeds, cabbage seeds, olive saplings, and in a similar vein, chicken coops for chicken farmers and beehives for beekeepers. Instead of cluttering the stockpile with additional items and expanding unnecessary mechanics, we've decided to remove the requirement for them entirely. Colonists can just plant wheat and cabbages and all the other crops and trees now, even if they lack seeds or saplings. We believe it improves the game, but we love to have your opinion!
Another new job is the "water pump operator". 0.7.0 adds two new jobs that need to be placed next to water: the fisherman and the water gatherer. Fish isn't fundamental to your colony, but water is. Instead of forcing players to start a colony next to lakes or oceans, we decided to add a new job block that can also turn empty buckets into buckets filled with water: the water pump. It can do the same thing as a water gatherer, albeit slower. Here's a complete list of changes to the dev branch this week:


Bedankt voor het lezen! Reddit // Twitter // YouTube // Website // Discord

The testers started their work exactly one week ago. We've gotten a lot of feedback, and we've implemented many tweaks and changes to improve the gameplay. The happiness menu was messy and hard to understand. There were a bunch of sliders, and if you dragged them around, some stats on the left side of the menu would eventually change, after waiting one or two in-game days. It was not intuitive and hard to test. There was plenty of data we liked to show in that menu, but we struggled finding a way to visualize the data without making the entire menu cluttered. Eventually, we decided that the best way to accomplish this would be by expanding the tool-tip that appears when you hover your mouse over an item. It now provides players with a lot of new information. It makes it a lot easier to make good decisions surrounding happiness.
The new data isn't only shown in the happiness menu, it's also present when you hover over happiness items in other menus. The "In Stockpile: #" line is also displayed for other items, which is useful when you're in for example the science menu and quickly want to know whether you meet all the requirements for a new unlock. There's still a significant list of small things to fix and improve, but we might manage to complete all tasks on that list next week, and start adding new content and features again. The next thing we're planning to add is unique content in other biomes, e.g., starting a colony in the tropical biome and being able to grow coffee beans and tea leaves.

Videos

One month ago, we shared a link that you could use to apply to be a tester. The form is still open. We've had plenty of great responses, and today, we selected the first five testers! Together with mod creators, "kings" and "emperors" on Discord, they were granted access to the 0.7.0 dev branch. There's a lot of new content. New world generation, multiple colonies, co-op functionality, new jobs and new items, new mechanics like happiness, etcetera. The update is not finished yet - some mechanics still need to be added or refined. There are no unique resources in other regions yet, or quicker ways to travel there. But it's great to start receiving feedback! We've made good progress this week. Rotatable objects, like beds, torches and certain job blocks, had a unique mesh and code for each direction. For example, one torch that faces north, one that faces east, one for south, and a fourth one for west. Certain new job blocks are also rotatable, and to improve performance and speed up adding new rotatable content, Zun rewrote how rotatable objects work. It's a lot easier to add them now. And we used that ability a lot this week. Plenty of new items and jobs were added. We listened to last week's feedback, and decided to replace some existing job blocks as well.
Fullscreen Clockwise starting bottom left: a stove for the cook, a shop where colonists gather their happiness items, a writer's desk, the new grindstone and an updated anvil
Water gatherers and fishermen
Olive farmers We're rapidly releasing new builds right now. On January 8, Zun started numbering builds. This afternoon, build 10, 11 and 12 were released. Lots of things are changing, and I find it both exciting and terrifying! The current happiness menu is very bare-bones and not intuitive, and I hope we'll manage to update it next week. We've got some good ideas on how to improve it! Bedankt voor het lezen! Reddit // Twitter // YouTube // Website // Discord

[Everything in this blog regards progress on 0.7.0, which has not been released yet] Recently, we added lots of new content but nearly all of them had placeholder art. This week, a lot of that has been replaced by actual items and icons. We've also added new science to give the new jobs and recipes their appropriate place in the tech tree. Here are some screenshots of the new content!
Beekeeper: gathers honey and wax, which is necessary for cooking, items like bow strings, and happiness items like candles and wax tablets
Cabbage farmer: because your colonists need some greens in their diets
Chicken farmer: because your colonists also need meat in their diets, and your arrows need feathers
A primitive printing press: for when you're tired of writing by hand The style of the new objects is a bit different than what you're used to, but we like how it looks and it'll cost less performance than new detailed textures for every job block. We're considering to replace some existing job blocks, like the bronze anvil and the grindstone, with physical objects like the ones above as well. How do you feel about this? Bedankt voor het lezen! Reddit // Twitter // YouTube // Website // Discord

[Everything in this blog regards progress on 0.7.0, which has not been released yet] After Christmas, Zun's birthday and New Year's Day, we've started to settle into a more regular rhythm again. We've redesigned the happiness menu. The intended outcome is a gradual increase of used happiness items. But quite a lot of happiness items are food items, and it doesn't make sense to feed your colonists 10,000+ calories per day. Obviously, being able to eat 3000 calories makes colonists happier than 2000 calories, and 2000 is better than 1000. But there's a threshold where extra calories don't make people happier. We've been struggling with how to turn this into a sensible mechanic. At first, food had "weights". Each food item had a slider, and there was one supreme slider to rule them all, which determined how many calories colonists ate a day. The sliders per item only mattered relatively. This has been removed and replaced. You can now choose how much exactly of each item you'll feed your colonist, and there's a "display only" slider that shows how much calories your colonists receive in total. To be able to properly test the happiness mechanics, we've added quite a lot of new content. A multitude of happiness items, each with complex and unique production chains. I've been hard at work rendering icons for the new items, and I've replaced some older ones.
Fullscreen
Fullscreen It's going slow but steady! If everything goes according to plan, the first testers will be able to try the new content next Friday. Bedankt voor het lezen! Reddit // Twitter // YouTube // Website // Discord

Fullscreen - One of the winners of the Equilinox Contest, made by ChrisDash2004 It's the last Friday Blog of the year! Today, we'll be looking back at all of the progress and broken promises of 2018. But first, we want to start by thanking all of you! It's been over one and a half year since we released Colony Survival in Early Access, and we're getting used to being fulltime gamedevs. We're very grateful to all of you who've made this possible! Purchasing the game, telling your friends about it, giving feedback, writing Steam Reviews, translating, developing mods: all of these things were tremendously important to us. Thanks a lot! Here's the first Friday Blog of 2018, where we detailed our plans for the year. We'll be going over the blog section by section.
This worked out 100%. A couple of weeks later, a small update added stairs to the game.

This held true as well. We did add builders & diggers, and we did skip blueprint builders. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=koa_E3jkuVM
Most of the things described above are in the current dev branch, but they're not publicly available yet. We would have loved to finish the update earlier, but sadly, did not succeed. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LMaFZ8I2Xg8
This is where things truly start to diverge. The multiple-colonies-feature are all fully present in the dev branch, but we ultimately decided against the burghers idea. We ran into a chicken-and-egg problem. The burghers were needed to colonize exotic regions, and you needed items from exotic regions to be able to recruit and sustain burghers. We believe the happiness feature to be more sensible and think it will deliver a more interesting challenge.
We haven't started working on these features yet, but we're still planning to add them. But instead of creating some kind of "medieval uranium", we're now planning to bring the time period of the end-game to the Victorian/industrial era. This allows us to add new, modern resources like rubber and oil, making exotic regions more useful and extending gameplay.
Fail, sorry. We are letting you wait for a long time without updates. The reason is explained pretty well in Friday Blog 66 - "Roundness" in Game of Thrones.
This is working pretty well! Here's a real map of a random terrain in the dev branch:
Currently, the world is "mirrored". You go from a cold north to a tropic center, but if you keep traveling south, you'll return to colder regions. We were planning to keep it in 0.7.0, but later decided against it. In 0.7.0, the north will be cold and the south will be hot.
Animal husbandry got cancelled/postponed, and is replaced by happiness/VAT/XP/modern machines. Running a colony together is possible in the dev branch, trade is not finished but still planned, griefer protection hasn't changed sadly.

Refactoring

Thanks

• Vobbert. When we've got to take important decisions, or need a sounding board to break a stalemate between Zun and me, we ask Vobbert, and he's always there to provide us with wise advice. He also wields the banhammer on Discord.
• Pandaros. Modder supreme, probably the biggest influence on our code except for Zun, and creator of the Settlers Mod
• Boneidle, one of our most dedicated builders, and who has also recently started modding
• Yogscast, for making dozens and dozens of episodes about Colony Survival. They gave us plenty of good advice in their videos, and we hope to see them play Colony Survival again after some big updates!
• All those people who've provided us with feedback, support and entertainment. Thanks Aljetab, Bilzander, SirDragonov, Lordis3D, Mtdeed, Pantoufleee, Semegod, Turner, Tonyy, Zeta-Prime and all the others!

I spent hours on a long and detailed Friday Blog. Half of it was about the game, and half of it was about major disruptions to large platforms. Then I accidentally deleted it like a total noob. I don't have the time to do it all over again, but it was about these subjects:

• YouTube Rewind 2018 being the most disliked video ever, beating the dislikes that Justin Bieber collected over 8 years
• Patreon banning people, seemingly for political reasons, and some of the most successful Patreon users (Sam Harris and Jordan Peterson) leaving the platform and vowing to create a new one
• Tumblr banning adult content
• Steam (70/30 split) receiving competition from Epic Games (88/12 split) and Discord (90/10 split).

Today marks the start of the Perpetual Testing Initiative! In the past, testing has been sporadic, limited and temporary. 0.7.0 is the biggest update in the history of Colony Survival, and it changes a lot. Dozens of technical systems have been refactored, and the update isn't finished yet. We'll need very thorough testing, and once we've set up a group of testers, why end that when 0.7.0 is released? If the testers are willing, they can test 0.7.1 and later updates as well. That's why we call it the Perpetual Testing Initiative, and not "0.7.0 Alpha" :) We've made a form that you can use to apply to become a tester. Here are the qualifications we're looking for:

• Owns Colony Survival and has joined the Discord.
• At least 16 years old (GDPR rules here)
• Has played Colony Survival pretty extensively
• Good English writing skills
• Has time to test the game pretty frequently and to summarize his or her experiences
• Has "general gaming experience", can say some intelligent things about gaming in general
• Some technical experience
• Our group of testers should include a diverse range of hardware and software, for example laptops and gaming PCs, Windows & Linux, etc.

Equilinox Contest

• You're allowed to post only one submission. You're allowed to remove it and upload a new one when the old one is gone.
• Submissions have to be uploaded before Christmas Morning, December 25, 10AM Central European Time.
• You're allowed to use mods
• You're not allowed to use the 0.7.0 development branch
• You're allowed to use Photoshop or similar software to edit the image

Colony Survival Progress

• Beekeepers (honey/wax can be used as a cooking ingredient and for wood polish, bow strings, wax tablets and candles)
• Olive trees and olive oil
• Water gatherers
• Fishermen
• Cabbages
• Chicken coops
• Books
• Jewelry

Built by Boneidle Wow, this week went by quickly! I'm finally starting to get a grasp on Unity and I'm very happy with the results I've managed to get. While I was leveling my Unity skills, Zun has continued to work on the happiness feature. The UI is still primitive, but 'behind the scenes' a lot of progress has been made. The Happiness Menu now calculates a total happiness and the recruitment cost of colonists varies based on this happiness level. The causes of happiness and unhappiness are shown to the player. We added a setting to toggle happiness off.
Work in Progress Now that the underlying systems are mostly functional, we're planning to add new content next week. We had hoped to get the "colonies with unique content in other biomes + trading" features ready before the end of the year, but I doubt that'll be 100% finished in 2018. Anyhow, there's a bunch of new features and testing them on a diverse range of hardware is always useful. We're still thinking of opening the beta (perhaps alpha is a better word) to the first group of testers around Christmas. It won't be a short, single event: the beta branch will be continuously updated. We're preparing a form where all who are interested can apply. We're pretty sure the GDPR applies to the kind of data we'll be trying to gather, so we've got to figure that out as well. Short timeline:

• 7 December: today
• 14 December: next Friday Blog, probably includes Beta Application Form
• 21 December: last Friday Blog before Christmas

• The C# Programming Yellow Book by Rob Miles
• NoobTuts Unity UI tutorial
• Catlike Coding Unity Tutorials
• Brackeys Unity Tutorials

Zun has worked pretty much non-stop since the previous Friday Blog, because he was having quite a lot of fun fixing some networking problems. In the past, connecting to other servers relied on a Steam Networking API. Zun rewrote it in such a way that we're not reliant on Steam anymore for networking. This has the following benefits:

• LAN support.
• Connecting to a server goes quicker
• A Steam non-public server is truly non-public now
• Network packets are now compressed and bundled, resulting in 10-30% less network traffic
• Useful preparation for improved co-op features
• Solved the biggest problem in porting Colony Survival to non-Steam platforms like GOG, Xbox and Playstation

Mods

Transport

Built by Boneidle, with modded blocks made by Boneidle Last week was focused on the mechanics of the grocer's shop; this week we focused on the mechanics behind the happiness items. Every happiness item now gets three stats. For food items:

• Food value / calories: how much hunger it satisfies
• Happiness: how happy the colonist becomes from eating the food
• Monetary value: the value that the VAT will be based on.

Lighting, in real life and games

Albedo

Heigth / Smoothness / Specularity

Normal

We shared a lot of our plans for the future in our previous blog, and received a large amount of feedback. Most of it was positive, but there were also some critical notes that are good to keep track of. We'd like to thank you for your efforts and encourage you to keep voicing your opinion! We cannot respond to every single comment, but we do read pretty much everything and we keep them in our mind when making decisions. Most of the time, I start blogs by summarizing what we've done in the past week, and end them with lots of rambling about diverse subjects. This week, we've spent a lot of time dealing with edge cases, and I'd like to start out by rambling about edge cases in general. Edge cases are problems that arise when something is used in a way that it wasn't intended to be used. Edge cases in programming are often complex and hard to explain, so I'd like to use a clearer example: race tracks. The basics of a race track are pretty simple. I'm thinking of something like the Top Gear Test Track. Put some tarmac in a field and you're done. If you've got the land and the materials, you could probably build a fun race track and use it with your friends within a week.
I've been thinking about using race tracks as an example for a long time, but had a hard time finding decent images. The new Hitman game perfectly suits my needs in regards to visualizing race tracks! Okay, so you've built your simple race track and had a fun weekend racing on it with friends. It didn't take a lot of effort. Now you want to host some more serious races and invite spectators. Your friends didn't need to prepare their cars, they drove safely, and they brought their own food and water. But as you scale up, these things cannot be guaranteed anymore. You need to build pit lanes and garages, and you need to prepare for crashes. You need to build run-off zones, track walls and safe barriers. You need first aiders and firemen. Spectators bring their own problems. They need places to park. You've got to build stands, and you've got to prevent your spectators from entering them for free. You need security and pay desks, toilets and food stands.
A Formula 1 race only lasts roughly 90 minutes. Most of them don't involve serious crashes. If people didn't crash and if everybody prepared well and perfectly followed the rules, it could've been a very simple event. But that's not how human beings operate, certainly not large groups of them. They do crash. They don't pay if they don't have to. They don't care about the rules. You need to provide them with toilets and food and water. So you have to image and prevent hundreds of edge cases. That's why hosting a single F1 race costs tens of millions of dollars. Every event is staffed by roughly 150 security officials and 130 medics and doctors. Providing cars with some tarmac is the core of the event, but it is only a very small part of the problems that have to be solved to run a serious event. It's the edge cases that swallow up time and money.

Edge Cases & Happiness

• Currently, food is consumed automatically. If certain happiness items are also food items, players will be able to control the diet of their colonists, and provide them with more or less calories. How do we prevent players from 'overfeeding' their colonists? (Solution: food is a separate category with a slider for "total calories")
• How do we deal with starvation? Where's the line between "not enough food = unhappiness" and "barely any food = death"?
• What if a diet is equally divided between four types but three of them run out? Do colonists consume more of the available food type?
• How does Siege Mode work in the new system? (Solution: it's changed entirely and will generate large amounts of unhappiness instead of increasing food consumption)
• What if a colonist cannot reach a grocer's shop for his daily "happiness package", including food? Currently, food is instantly teleported into their bellies, so starvation only occurred if there was no food in the stockpile. It should happen for isolated colonists as well now.
• Realistically, a colonist that has had double/triple rations for a while should be more resistant to starvation. Does that happen in-game? (Solution: probably not)

This week, we've worked on the grocer's shop. It's an integral part of the happiness system. Until now, colonist's only daily demand was food, and it was magically teleported straight into their bellies. In 0.7.0, they'll require a lot of other items to keep them happy. To get these items, they will have to visit the grocer. The grocer's shop is a physical block that has to be manned by a colonist. As long as the position is manned, other colonists can visit the grocer and get their daily bundle of food and other happiness items. Instead of letting hundreds of colonists storm the grocer simultaneously, they choose a random moment during the workday for their daily trip to the grocer. It would be dangerous if guards did that, so they visit the grocer at the end of their shift. The grocer's shop doesn't have textures yet and the system isn't 100% done, but we expect to be able to show you a video next week! It has been a while since we gave you a general overview of work that has been completed and things that still have to be done. Here's a new rough summary!
I hope we can finish happiness, trading and some unique content per biome before the end of the year. Once those features are done we can start a beta! A form where beta testers can apply will be released here and on Discord in due time.

Rough outline for new content in 0.7.0 and 0.7.1

• A cook, to turn ingredients into meals
• Fishermen
• Beekeepers
• Chicken coops
• Barley, as chicken feed
• Olive trees and olive oil
• Water gatherers

Programming Progress

Fullscreen, an awesome render made by Lordis3D! Not in-game functionality, sadly Until now, we've put most of our focus on new systems like the new world generation, multiple colonies and co-op. This week, we've turned our focus to all of the new content in 0.7.0: new jobs, new items and new science. Old systems have to be changed to facilitate unique jobs and science in different biomes. Much of the old content was hard-coded. Zun has been working hard to convert the old systems to flexible and streamlined .JSON files. They can easily be accessed by us, players and modders alike. The list of things that can be changed in these .JSON files is steadily growing. It's now possible to use them to:

• change the way the world is generated
• change how biomes look
• change the shape of trees
• add or change blocks/items
• generate specific complex block types easily (rotated blocks, 'job outlines')
• add science
• add or change player recipes
• add or change npc recipes
• add or change npc/zombie types
• add or change audio files
• add or change localization
• change textures
• add crafting jobs to blocks
• add guard jobs to blocks

Mods

Microtransactions

DLC

A yearly release cycle with season passes

Review score

What it means for Colony Survival

Programming Progress

We've made a lot of progress this week. Most changes are minor, but to give you a sense of the scale of what's changing, I'll post the full changelog at the end of the blog. A major change is coop! A lot of people have asked for shared colonies. With the changes that were made to support multiple colonies, it was relatively easy to add that functionality. There's no UI yet, but there are a couple of new commands to make sharing a colony easier:

• /colony addowner {player} [colony]
• /colony removeowner {player} [colony]
• /teleportother {player} here

• Gameplay: a new feature should add quite a bit of it
• Development time: this ought to be balanced with the amount of gameplay it adds
• Performance: we're striving to make the game run better, not worse
• Future: some changes make future changes easier, others make it harder

Sunday

Tuesday

Until the end of last week, we were fully focused on the new terrain generation. We released three successive videos without a single colonist in sight. When we finally tried to build a colony in the new world, we immediately encountered problems. The biggest problem was the lack of flat space. We knew there would be less in the new world, but we hoped there would be enough to build a colony that's big enough to unlock builders & diggers. There wasn't. But instead of changing the terrain generation, we thought we could add "farms with verticality". In real life, farmland isn't often perfectly flat either. Why should it be in Colony Survival? Zun worked on this problem during the weekend and we quickly had results. I think it's both visually pleasing and highly practical! One of our most prolific builders, Boneidle, used the new world and the new farms to build an awesome castle. We made a video to showcase the new feature and his world: https://youtu.be/2t07K9_QuBs With the farms working in the new more hilly terrain, we could test other features. It turns out quite a lot is still broken. This is partly caused by the new save game system introduced with the new world generation, and partly caused by multiple colony support. In the past, every job and action was saved as owned by a certain player. Crates, beds, colonists and builders and diggers are all placed and thus owned by player X/Y/Z. With the multiple colonies, this isn't true anymore. Each colony has its own stockpile, its own beds, its own crates and its own jobs. What happens with colonists and jobs far removed from any banner? What happens if you remove a banner? These are all new issues introduced by multiple colony support, and we've got to find solutions for each of these problems. Apart from issues like these, there's a pretty long list with broken stuff. Crops didn't grow anymore; beds were used for only one night; torches were bugged, and much, much more. It's pretty boring and frustrating, but highly necessary.
While Zun was working on bug fixes, I've been trying to improve my programming/Unity skills. I'm far from skilled, but I feel like I've got a basic grasp of programming and can do some fun stuff with it. It's all text-based though. I'd love to make more visual programs, with a UI. So this week, I've been trying some more complex stuff in Unity. I've followed the UI tutorial on Noobtuts.com, followed by an attempt to recreate Pong. I can see a lot of possibilities, but I'm still an absolute beginner. It's hard to wrap your head around certain concepts, but I'm sure I'll manage to eventually. I hope to release some fun software of my own design in the future :) Bedankt voor het lezen! Reddit // Twitter // YouTube // Website // Discord

We were pretty happy with the continents as shown in the previous blog, but we had also spotted some room for improvement. There was one major problem: a lot of biomes looked pretty similar. It wasn't immediately clear when you had arrived in a different biome. A good thing was the combination of different trees. In certain areas, there is a mix of pine trees and deciduous trees, and we love how that looks. We suddenly realized we could use this as a solution to our problem of biome distinctiveness! Trees with different colors can make a biome look better, nd it helps to visually separate the biome from others. Here's a video to show the new look of the biomes: https://youtu.be/LMaFZ8I2Xg8 What do you think of the changes? Let us know! We finished the important changes to the world generation this week. We decided to test it by starting a new colony without cheats. It was highly frustrating. Look at this area:
It looks relatively flat, right? I thought it was a great spot to start a colony. But when seen from above, a problem becomes obvious:
There's barely any flat space to start a 10x10 wheat field! I discussed with Zun whether it was easy to add more truly flat spaces, and he answered "no". He quickly came up with a different solution to the problem: allow players to create fields on areas that aren't flat! In real life, there's plenty of farmland that isn't 100% flat. It takes some tweaking, but it should definitely be possible to let players start non-flat fields in Colony Survival. We hope to be able to show it next week!

Q&A

Why do you keep playing a game?

In many games with randomly generated terrain, there is no overarching logic to the world. If you want to find a specific area, your best course of action is to travel as far as possible in a straight line, and eventually you'll encounter the terrain you're looking for. While this system has benefits, we've got a different idea. We want the arctic to be in the north, and the tropics should be in the south. If you're looking for those areas, you'll always know in which general direction you should head. So during the past weeks, we've been working on a system to generate unique, random worlds which still conform to general, overarching rules. The result can be seen in this video: https://youtu.be/HIjeNA-JCjc We're very happy with how it has turned out! We'd like to allow people to explore all directions, so there is a "New World" in the west and a "Far East" in the east. These other biomes should have unique resources, to encourage players to explore and settle new lands. It would be a bit weird if you could build two colonies right next to each other, but on opposite sides of the "biome border", allowing you to acquire all the resources of two biomes in one big "double city". That's why all the "useful" biomes are separated from each other by "useless" biomes.

• You need to traverse the tundra before you discover the arctic
• You need to cross the steppe before you discover the Far East
• You need to survive the desert before you discover the tropics
• You need to sail across the ocean before you discover the New World

A couple of months ago, I wrote that I wanted to learn to program. The first couple of steps of programming are lots of fun to learn. You learn commands like Console.WriteLine, which allow you to let your computer "speak". Vice versa, Console.ReadLine lets your PC read your input. It's exactly the kind of stuff I expected to learn. But as I progressed, new lessons started to subvert my expectations. Instead of teaching me new commands that allowed me to try new and exciting things, all the tutorials started to focus on abstract methods used to "organize" your code. That's not at all what I was interested in! I gave up and focused on other tasks. Subconsciously, I approached programming like it was magic from Harry Potter. I thought experienced programmers, like Zun (the programmer on our team who has written the code behind Colony Survival), just knew a whole lot of "spells". I expected programming lessons to be like magic lessons at Hogwarts, learning a couple of new spells every day.
And at the start, that's pretty much what it will be like. Here's a piece of real, functional code:
When you run this piece of code, a console window will open and ask "In what year were you born?" Type "1993", press enter, and your PC will set "birthyear" to "1993". In the next line of code, it will set "age" to (2018 - birthyear) = (2018 - 1993 ) = 25. The final "Console.WriteLine" will print that age to the screen. That's pretty awesome, right? It's relatively simple and does something useful. But... it only asks one question, gives one answer, and then it stops. Let's make it more interactive! We can start by asking what the user wants to do. If he responds with "calculate age", we can continue by asking him about his year of birth. If we create a loop with while {} and put the code between the brackets, the first question will be repeated when the end of the code is reached. New problem: the code is too long to Photoshop onto one scroll. Now we've got to do the dreaded thing that frustrated me so much. We've got to work with "methods". I'll admit that it's pretty useless in this example. But it's crucial in larger projects, so please bear with me! A "method" is a block of code that can be executed by using its title. So the code from the previous example can be copied to a different location and titled "calculator". When I type "calculator()" in my main code, it'll execute the full block of code saved under that title.
Fullscreen It's becoming more complex now, but I hope the explanation above makes the basics of the concept pretty clear. There's one last concept I'd like to explain before I come to my conclusion, and that's structs. They're a way to save more complex information in an organized fashion. The basics of a struct look like this:
On the left, a general format for saving "game information" is defined. On the right, an example of specific information that can be saved in that format is shown. The struct isn't limited to one set of data, it can hold many more. The code on the right scroll can be followed by for example: game Skyrim; Skyrim.Developer = "Bethesda"; Skyrim.Releaseyear = 2011; Skyrim.EarlyAccess = false; A variable like "TimeSinceSkyrim" could be used like this: TimeSinceSkyrim = ColonySurvival.Releaseyear - Skyrim.Releaseyear; Console.WriteLine($"Colony Survival was released {TimeSinceSkyrim} years after Skyrim."); All of these concepts are interactive. Structs can be used in methods, and methods can be used to fill structs. Using these concepts, you could write a more complex program that can sort games by age, or another one that provides users with a list of all games by a selected developer.
Structs can be used inside of structs, and methods can be used inside of methods. A complex program can quickly become an intricate web where everything is connected to everything. That seems to be the difficulty of learning programming. It's not like learning magic or a foreign language. It's not about learning spells or acquiring a large vocabulary. It's about organizing complexity and understanding abstract connections. If you're writing your own code, you're the one who has to decide how data is saved and used. You've got to determine which blocks of code will be split into methods, and which won't. Creating a good but complex program requires a lot of thought before the first line of code can be written. Pretty often, your first plan won't be perfect and you'll learn that you've got to reorganize parts of your code. This is called refactoring. Sometimes code is refactored to prepare the game for new features, sometimes it's done to optimize performance, and sometimes refactoring can help mod developers. The oldest code for Colony Survival was written in 2014. Since then, Zun has learned a lot. His programming skills have improved, and we've gotten a lot of feedback from mod developers and users with different kinds of hardware. This means that there is a lot of potential for improvement when working with older code. Instead of quickly hacking a new feature into the game by adding it on top of flawed code, Zun has the habit to rewrite older code to make it more useful, more stable and more optimized. It does take more time, but we believe it's worth it!

Progress

• A nice in-game menu to change those settings
• Some new trees
• Some simple rock formations
• A simple map (mostly for us, not in-game) to help us fine-tune the continents
• Grass shouldn't grow on cliffs

Game of Thrones is one of the most popular series on earth, and like many others, we've watched all seasons. Many episodes are absolutely brilliant. But like anything in life, it isn't perfect, and it has received criticism. This week, I was watching a video that criticized the development of a certain character, and when I thought about it, it reminded me a lot of the problems we're experiencing with 0.7.0. I'll try to keep the Game of Thrones spoilers to a minimum! In GoT, there are two important continents. There's the "main continent", that receives roughly 90% of the attention, and a second continent that gets the other 10% of screen time. One of the most important and beloved characters spends the first four seasons of the show on the first, main continent. It's great television. The main character is very interesting and entertaining. But the world he inhabits is highly compelling as well. The other characters are complex and have deep interrelationships. There are important and violent political problems with sensible motivations on both sides. And we know a lot about the "background" of the world. We learn about the most prominent religions, we learn how the rich and the poor live, we know about the history of the continent. Watching our main character interact with this world is fantastic. But in the fifth season, he moves to the 'second' continent. Of course, this continent is also populated with interesting characters and political problems. We do learn some things about that world. But it lacks the depth and complexity of the primary continent. And our "main" character suffers for it. He's a lot less important and interesting on the second continent. I don't think it's caused by any changes to the character. The actor is still amazing, the character is still very witty. But he's missing the deep and complex world to interact with. Apparently, the second continent is way more detailed in the books, but when converting the story to television, the showrunners had to cut characters and storylines.
With many things in life, returns are proportional to investment. Study hard, and you'll learn a lot. Work hard in the gym, and you'll lose weight and/or become stronger. It's also very often true in game development. We could easily release weekly updates with new cosmetic blocks, new jobs or new items. It's simple to add a new guard that does more damage or has a lower reload speed to Colony Survival. But we're sure that doing that every week will quickly result in bored players and a cluttered game. Developing new and complex features will probably result in a better game, but that takes time. But it's not always that simple. Imagine you're a car designer, and you and your team have designed a pretty average car. It's good, but not particularly fast. So you spend months or years integrating an engine that has thrice the horsepower of the old engine. You've put a lot of effort into it. But is the car better? Arguably, it's worse. It lacks the brakes, the tires or the safety features to properly handle its new power. You have dramatically improved one aspect of the car, but it has only caused a lack of balance. Now you need to upgrade the rest of the car as well, turning a minor upgrade into a major redesign. I think the showrunners of Game of Thrones faced a similar dilemma with the secondary continent. It's less interesting, so they spent less time on it. But now the viewers are less familiar with the characters, problems and history of the secondary continent, making them even less interested. It's a tough problem to solve. You need to cut some characters and plotlines when converting a book to a television show, but cut too much and the viewer won't care at all! In my mind, I imagine a circle - or only a couple of fragments thereof. You can spend a lot of time developing a brilliant engine, but it's worthless if the rest of the car cannot support it. A main character can be very witty and charismatic, but all the effort is wasted if he doesn't have an interesting world to interact with. The engine or the main character is just a fragment of the circle, and it needs other parts before it's "fully round". In a TV series, a supporting character can be added or removed from a well established situation without changing the "roundness" too much. In a car, the audio system or the upholstery can be dramatically changed without affecting the "roundness" too much. In a game, some new (cosmetic) content or complementary features can be added without disturbing the "roundness". But add a new continent to your TV series, upgrade the engine of your car, or add a significant new feature to your game, and you've "broken" the roundness. While the change itself might be good, the lack of balance might make your product worse. But invest in the other parts of your product as well, restore balance or "roundness", and you might have just taken your product to the next level.
Colony Survival 0.1.0 to 0.5.0 all had some obvious "holes" in their "roundness". It needed more content, it needed the science system, it needed a way to let your colonists assist you in building. Plugging those holes made the game "rounder". But the latest version, 0.6.3, lacks big holes that can be fixed with fun new gameplay like the builders & diggers. There's one dramatically underutilized thing: the large and diverse world that's barely ever explored and used by players. That's why we'll work on that in 0.7.0. But adding only multiple colonies disturbs the balance. It's not "round", it's just a fragment. You'll need a good reason for exploration as well. And a means of transport.
Separately, these features are useless. Multiple colonies need a purpose, and the happiness feature relies on the other continents. Transport is not needed in 0.6.3, why explore if you can only start one colony and it functions the same everywhere? This is the reason why 0.7.0 is taking a while. Each one of these features is complex and significant alone, but they require each other to have a purpose. We've thought about releasing them separately, but the more we think about it, the more we realize that's a bad idea. We can't wait to see how those features will interact together! Two weeks ago, we published a rough timeline that will most certainly change. We're still on track though! For convenience, here it is again: September: New world generator, continents, new trees October: Features like trading, multiple players in one colony, happiness Closed beta starts here, we'll release a form where you can apply to become a tester November: New crops, jobs and items + airships or boats December: Finishing things up, patching issues found by testers, polishing, achievements That was a long, philosophical ramble and I wonder if it makes any sense. Was it actually insightful? Let us know in the comments or on Discord! Bedankt voor het lezen :) Reddit // Twitter // YouTube // Website // Discord

Fullscreen We've made good progress on the new world generation this week! We've added cliffs and some kind of tiny rivers, and new trees. We're very happy with the results! Here's a video featuring the new terrain: https://youtu.be/QQ50AmplF3g While traversing the new terrain, the command "/debug printbiome" can be used to display info about your current location. Here's an example of using that command thrice:
Temperature and average rainfall (precipitation, in-game stat only, no visual effects) change gradually, ensuring a smooth transition between different areas. With those stats in mind, the new terrain generator selects an appropriate biome. In the past, trees were predetermined structures. They had to be built by us, manually, block by block. We saved the structure, and the structure was loaded into appropriate locations. For the new world generation, Zun has written a program that can quickly convert simple instructions into a complete tree. This makes it a lot easier to add new trees!
Fullscreen To the left is an example of the tree instructions. The first "box" instructions cause the renderer to generate a trunk made of "logtemperate", 5 blocks tall. The second block of code titled "format : circleY" generates a circle of leaves on top of that trunk. The next blocks of code generate more circles of leaves. To the right is an example of one of the biomes. The lower bounds are 20% rainfall and 9°C, the upper bounds are 60% rainfall and 15°C. The "totalStructureChance" defines the total amount of vegetation. It's followed a by a list of trees and bushes that spawn in that biome. The higher the weight, the bigger the chance of spawning that particular tree. The code above isn't hidden deep in an inaccessible generator, it's easily available in a couple of .JSON files. It is now very easy for modders to add their own structures, and to change the terrain generation! We're sure there are talented people with more artistic skills and patience than us who will be able to improve dramatically on the examples above. We're looking forward to seeing their results!
Fullscreen Currently, the world is one infinite continent with randomly fluctuating temperature and precipitation. There is no cold north nor a hot south. That's our next job. The shape of the continents should be pretty random, every world should be different. But the "standard" biome in the center should be bounded by obstacles in all directions. A cold tundra in the north, a dry steppe in the east, a hot desert in the south, and an ocean to the west. On the other side of the obstacles should be different biomes, where new colonies can be started and new resources can be generated and extracted. It'll be an interesting challenge! Bedankt voor het lezen :) Reddit // Twitter // YouTube // Website // Discord

Fullscreen After multiple weeks of behind-the-scenes work resulting mostly in ugly brown hills, we're finally starting to render more interesting worlds! Every place in the world is assigned a temperature and a level of rainfall. With this information, the appropriate biome is selected. This ensure a realistic distribution of biomes, and a gradual transition. We needed more shades of grass to make this gradual transition possible. We've got a system for giving blocks different colors without adding new textures, but we couldn't get it to work with grass in the past. Yesterday, we succeeded in doing that! So today we've been experimenting with many shades of grass.
Fullscreen Zun has also created a way for me and modders to easily generate new trees. The old world generator required hand-crafted trees that were saved as 'structures'. With the new system, a tree is defined by it's height and the shape of its leaves. This makes it a lot easier to generate a wide variety of trees, and to ensure a smooth transition between them.
Fullscreen Here is a summary of the work that still needs to be done on the new world generator:

• More diverse trees and shrubbery
• Random flowers
• Rocky outcrops and cliffs
• Clear consequences for going north/south/west/east, continents and oceans
• Appropriate ores in each biome

Rendering a silver ingot in Blender Last week's blog resulted in a lot of comments and a long discussion on Discord. They were very useful! I never expected so many people to be so passionate about Malthus and Boserup :) There were two suggestions that really surprised us and have a pretty big chance of being added to 0.7.0. "Around999People" suggested turning the XP system into an income system. Others loved this idea and expanded upon it. We discussed it, and we think it has a lot of benefits! Instead of the consumption of a chocolate bar by a colonist resulting in some XP, the chocolate bar is assigned a monetary value, and there's a variable VAT (Value Added Tax) rate. Imagine the value of the chocolate bar is 10, and the default VAT rate is 20%. The consumption of one bar would result in 2 "money" for the colony, to be spent on productivity upgrades. Increase the VAT rate to 40%, and you'll receive 4 "money". It will also result in more unhappiness. The opposite is also true: reduce the VAT rate to 10% and you'll only receive 1 "money", but your colony will be happier. It might make more sense than calling it "XP", and it gives players another interesting choice. High happiness makes it easier to recruit new colonists, and improves the speed of research. But having a lot of productivity upgrades will make your colonists way more efficient, making it easier to produce food, ammo and science bags. On Discord, Greedoflashbang and Boneidle suggested hot-air balloons / blimps / hot air boats / airships. Exploring will be an important part of 0.7, and a quicker form of transport than walking will be very useful. I've tried to convince Zun of boats, but he was hesitant. He thinks they're pretty hard to add decently, because of the floating on water + collision + multiplayer. Airships will probably be easier to add. We're almost certain trading in 0.7.0 will not involve colonists/boats traveling from one colony to another, but if we ever add something like that, airships are a lot easier to automatize than boats. Rendering new icons Drawing icons for items that have no in-game model has always been hard for me, and there are quite a lot of terrible icons. It felt like a huge improvement when, in 0.6.0, I replaced the ugly hand-drawn bed icon with an icon that was made using a screenshot of the in-game bed. This week, I've been busy replacing ugly hand-drawn icons with rendered alternatives. At the start of the blog, you've seen the rendered silver ingot. Here's what the old and new ingot icons look like:
I think it's a worthwhile investment to replace as many icons as possible with rendered alternatives. Zun was very unhappy with the icon for bronze coins, so I made this:

I worried about hand-drawing icons for all the new happiness items, but I think rendering them is a great solution! Terrain generation While I've been rendering icons, Zun was working on the terrain generation. It's taking a while, because we want the new system to meet high requirements:

• More realistic world
• More interesting world
• More beautiful world
• Better performance
• Players should be able to set some parameters, like size of the biomes, amount of flat terrain, many islands vs big continents
• Modders should be able to easily change the terrain

A couple of Fridays ago, we wrote about an issue with the increasing costs of keeping colonists happy. It would encourage people to start new colonies, instead of expanding their first one. Some encouragement is fine, but there should be benefits for having a big colony with lots of colonists (that consumes lots and lots of happiness items) as well. There are actually very interesting principles behind the real life historical benefits and costs of population growth. And instead of last week's blog about geography, this is something I've actually got an academic degree in :) Avoid the history lesson by skipping to "What does this mean for Colony Survival?". Thomas Malthus, an English scholar who lived from 1766 to 1834, wrote some very important things about population growth, which are still taken very seriously. He's basically Thanos from the last Avengers movie. He thinks the population growths exponentially. Populations don't grow with a steady +100,000 per year, they grow with a percentage, like for example 3 or 4%. On the other hand, food production doesn't grow as quickly. It does grow (England was a lot more populated in 1800 than in AD 100), but it increases linearly. So while food production has a growth like "10 - 12 - 14 - 16", population growth goes like "4 - 8 - 16 - 32". The problem is obvious. After a period where enough food is produced for the entire population, the population will inevitably outgrow food production. They ran into the Malthusian trap. A period of disease, starvation and war will occur. A significant amount of the population is killed off, and food production is adequate again. But without the availability of reliable birth control, the population is bound to exceed food production a couple of generations later, running into the same Malthusian trap.
Source The ideas of Malthus can be used in a decent amount of situations. But it also runs into some problems. Let's take a further look at his linear increase of food production. Our civilization has increased food production in a lot of ways in the last couple of generations. Tractors, synthetic fertilizer, irrigation, genetically modified crops, etcetera. They've spread around the world like other inventions, for example televisions and smartphones. Tractors and smartphones are obvious improvements, and a large majority of farmers/people want them. The biggest barrier is often money. We often apply the same view to historical food production. Someone invents a better plough or improved irrigation, and this takes the world by storm, like televisions and smartphones. Barriers are things like lack of education and lack of money, but fundamentally, people want these improvements. That's what Europeans thought when they tried to spread their advanced farming technology around the world in the last couple of centuries. But very often, natives in other continents didn't care for those improvements. The same happened with European settlers: when English and German farmers moved to South America, they often reverted to more 'primitive' forms of agriculture. This is pretty much unexplainable with the Malthusian perspective. Methods of food production ought to increase linearly! Knowledge and availability of more advanced agricultural technology is the bottleneck of humanity! Enter Ester Boserup, a Danish economist who lived from 1910 to 1999. According to Boserup, agricultural improvement is mostly a lot of extra work that isn't a whole lot of fun, and thus will be avoided if possible. You're basically trying to grow more crops per square meter, which requires you to put a lot more effort into your job.
Medieval peasants, source If you're a primitive farmer in an empty, fertile Europe in 5000BC, growing crops is easy. You burn down part of a forest, the ashes make the ground extra fertile, you throw some seeds in there, and a couple of months later you've got your harvest! If you're a medieval peasant with a small amount of land, your job is a lot harder. You've got to plough and fertilize, you might have to irrigate, you've got to remove weeds, etcetera. Now image the medieval peasant trying to get the primitive farmer to adopt his agricultural methods. Of course he's not going to accept that! Why do all that work, when there's enough fertile land around that you don't need to optimize your crop yield per square meter?
Slash-and-burn agriculture, source So Boserup claims that most agricultural "improvements" are only adopted out of necessity, when lack of land / overpopulation forces farmers to do it. I believe this to be true. This really hinders the development of cities. You can't start a major city in an area with only a handful of slash-and-burn farmers. You need a significant amount of dense villages where lots of food is produced before a nearby city can develop. Remember, there were no trucks, railroads or refrigerators! Everything had to be transported by humans, horses and simple carts. You can't import major amounts of food from far away places. What does this mean for Colony Survival? Earlier, we concluded that the increasing cost of happiness items would stimulate people to keep starting new colonies, instead of focusing on growing one colony as large as possible. New colonies are very attractive, because colonist #1 has a lot less demands than colonist #821, which will require a lot of happiness items. We just concluded that the exact same thing happened in real pre-industrial villages and cities as well. Why live in a place where land is scarce and farming is a lot of work, when there are still places nearby where more land is available? Big cities like London, Paris and Rome were all surrounded by hundreds of kilometers of densely populated farmland in all directions. If we're adding realistic incentives to Colony Survival, the optimal way of playing the game would result in a similar world: one relatively big colony, surrounded by lots of smaller colonies in all directions. But imagine doing that, in singleplayer. Having to build dozens or hundreds of small, repetitive colonies before you can make progress. That's not fun. That's awful. To prevent this realistic drudgery, we've got to introduce an unrealistic feature. We're thinking about experience points; XP. A pretty weird form of XP, that is only gained by consuming happiness items, instead of doing actual work (please add that in real life). Instead of XP directly upgrading the related job, it's all added to one big pool per colony. You, the player, will have to decide how to use it. Upgrade your miners, or your farmers? It's your choice. But XP earned in a colony can only be spent in that colony on productivity improvements that only apply there. A new colony will have to start from scratch. We just compared colonist #1 and #821. It doesn't mean that colonist #1 will always have little demands. When you've got 100 colonists, you'll have 100 colonists that demands a couple of happiness items. When you've got 821 colonists, you'll have 821 colonists which will all require lots of happiness items. This means that a colony with 800 colonists won't require merely 8x more happiness items compared to a colony with 100 inhabitants, but probably closer to 60x more happiness items!
More, more, more happiness items! Source If we tie XP to consuming happiness items, this will mean that the large colony will also receive way more XP than a smaller colony. If the XP can be invested to make jobs more productive, the motivation to start new colonies becomes a lot more balanced. Colonists in small colonies will have less demands, but they'll also be less productive. It'll still be very compelling to start colonies in different biomes with new resources, but filling the same biome with lots of repetitive colonies won't be as lucrative. XP is one way of dealing with the quickly increasing demand for happiness items. Another way that we talked about earlier is industrial machines. We can now visualize what playing 0.7.2 (0.7.0 + a few updates) will roughly look like.
Full size At the beginning of the game, there will be a large surplus of happiness ("presence of the King"), and it'll be easy to recruit more colonists and grow. Easier than it currently is! We've received many complaints of people who thought recruiting the first 30~50 colonists is the slowest and most boring part of the game. Eventually, the increasing population will add unhappiness, and expanding will become more difficult and expensive. But there's a solution! Start producing and distributing happiness items, and further expansion will become possible. At first, this will be cheap and easy. But as your population grows, they will start demanding more and more happiness items (which can also be found in other biomes). Producing them will start occupying a larger and larger part of your population, making further growth harder again. Next solution: XP! As your colony has started consuming more happiness items, you've received more XP. Invest it to make your colonists more productive and to fuel further expansion. But the XP costs of higher levels of productivity increase exponentially, so eventually you run out of quick productivity boosts. You need something else to be able to produce enough happiness items for very large colonies. Enter the Industrial Revolution! Invent machines that help you do just that. Spinning machines that help you turn large amounts of flax into linen for your tailors, electric furnaces that can smelt many ores simultaneously, etcetera. They will all require electricity. As you start building more machines, and invent more advanced machines, your electricity consumption quickly increases. More and more colonists will need to work at generators, and to produce the fuel they need. Next optimization: nuclear reactors. They're a bit controversial, but we're still planning to go forward with them. They won't be very realistic, and they'll look pretty retro / steampunk. But they're a sensible way to force people to gather resources from all biomes. And they're a great solution to the problem of the increasing cost of electricity in Colony Survival. Eventually, there will be an end to new content. There's a finite amount of happiness items and ways to optimize producing them. But we don't want to have a theoretical limit of for example #2462 colonists. Theoretically, you should be able to keep expanding. Our way of allowing this is infinite research. It'll cost a lot of energy, but when you've built nuclear reactors you'll have just that. With infinite research, you'll be able to keep optimizing your colony and to keep adding new happiness to the colony.
This was a long and dense Friday Blog - congratulations on reaching the end :) The graph above pretty much explains what we want 0.7 to look like eventually. We're pretty sure that electricity, nuclear reactors and infinite research will not be added in 0.7.0, but we need to make sure that all required ores are available in 0.7.0. We don't want to force you to start a new world in 0.7.1 or 0.7.2! One caveat to the graph: the various "stages" will be a lot smoother and less obvious in-game. For example, the XP system isn't a bottleneck that has to be "solved" once: the productivity upgrades will keep coming throughout the game. We'd love to have your feedback! Are you looking forward to it, or are you disappointed? Have you got suggestions to improve it, or do you see pitfalls that you want to warn us for? We're listening! Leave a comment here, or join our Discord and share your opinion! Bedankt voor het lezen :) Reddit // Twitter // YouTube // Website // Discord

Colony Survival is a wildly unrealistic game. Everything is blocky. Colonists don't have mouths and are born as adults from a wood-and-cloth construction. The night only lasts a couple of minutes. It's permanently summer and wheat only requires a couple of days to grow. But despite all of these simplifications, many parts of the game required quite a lot of real-world knowledge to develop. While working on the graphics, we had to learn how light scatters through the air and reflects from various surfaces. When adding the new ores and metals in 0.4.0, we had to learn about real history and even physics. The attempts to underlying realism might seem like overkill. I believe it isn't. The following paradox is relevant: A.) My hands are physically able to draw a photorealistic sketch B.) My brain knows when a sketch is not photorealistic C.) Despite A and B, my brain cannot let my hands draw a photorealistic sketch I often wondered how this is possible, and I think I have a solution. We have got a lot of unconscious knowledge and experience. In the specific case of photorealism: we are looking at the world nearly every waking moment. We know what real life looks like. We've got many years of experience with it. But we don't know why exactly the world looks like it does. While we have years of experience and know it perfectly well unconsciously, we cannot consciously verbalize the reasons why something looks realistic or fake.So while nearly all of us can judge whether a sketch is photorealistic or not, only a few us have the knowledge and skill to draw a photorealistic sketch. I think the same principle applies to many aspects of developing Colony Survival. To portray a historical colony in a semi-realistic world, we need to understand some historical/biological/geographical principles in quite a lot of detail. The better we understand those principles and represent them in-game, the more immersive Colony Survival will be. When we 'break' those rules, you might not be able to explain precisely what's wrong, but you will feel that something is off. In the past week, we've been struggling with the principles behind natural variety. Why do deserts and jungles exist? Why are they located where they are located? How does a desert transition to a jungle? How can we apply these principles in-game? One of the charts we've been looking at a lot is this one:
Source Most of the chart make sense. Tundras are cold and dry. Deserts are hot and dry. Rainforests are hot and wet. But to me, some of the info was pretty surprising. It's possible for a desert to receive just as much rainfall as a temperate or boreal forest. I didn't know anything about temperate rainforests. Another thing that surprised me was the "border" between biomes. Many of them are angled from the bottom left to the top right.
Look at the red line, the border between shrubland and forests. What does it mean exactly? I struggled to put it into words. Apparently, as the average annual temperature increases from 0°C to 22°C (30°F to 70°F), more rainfall is needed to sustain a forest. The same can be seen all over the chart. Transitioning to a 'higher' biome requires more rainfall as the temperature increases. And 'higher' biomes are generally biomes with more vegetation. I modified the original chart to represent that a bit better:
At first glance, I thought this was a bit weird. Don't plants and trees 'like' sunlight? Not in extreme amounts, but an average annual temperature of ~10°C doesn't sound high, and in the "low rainfall scenario", there's already significantly less vegetation at that temperature compared to colder climates. Then we figured out that the problem probably is not the heat directly, but the increased evaporation. As the temperature increases, rainfall disappears quicker, and there's less water available for vegetation to grow. Here are some "rules" we've tried to distill from the charts above: 1.) More water = more vegetation 2.) Higher temperature = more vegetation 3.) Higher temperature = water disappears quicker (Paradox!!!1!!1!) 4.) Maximum rainfall is way higher in hot climates, meaning that a wider variety of vegetation can appear there (everything from 'none' to 'lots') Here's what that would look like, from north to south. Average annual temperature: Below 2°C/36°F: Tundra. It barely rains, but once it rains, the water barely evaporates. It's too cold for trees or lots of bushes, so everything is covered in grass and moss. There are no deserts. Below 8°C/46°F: Taiga. Rainfall increases. Nearly all of the region is covered in trees. Only the driest of places revert to shrubland/grassland. Below 22°C/71°F: Temperate. On average, more rainfall. Most of the region is covered in trees. Relatively dry places revert to shrubland or grassland. In the hottest and driest corners of the region, some small deserts exist. In the hottest and wettest parts of the region, there are temperate rainforests. Above 22°C/71°F: Tropic. The driest ~20% of the tropics is a desert, because the heat makes the water evaporate quickly. As the rainfall increases, vegetation increases from desert to grassland, to shrubland, to woodland, to seasonal forest, to rainforest. We believe applying these rules in Colony Survival will result in a world that's a lot more realistic and more fun to explore. We're looking forward to showing you our first successful attempts at generating the new world! This week's attempts mostly looked like brown hills, so we've still got some progress to make :) Bedankt voor het lezen! Reddit // Twitter // YouTube // Website // Discord

"SummerTales" by Pyris-TT Last week, we posted a video of functional multiple colonies. While the basics were done, many jobs and systems like science didn't work yet. Zun spent nearly the entire weekend fixing those issues, and it's done now! All jobs and systems are functional with multiple colonies now. We've made a video to show the changes: https://youtu.be/iISE1YBYD-Q While old systems are functional, multiple colonies require many new functions. Naming your colony, trading, travel, producing banners, info on remote colonies, etcetera. But instead of immediately continuing to work on those issues, we've decided to enjoy some variation by working on a different problem: the new world generation. World Generation Until now, exploration hasn't been important in Colony Survival, but it will become so in 0.7.0. The non-standard biomes are pretty simple, boring and ugly currently, so that definitely has to be fixed. We'd like to make the landscape a lot more diverse. Random flowers and plants, rock formations, cliffs, grasslands in the desert and patches of trees in the tundra, etcetera. The transitions between biomes is very harsh now. I've been thinking of ways to improve it. I realized there's no clear line in Finland separating taiga from tundra. Nor does the desert in the west of the US appear suddenly. There's a gradual transition that looks roughly like this: No vegetation (snow/sand) -> grassland -> shrubland -> some trees -> forest This doesn't mean the world will be a simple monotonous transition from grass to forests either. IRL, there are patches of sand in the middle of fertile Europe, and there are patches of green in the middle of the desert. I'd like biomes in Colony Survival to be like that as well. When sharing these conclusions with Zun, he responded that he had already come up with similar ideas independently. He'd like to generate some underlying statics like temperature and humidity, and to pick a relevant biome based on that info. This should make the world both interesting and realistic! We hope to be able to show you some of the first experiments with the new world generation next week. A fastforwarded flythrough of the old world can be seen in the video above.
First Complete Texturepack! There have been people in the past who've redone some textures, and others who've made new textures for mods. As far as we know, there is nobody who has redone all the textures in the game. Until now! Pyris-tt has made the SummerTales texturepack. It's used in all the screenshots in this blog, and the middle part of the video. It's beautiful! He's also made new icons for nearly all the items, and they improve a lot on the default icons. Thanks Pyris-tt! In related news, Pandaros has expanded the team working on the Settlers Mod. The team now includes Pandaros himself, Pyris-tt, Kenovis and Servius. They've got many exciting ideas, and they're also planning to use the upcoming multiple colonies and happiness features. We can't wait to see what they'll produce! Bedankt voor het lezen! Reddit // Twitter // YouTube // Website // Discord

We recently had some relatively boring and frustrating weeks. A lot of things changed behind the scenes, but there was barely any visible progress. Those weeks of work finally paid off! We've got a new internal development branch with new features. It's far from perfect, but it's now possible to start multiple colonies in singleplayer! Here's the video: https://youtu.be/lh0bQ37JBE8 It's a lot of work to "port" features so that they work with multiple colonies. Step by step, we're adding jobs and mechanics back into the game. For example, area jobs and science are still broken and require attention. It takes time, but 'multiple colonies' is a mechanic with a lot of potential and we're looking forward to testing it more extensively!

The consequences of multiple colonies and happiness

A new idea for icons

Last week, we explained how we could add happiness to the game. I'm pretty sure we didn't have a single negative response! The idea seems to be pretty popular, and we're pretty sure we're going to add it in 0.7.0. We've been thinking about the full consequences of adding happiness, and we ran into some inevitable mathematical problems. It's pretty difficult to explain, but I believe it's pretty interesting, and we'd like to explain why we make certain choices. The first concept you need to understand is "required colonists". To stay alive, you need food, ammo, and guards. If you lack one of these three, your colony will inevitably collapse. Let's say roughly 1 in 7 colonists needs to be a guard, 1 in 7 colonists will need to produce food, and 1 in 7 colonists needs to produce ammo. This results in the next graph:
The dark green line is the total "required colonists" to stay alive. The black line is the total amount of colonists. The space in between them represents the amount of colonists that can be dedicated to non-essential tasks, like research, producing large amounts of cosmetic blocks and digging giant holes. For colonies with less than 100 colonists, these colonists might not be essential to keep the colony alive in the next 24 hours, but they are essential for research and to gather resources for a basic fort. From 100 to 300~500 colonists, most people still manage to find purposeful work for their colonists. But larger colonies often have a surplus of 'useless' colonists. We often see entire skyscrapers full of farmers while the colony already has a 150K food surplus. It's where the game becomes less challenging and more repetitive. We've been thinking of how to prevent this for a long time, but we didn't want to add arbitrary requirements. It's very frustrating if your colony collapses because arbitrary item '25C' isn't present. The happiness idea as explained last week fixes the issue above, but if implemented exactly as described, it'll inevitably destroy itself. Here's the math:

• every new colonist adds +1 to global unhappiness
• this can only be countered by providing every colonist with new happiness items
• as your colony expands, the total amount of required happiness items grows both because every new colonist needs those items, but also because every colonist needs more items as the colony grows and unhappiness increases

Tier 0

Tier 1

Tier 2

Tier 3

• A mail every time we release a Friday Blog
• A mail every time we release a smaller update like 0.6.3
• A mail every time we release a larger update like 0.7.0
• A mail once we leave Early Access
• A mail every time the game is on sale

We switched from green to blue for those with color blindness. Light blue for previous progress, dark blue for this week's progress. Last Saturday, hundreds of people had already answered the survey. Thanks to everybody who participated! The results are very interesting. A large majority was in favor of adding post-medieval tech like electricity. But modern tech like nuclear reactors and jetpacks was pretty controversial. The group opposed to modern tech was nearly as big as the group in favor of it. One of those opposed to modern tech is our most prolific modder, Pandaros. A couple of weeks earlier, we already had an intense discussion with him about this subject. He doesn't want the game to turn more into a tower defense game, a sentiment expressed by others as well. He wants us to add other sources of difficulty instead of merely "kill the monsters". Many people want us to add a happiness-mechanic that forces players to keep their colonists happy. We like the idea, but we always thought it would result in two problems: A.) Experienced and skilled players will quickly optimize their colony's happiness and gain the benefits of a happy colony (for example, increased crafting speed). Their stockpiles, which often already contain 100K+ food, will grow even larger. New and less skilled players are often already struggling to survive, and happiness will make the game even harder for them. If their colony becomes unhappy, it might start a death spiral they cannot recover from. B.) The happiness feature can be very extensive. It could add politics, social policies, crime & justice, revolting colonists, etcetera. This will take a very long time to develop. This is what we were pondering about last Saturday. Simultaneously, I hadn't played any games for more than a week, and that's inexcusable for a game dev ;) So Zun and I started looking for a game we could play together. We ended up choosing Civilization V, something we hadn't played in many years. After playing for a while, our civilizations started growing unhappy. We searched for the cause of this, and found it. In Civ V, the growth of the population causes unhappiness. This can be countered by building things like the Colosseum, theaters and stadiums. Moderate amounts of unhappiness in Civ V don't cause death spirals, they just slow down the growth of cities. Which in itself, was the cause of the unhappiness. Suddenly, we realized that the happiness mechanic in Civ V solves all the problems we expected from a happiness system in Colony Survival. It's an additional challenge for players that grow quickly, but it's not a problem at the start of the game. Unhappiness prevents growth, but it doesn't cause collapses. And the system is pretty simple, it's not excessively complex. It might look weird to make 'population growth' a source of unhappiness, but the end result makes sense. Small villages don't have theaters and stadiums. Primitive civilizations don't have luxury goods like coffee and tea. As cities and civilizations grow larger, they do start to offer more (material) sources of happiness to their inhabitants. Franchises like Total War use the same system. Population growth causes social unrest, which can be countered by building temples or other sources of order and happiness. We think it might be a good idea to adapt such a system to Colony Survival. We've made a simple mock-up of what happiness might look like in Colony Survival:
Every new colonist will add unhappiness to the colony. With a "Starting Happiness" of something between 30 and 100, it won't be a problem for small colonies. But as you grow larger, you'll have to start producing goods to increase the happiness of your colonists. These goods could for example be clothing, jewelry, tools, shoes, coffee, tea, chocolate, luxury meals and books. They could also be services like religious ceremonies and doctors. We'd like you to be able to select different "rations" for these goods. Coffee could for example be a rare luxury that your colonists enjoy once a month, or it could be so common that your colonists will drink it three times a day. The more common something is, the more happiness it provides. When a colony becomes unhappy, it will be more expensive to attract new colonists to the colony. If the unhappiness becomes too high, we might disable the ability to recruit new colonists entirely. Colonists might even start leaving. It will be possible to make sources of happiness with the resources found in the spawn area, but ultimately, you'll have to start outposts in different biomes to produce new resources for new sources of happiness. We think it's a great system and we're very enthusiastic about it! We're considering to postpone the freeze/poison guards and work on happiness instead, but before we make this choice, we'd like to have your input. Would you like to see the system described above in Colony Survival? Would you mind if freeze/poison guards were postponed or even cancelled in favor of happiness?

Survey Results

This week's progress

Would you like to help us shape the future of Colony Survival? Participate in this survey and share your opinion! During my short stay in France, Zun enjoyed some extra days of rest. Despite that, he also made some progress on 0.7.0. He fixed some common issues that occur in corrupted savegames, specifically the ones with invisible crates and beds. During that process, he also prepared them for multiple colonies! You can compare this week's Progress Meter to the one posted last week. There has been some controversy regarding our plans for 0.7. Some people love our plans for more modern technology, while others think the game should stay medieval. We've discussed and thought about the subject a lot, and we decided we wanted to organize another survey. We'd love to know what you think, and the previous survey was very useful. We hope you're willing to participate!

Contest winners!

"Rise of Industry on the Final Frontier" by Aardvark
Full size Car Prototype Factory from Rise of Industry by nobrains21
Full size Huge industrial compound by [sirdragonov]
Full size Industrial Dutch harbor by Thorvic
Full size Victorian Industrial Steampunk City by Bilzander
Full size

Holiday's over

We owe thanks to a lot of people, but this week, Pandaros deserves a special mention. He gave us a lot of advice regarding the savegames. Especially during the weekend, it felt like Zun and Pandaros were exchanging info from early in the morning to late in the evening. Thanks Pandaros! If you're looking for more Colony Survival content while waiting for 0.7.0, you should definitely try his Settlers Mod. We received a lot of feedback when we described our plans for 0.7.0 last week. Some were concerned the medieval feel of the game would be lost if we added too much modern technology. We understand those concerns. We will probably try to make the modern tech look a bit "retro". Another good suggestion was "aggro the monsters". It would be awesome if players could draw the attention of the monsters from minor colonies to their strongholds. This would be a fun new job with of course some costs associated.
We've made the Progress Meter above to accurately display what we've worked on and what still needs to happen before the update can be released. The more modern stuff announced last week is not tracked, because we're planning to release it in 0.7.1 and later. The Progress Meter was accurate last Tuesday evening, but this Friday it's hopefully appropriate to color one or two dots green next to "multiple colonies". If everything goes according to plan, I should be in France right now for a short week. Zun is holding the fort and available on Discord!

Rise of Industry Contest!

• Post the image in #IndustryChallenge in our Discord. You've got to be verified before you can post images there. You'll be verified if you post a message in one of the channels. It can take up to a dozen or so hours before you're verified.
• Images should be submitted before 4PM UTC Friday July 13th.
• The winners will be announced in the next Friday Blog.
• You're allowed to post only one image. If you post more, they'll be deleted and only the first one will count for the contest.
• It should be a still image, preferably JPG or PNG. Videos, links to website or albums, GIFs or MP4s will be disqualified.
• Mod use is allowed, as is editing your images.
• The most impressive and beautiful five screenshots will win!

We've been making plans for 0.7.0/0.7.1/0.7.2 for many months, and we've finally agreed on a rough outline of all the changes we want to make to the game. We're still in a very early stage, so we can take your feedback into account! We'd love to know what you all think of the plans. 1.) Colonist requirements The only thing currently required to recruit a colonist is a bunch of food. This is relatively hard to get for new colonies, but larger colonies can often recruit many dozens of colonists simultaneously. We'd like to scale the requirements as the colony grows. Colonists will be cheaper for small colonies, to speed up the first stage of setting up a colony. We've heard many players say that the early game is pretty slow and boring, and that it gets way more interesting later on. We'd like to help players get to that stage faster. We'd like to increase the colonist recruitment cost for larger colonies. Apart from food, other items like clothing, tools and a small amount of coins could become required. We'd like to increase the cost gradually. Colonist 250 should be more expensive than colonist 150, which should be more expensive than colonist 50. 2.) New world generation The world generation has barely changed in more than a year. We'd like to put a lot of effort in a more interesting world. Different mountains, new cliffs, random fields of wheat or flowers, interesting "sub-biomes" like swamps or an oasis in the desert, etc. In every direction, you should eventually find an interesting different "top-biome" where a new colony can be started. There should be an arctic area in the north, a tropic biome in the south, a "far east" obviously in the east, and a "new world" to the west. Each of these biomes should have distinctive items and resources. This makes sure every colony has a unique purpose. Every biome should have special items in each of these three categories:

• Local items/food like rice in the far east and potatoes in the new world.
• Resources for weapons. For example, poison plants for poisonous projectiles in the tropics, freeze missiles from the arctic and obsidian in the new world for powerful armor penetrating projectiles.
• Resources for more modern technologies, like rubber, cobalt for batteries and 'importanium' for energy production.

• Monsters with more HP. The strongest monsters are now killed in one shot by the matchlock gun. We'd like to add "boss monsters" that are perhaps 10 times stronger.
• Armored monsters. This allows us to add more differences between projectiles, because they will now also require armor penetration.
• Monsters that fire projectiles at guards and the player. It would be nice if the monsters have some way of fighting back from the middle of a maze. They shouldn't have a very long range, so a properly designed defense can keep your colonists save.

• Guards that do armor penetration damage, with for example obsidian projectiles.
• Guards that fire poisonous projectiles, to damage monsters over time.
• Guards that fire freeze projectiles, to slow down monsters.
• Guards with area of effect damage, to damage multiple monsters simultaneously

Yesterday, we released update 0.6.3! We're used to releasing updates on Friday, simultaneous with these blogs. But we were expecting a large group of new players at the start of the Summer Sale, and we expect 0.6.3 to be very useful for new players. There are a couple of important changes. Nearly every item shows where it is made in the tooltip now. Pretty useful when you're getting used to all the different job blocks. There is now a search bar in the stockpile, which can be used to find both individual items and categories of items like "food", "ammo", "weapon" and "job". The loading screen has had a major makeover. It now has a random stylized background and a random hint. There's also a rotating gear, which will probably stutter when large files are loaded. The in-game UI has also been slightly tweaked. The statistics screens in the top left and top right corner look slightly different, but I believe it's a significant improvement.
Arrow trails have been added to both guards and weapons used by the player. There is a difference between them. Guards instantly kill a monster when they shoot, but players fire actual projectiles which travel through the air. So the arrow trails made by guards also form instantly, and look slightly like laser beams. The arrow trails of projectiles fired by the player do follow the projectile properly. Nevertheless, the arrow trails are very useful. It's a lot more obvious which guard is doing what now. It also adds a bit of extra impact to the combat. 0.6.2 added the World Settings Menu, accessible by clicking on the gear symbol in the banner menu. Working together with mod developers, we've given them the ability to develop their own custom menu. They can now add extra options to the World Settings Menu. Together with other improvements to the mod support released in 0.6.3, this will lead to even better and larger mods in the future!
Yesterday, 10AM Pacific Time / 7PM Berlin Time the Steam Summer sale started. Today, from the same time onward, Colony Survival is on the frontpage for 24 hours! If you don't own the game yet, this is a great moment to purchase it. If you do own the game, now's the time to bother your friends about buying it ;) Next week: the Looming Abyss From October to March, we added a lot of content in 0.4, 0.5 and 0.6.0. We spent the time from April to now working on smaller quality of life issues. But now, our focus has shifted back to adding new content. Which is awesome. And slightly terrifying. 0.7.0 will be the biggest update in Colony Survival History. We were planning to add more 0.6.X updates with new features in preparation for the new world in 0.7.0, but we've discussed this idea some more this week and we're afraid it'll slow us down too much. Splitting up the 0.7.0 update into smaller updates will result in lots of additional work, and the updates may not make much sense because they rely on future updates. We'd rather focus our efforts on one big, awesome update! :) We are planning to share the password of the dev branch in our Discord once we've developed a significant amount of new content and features. Here's a rough, work-in-progress overview of the planned changes. Consider the 0.6.X features on the left to be "dev-branch-updates" instead of "full" releases.
Bedankt voor het lezen! Reddit // Twitter // YouTube // Website // Discord

Tomorrow, it's June 16th, meaning Colony Survival has been available on Steam for one full year! It has been an amazing year. In 12 months, we went from a handful to more than 100,000 players. We want to thank all of you for making this possible! In this blog, I want to give a summary of the progress we've made in the last year.

0.1.0 - before June 2017

0.2.0 - June 22

0.3.0 - August 25

0.4.0 - October 31

0.5.0 - December 22

0.6.0 - March 23 2018

0.6.3

This week, we've spent our time improving the interface. Here's what the tooltip looks like now:
Nearly every item's tooltip shows where the item is made now. This will be pretty helpful, especially for new players. We're certain it'll prove useful too when we add more new jobs and new items in future updates. The change mentioned above is practical, but we're also trying to make the UI more beautiful. Some parts of it looked pretty ugly or just really unfinished. For example, here is our loading screen:
And here's a mock-up of what we're roughly striving to create:
Changes like these may not affect the gameplay, but they do make the game look a lot more professional!

Steam

The new update is now live! It significantly changes both monster spawning and the stockpile. In the past, long mazes decreased the total amount of monsters that spawned, while killing them early increased the spawned amount. This has been stabilized. Only the amount of colonists determines the amount of spawned monsters now. If you've got long mazes, you might have to readjust your defenses! Another change to the monster spawning involves the spawn location. Before this update, monsters only spawned a couple of blocks above and below the original terrain heigth. This mean they would not spawn on buildings made by players, nor in deep tunnels. This has been fixed as well. Monsters might now spawn in locations you aren't used to! We've also made it easier to adjust the difficulty in existing worlds. There's now a settings icon in the banner tool menu. Click it, and you'll be able to determine the amount of night monsters and the amount of day monsters you want to fight.
Last but not least, the stockpile has been updated. You can now craft items directly from the stockpile. Shift-click to transfer items from the stockpile to the inventory. Control-click to produce a full stack of items.
Because you can now craft items directly from the stockpile, we removed the warning above the stockpile that explained how this works. We slightly changed the place of the stockpile in the menu, and now there's more room for visible items. We'd love to know how the updated monster spawning affects your world. More or less monsters? Earlier or later in the night? What does your colony look like? Please share your experiences with us in the comments or on Discord! As always, the update might have unexpectedly broken things that we haven't noticed yet. If anything out of the ordinary happens, let us know! Next week We aren't 100% sure what we'll work on next week. We planned to start working on bigger new features, but we might spent one week optimizing the interface. The Yogscast suggested an improved tooltip that includes info on where items are produced, and we think that might be an excellent idea. See the mock-up below.
This mock-up was made with the old stockpile menu. Spot the differences! Something like this might be very useful, especially when 0.7.0 is ready and all kinds of new blocks, jobs and items are added. Combine the improved tooltip with a search function in the stockpile, a decent loading screen and a nice splash screen, and it seems like a week of work well spent. Your input is welcome too :) Have fun with the update, and please report problems! Reddit // Twitter // YouTube // Website // Discord

Boneidle's world This week, we've made good progress on the World Settings Menu. It's a new menu, accessible from the Banner Tool, to access and change settings for that specific world. Currently, it's hard to change options like the presence and amount of monsters and whether they spawn during the daytime. The new menu will solve this problem! We want to extend the World Settings Menu with the 0.7.0 update. We want to add new monsters, and we'd like to make sure you can toggle monster types on and off. We'd like to add for example monsters that can attack you and your colonists with [strike]missil[/strike] projectiles, but we understand that some people might find it very annoying. With the new menu, it'll be easy to completely remove them from your world! It also makes it easier for us to add 'annoying' enemies that are toggled off by default, like explosive enemies or enemies that place and/or remove blocks. We hope to be able to release the update, including the new menu and a monster spawning overhaul, next week! Programmer Pipliz Regular readers of this blog probably know that our team consists of me and Zun, the programmer. I'm responsible for the textures, the models, the Friday Blog and other social media, and a majority of the game design choices, while Zun has written all of the code. Pathfinding, lighting, savegames, the UI, everything. You might have noticed that not a lot of new models and textures have appeared in the game in the last couple of months. Recent updates like the builders & diggers required mostly programming work and barely any texturing work. This will be true for many planned updates as well, like the ability to start multiple colonies, new world generation, improved MP(/PVP) and splitscreen functionality. So I've decided to start learning programming. I've made some half-hearted attempts in the past, but I've tried it again with more determination this week. I've actually managed to make a couple of simple but useful programs this week! Not useful for Colony Survival yet (unless you think a dynamic Formula 1 Racing Schedule and Countdown is a great new feature), but it feels great to actually produce simple software in C#. It'll probably take many months before I'm able to do anything that might actual contribute to Colony Survival, and that will probably be simple stuff like working on the UI so Zun can focus on [strike]optimizati[/strike] new gameplay features. So the title is pretty much complete clickbait :) But we hope that this will have significant consequences in the long term. Yogscast While writing this Friday Blog, it came to our attention that the Yogscast released a new Colony Survival video. Here it is! https://youtu.be/ph_HKmBgwME They suggest smart new features like a better tooltips menu that shows where items are produced. They also discuss that they would like to see more frequent updates that would add simple new jobs like apple trees and a new colonist that can turn apples into cider. This is something I've thought about a lot in the past couple of weeks. I would've loved to release more frequent updates with new gameplay and content. We did that more often in the past. In the first months after releasing the game, we released smaller updates containing a couple of new blocks, like colored planks, cherry trees and carpet. We stopped doing that, because we don't want to clutter the game. We could for example release simple variations of foods and weapons every week. A crop that takes slightly longer to grow but has a higher food value. A new guard with a bow that has more range but with slower reload speed. A new projectile that's more expensive but does more damage. Etcetera, etcetera. It might be fun in the short term, but in the long term, we believe many players would tire of these simple variations. We prefer to add unique features like the builders and diggers, despite them taking longer to develop. We've got many ideas for new weapons, new foods and new jobs, but we'd like to spread them over multiple colonies to prevent drowning players in confusing options in their first colony. Of course, this requires us to first add the new multiple colonies feature. To do that decently, we'll need to add other new features like ways to travel faster and a method to trade between colonies. Something like this takes months, not a single week... Once the features above have been added, we can start working on the new weapons, foods and jobs. But these are all very codependent. The new crops and jobs and ores are dependent on the new biomes, and the new weapons and guards are dependent on the new monsters, and vice versa. It would be useless to add the new guards without the new monsters, and destructive to add the new monsters without their counters. So we've chosen to work on bigger updates that take longer to develop, but will hopefully result in a more interesting and balanced game, instead of a hotchpotch that gets increasingly cluttered and unbalanced :)
Death of TotalBiscuit Today, it was announced that John Bain, known as TotalBiscuit, has died. It's hard for us to find appropriate words to describe this sad event, but we don't want to end this Friday Blog without even mentioning it either. In 2014 and 2015, when we made lots of fundamental choices for Colony Survival, we watched a lot of his "WTF is...?" videos. We agreed with his criticism very often and he gave us a lot of insights into good (and bad!) game design. We often compared the games in his videos to Colony Survival. We hoped to one day see it in a "WTF is..." video. We would've loved to hear his genuine judgment. I'm sure his opinions have had an effect on Colony Survival. He often criticized practices like pre-orders, day-one DLC and lootboxes, and we've tried to stay far away from things like that. Rest in peace.

Last Saturday, we released 0.6.1.4. It included a very small change to monster pathfinding with major consequences in some worlds. Prior to the update, monsters would search and attack guards, colonists and the player if they were within a 31 block range and the path towards them was shorter than the path to the banner. It makes sense, but causes big issues in situations with very long paths to the banner. If the banner was very very very far away, and guards were within the 31 block range but also required a very very long path to reach them, monsters would constantly be calculating ultra long paths. Apart from causing weird monster behavior, it also caused lots of lag. So we shortened their "search behavior". They'll only attack other targets than the banner if there is a path towards them that is shorter than ~100 blocks. In certain worlds, this causes FPS on the server to go from 0.6 to 50+ frames per second! On Wednesday, we released 0.6.1.5. There was a slight mistake in the code making savegames which was only revealed by specific behaviour from a mod, causing loss of inventory and science. A small hotfix solved that issue. We've also continued work on 0.6.2. We've currently got an internal testbuild with two major changes:

• Monster spawning. The terrain in Colony Survival is generated using a 2D height map. This height map is used in the default version of the game to spawn monsters. The monsters only spawn in places where it's possible to spawn on the standard height determined in the height map, plus or minus three blocks. If the standard terrain has a a height of 65, monsters will only spawn in that place if they can spawn anywhere between 62 and 68. If you build a wall that stops at a height of 70, no monsters will spawn there, even if it's outside of the banner safe zone. In 0.6.2, monsters will spawn anywhere outside of the safe zone, no matter what you've changed or built. We've tested this in older worlds and it does make a significant difference. Monsters will start spawning in new and unexpected locations.
• The new build also fixes the problem described here. In the default version of the game, colonies with long walls and mazes will encounter significantly less monsters than colonies with shorter paths towards their banner. This is pretty unfair and not sensible, so that has been fixed in our testbuild. All colonies with the same colonist count will encounter the same amount of monsters, regardless of path length and guard placement.

• More advanced difficulty options when starting a new world. Currently, the options are no monsters, standard monsters, double monsters, and day monsters. We'd like to add some kind of slider that allows a better selection of the desired monster amount. For example, "half monsters" or triple monsters. Another fun challenge would be continuously increasing monster amounts, instead of keeping them in sync with the colonist count.
• A way to easily change those settings once you've started a world would be useful too.
• We want to port the hotbar/inventory from client to server side. It gives us and modders more options to stop cheating, and it also means it'll be easier to add features like "shift-click to transfer items from the stockpile to the inventory".
• Last but not least, another significant optimization to monster pathfinding.

The entrance to Bilzander's Dwarven Kingdom In last week's Friday Blog, we told you the update was finished but we wanted to wait till Saturday morning to release it, so we could be on standby to fix potential issues. That was a pretty good decision :) Shortly after releasing 0.6.1, we received complaints about guards not working properly. We found a bug, fixed it, and released 0.6.1.1 as soon as possible. Later this week, we released 0.6.1.2. It adds a small new feature: hold left alt while placing a construction area, and you can place a second identical construction area without automatically switching to construction jobs. Previously, when you wanted to place 4 wooden walls, you had to...

• Select the builder, select planks
• Place the construction area
• Game automatically switches to construction jobs, place them
• Return to the command tool, select the builder, select planks
• Place another construction area
• Place construction jobs
• Repeat all steps above

• Select the builder, select planks
• Place the construction area while holding left alt
• Place 2nd, 3rd and 4th construction area
• Place jobs and you're done!

Plans for 0.6.2

• Currently, monsters don't spawn in places where the terrain has been significantly altered. This means they won't spawn in tunnels, or on bridges and walls, even if they're outside of the safe zone. We want to fix this. This might also mean that we will cause monsters to spawn in your mine, and you'll need to guard it during the night. We like the idea, but don't want to destroy many colonies with an unexpected change. We'd love to hear your feedback!
• We want to fix the problem of wildly varying monsters counts based on your defense layout described here.
• We think we can optimize the monster spawning significantly by reusing pathfinding.

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The new update is ready, and will be released tomorrow 10AM CEST (UTC+2). Countdown here! We intended to release it this evening, but the update contains six weeks of changes and hasn't been tested very thoroughly yet. It would be pretty problematic if players ran into major bugs tonight, while we are asleep. The dev branch has been opened to modders and many are now working to update their mods. The biggest visible change is the new server browser. The old server browser was very basic and limited. The new browser contains lots of extra features. It shows for example which mods are used in a server, which players are active and the total colonist count. It's now possible to sort by ping or player count. We've also made it easier to set up a server that cannot be joined by random strangers. You can now set a password on your server. The server browser will show which servers have passwords and which haven't.
Some features, like showing active players and mods, don't work with 0.6.0 servers and aren't visible in the screenshot above. We might tweak the update when more people have tried 0.6.1 servers and sent us their feedback. Crates of bread are part of the update! They're visible in the first screenshot of this blog. We've broken one of our own rules that we announced last week: the bread crates do look a lot like the default crates. We hope they won't be too confusing. They can be used to store food in singleplayer, or to gift it to friends in multiplayer. Another small but noticeable tweak is "0-items". Once an item has been present in your stockpile, it won't disappear anymore. If you run out of the item, it'll show the icon with "zero" on top of it. This will prevent your stockpile from continuously rearranging itself when you've got lots of colonists quickly adding and removing content from the stockpile. A couple of weeks ago, we posted a short texturing guide. Since then, multiple people have started working on new texture packs. They noticed that it was relatively hard to replace textures, especially when you want to add textures to places that currently don't have unique textures, like the tops and bottoms of logs. We've worked on the issue and it's now a lot easier to replace textures! Last but not least, the server has been significantly optimized, resulting in a noticeable performance boost. We hope the new features will be useful, and if you run into any issues tomorrow, please let us know! We're very active on Discord, but we also read all comments on Friday Blogs :) And of course we try to read most posts on the Steam Forums and Reddit. Thanks for reading the blog and testing the game! Reddit // Twitter // YouTube // Website // Discord

Today, king of the Netherlands Willem-Alexander turns 51. On his birthday, a national holiday named Koningsdag, he decided to visit the city of Groningen. Groningen is the confusingly named capital of the province of Groningen, which we live in. Our king has been running his colony with over 17 million colonists for nearly 5 years without a single frame drop or lag spike. I decided I had to investigate this and went to Groningen. I managed to take the photo seen above and we're studying it to see if we can extract further performance gains from it!
Pantoufleee's amazing and detailed world Work on the improved server browser has continued this week. It's nearly done, but we're still working on some small issues like making sure all text can be translated to other languages properly. The new server browser adds a lot of new features. You'll be able to sort by ping or by the amount of players. It directly shows how many colonists are present on a server, which players are online, and whether it uses mods. If it does, it'll show you which mods are active. Update 0.6.1 also allows you to set a password for your server. We're pretty sure 0.6.1 will have been released next Friday, and hope to be able to push it live significantly earlier! In the most recent Yogscast Colony Survival video, they figured out they could use the new builders and diggers to quickly trade resources. One player uses builders to place hundreds or thousands of excess blocks, and the other player uses diggers to transfer them to his or her stockpile. Great idea, but it immediately frustrated me because it could not be used to trade vital resources like food. Which made us think of a simple solution. 100 bread + 1 crate = 1 physical food crate that can actually be placed in the world and used for storage or gifted to a friend. We'd love to add the idea, but are unsure what the new block should look like. Here are the constraints:

• It's going to be a simple 1x1x1 cube like nearly all other blocks
• It should be very different from regular crates, to make sure people don't mistakenly assume colonists can use it like they use other crates
• We'll add only one new texture for the food crate. We could potentially use other textures (like planks or bricks) for the bottom/top/sides.

We have just updated Colony Survival to version 0.6.0! You can now play the Construction Update. Changes include:

• Diggers. Colonists that can remove blocks
• Builders. Colonists that will fill the construction area with the specified block
• Special Diggers. They will remove only blocks of the specified type
• New research to extend the size of the construction area
• An experimental Mac Port!
• A new graphics setting that allows you to increase the view range. Requires rebooting the game
• Optimized NPC rendering, resulting in massive performance increases for big colonies
• Hold CTRL to crouch and not fall of edges
• Hold CTRL to recruit 15 colonists simultaneously
• Two new achievements
• Multiple updated icons

We're not surgeons and we barely know the correct terms even in Dutch, so we hope not to cause problems like the missile controversy again. But this week, we felt like we were stitching up Colony Survival after a major surgery. While you might not notice big changes in 0.6.0, except for builders&diggers and some small quality of life improvements, a lot of things have been improved behind the scenes. The increased view range might be most noticeable, but it required us to significantly overhaul terrain generation and rendering. Performance should be a lot better now! We feel like in the past two months, we removed and replaced multiple major organs. Last week, we celebrated successfully inserting the last organ. But the patient still lies on the operating table, with the body cut half open. This week, we've been working on stitching everything back together. Updating interfaces, cleaning things up and fixing the last problems.
There was no room left in the graphics settings menu to add a view range option. You can now scroll through the menu to see more options. While overhauling it, we also added a preset option so you can easily choose a standard, low or ultra high preset. Another small improvement among the many changes concerns climbing out of water. We've reused the code of the stairs to make leaving water a lot easier. We've noticed people struggling to get out of the ocean, and this should make it a lot easier :)
Photo made during my stay in Austria. Inspiration for building beautiful towns and improving the biomes! While Zun has been working on the technical side of things, I've been testing the new content by building new worlds for a new trailer. Our current main trailer will be a year old in a couple of months and lots of things have changed in the meantime. The trailer and the city in the video were made in two days, perhaps one evening. We hope we can now make a better trailer! It has become very clear to me how much builders and diggers change things. I've always had huge ideas for cities, but it's a chore to build long moats and high walls around your entire town. Placing a floor in a small 10x10 building already requires manually removing 100 blocks and placing another 100 blocks. This quickly gets boring when you want to construct many buildings (or a big palace or square). Builders & diggers make constructing your wildest fantasies so much easier. Now, you're much more concerned with planning and adding details instead of removing block after block after block. We'd like to share the new content with you as soon as possible - we can't wait to see what you'll use it for! We hope "ASAP" will be next Friday, but we cannot guarantee it. We don't like to postpone things, but we dislike releasing shoddy updates even more. We'll do our best :)
Bedankt voor het lezen! Reddit // Twitter // YouTube // Website // Discord

This week, Zun has improved lots of different things. First and foremost, an adjustable viewrange is coming to update 0.6.0! The viewrange has been limited to 256 blocks up till now. Mountain ranges often popped in and out of view when walking through your colony. Chunk rendering has been optimized and in our testbuilds it's now possible to adjust your viewrange! Some other important fixes: - We've fixed the mysterious floating objects mentioned a couple of months ago! - Network data used is reduced by 30-60% - Torches don't lag the game anymore when they're loaded in the distance - Fixed a multiplayer issue delaying in-game actions by dozens of seconds when there's limited bandwith
As mentioned last Friday, I'm spending this week in Austria. I might be AFK, but Colony Survival is on my mind all the time. I've visited multiple castles and medieval towns and they're very inspiring. It has also become obvious to me that we need to improve our mountain biomes ;) I've also been thinking about game design in general. We never went to college or something like that for game development, but we've played many games and discussed them in depth. One of the games Zun and I have played a lot in the past is Day of Defeat: Source. We've always been impressed by it. One of the things the game does very well is game balance. In DoD, the spawn location doesn't change. When team A is stronger than team B, the battle will move towards the spawn location of team B. This mean players from team B will arrive at the frontlines quickly, while team A has to walk a lot further. Defending is relatively easy, while attacking is hard. While DoD is very different from CS, we try to keep game balance in mind in other ways. Setting up a small colony is relatively easy. Slingers and berry farmers don't require much. But producing gunpowder pouches, science bags and bread is a lot more complicated. There are some common suggestions that we liked on first sight, but that we're hesitant to add because of their implications for the game balance. These suggestions are happiness and XP. It makes a lot of sense: experienced and happy colonists should produce more than new unhappy colonists. It could add a lot of content to the game; all kinds of items could be used to make your colonists happy. But instead of boosting new players and challenging experienced players, the suggestions above do the reverse. If your colony has problems, your colonists will work slower, making the game even harder. But if things are going well, happy colonists will boost your succesful colony even more, creating overabundance. We've discussed potential ways to fix this problem. Empire Total War had a great system where building universities and educating citizens actually caused more civil unrest. We could employ similar systems. Your early colonists living in primitive circumstances could be very tough and loyal. As your colony grows and becomes more prosperous, your colonists could become spoiled and rebellious. We like this idea, but it's going to be a lot of work to add properly and will change the fundamentals of how the game works. That's why we're not planning to work on systems like happiness and XP in the next couple of updates. For now, we'd like to focus on adding new systems instead of changing the basics. That's a lot less controversial :) I'll be in the Netherlands again this Sunday and might share some photos in next week's Friday Blog! Bedankt voor het lezen! Reddit // Twitter // YouTube // Website // Discord

This week, we've added a basic functional builder to our internal testbuild! We've made a short video to show you how they work: https://youtu.be/6bIVUv1_xf0 We still have to make them more user friendly and we want to add a couple of new features to them. You should be able to choose between letting the builders only place blocks where there are none, and letting them replace existing blocks. We'd also like to add a drop-down menu where you can choose certan presets like "walls only", pyramids and spheres. Counting monsters When we added monsters to the game, many years ago, we wanted players to be assaulted by a continuous stream of monsters during the night. That's why we added a "monster limit" that the game always tries to reach. When you had 10 colonists, roughly 20 monsters would be alive all the time. When the sun rose, all the monsters died. After releasing the game, many players figured out that they could build a maze big enough to keep the monsters occupied all night. This way, their colonies didn't even need guards. In response, we removed the "dead at sunrise" vulnerability from the monsters. To make sure the monster assault would end near sunrise, the game now stops spawning monsters a couple of minutes before sunrise. This works pretty well in most situations. But in the current version of the game, you can significantly expand the "safe zone" and get pretty close to the monster spawn area. Because the game always tries to spawn the maximum amount of monsters simultaneously, killing monsters close to their spawn zone during the first half of the night is pretty counterproductive. You waste ammo and the monster immediately respawns. We weren't sure how big the effect was, so we've tested two different colonies and counted the amount of monsters that attacks them. The first colony is a physically small colony. Monsters have to walk a while before they're there, and have to enter a building where they are shot by musket guards. The second colony is large. Rows of musket guards guard the edge of the safe zone and shoot at monsters as they spawn. We've compared the amount of monsters that assaults those colonies to a theoretical minimum where the spawned monsters never respawn. You can see the results in the graph below:
As you can see, there are huge differences between the colonies. And that doesn't make sense. Places with many colonists should attract more monsters, but a colony shouldn't attract more or less monsters because of the precise way their guards are placed or the shape of their maze. There is a relatively simple patch for this problem: spawn a fixed amount of monsters per colonist. We believe this is a lot fairer than the current situation. We expect to fix this as well in 0.6.0! Ports Last week, 5viki asked us if we could say something about a Nintendo Switch port in the next Friday Blog. We think this is a good moment to say something about ports in general. The Linux port was relatively easy, and we hope porting the game to Mac will be similar. It's something we definitely want to do - but there are lots of thing we definitely want to do ;) Porting the game to consoles is going to be harder. We'll need to add controller support, which takes time. Colony Survival uses Steam for a lot of things (like the server browser) and that will have to be replaced with whatever is used on consoles. We'll need to get development kits. So we expect this process to take at least multiple months. During these months, development on PC will cease completely. And after releasing the console ports, updating the game will be significantly harder, because every update will have to be released on many platforms. Finally, we have to consider (press) attention. Full releases get attention, updates a lot less. We'd like to attract new attention to Colony Survival when the game is complete, and releasing console versions is a good method to ensure this. We don't want to draw attention to the beta version just to be ignored when the game is finally finished. We certainly want to release console ports. Preferably on PS3 / PS4 / Xbox 360/ Xbox One / Nintendo Switch and more. But for the many reasons described above, it's not a priority now. We expect to work on console ports in 2019. Mac port will hopefully come sooner!
The 'small colony' from the monster counting test above Tower Defense & Missile Controversy Last week's blog received multiple comments regarding missiles. They would be "out of place" and "too modern". We didn't understand at first. When we wrote "poison missiles", we were thinking of poisonous blowpipe darts. We soon learned that the word "missiles" generally means "guided rockets". Oops! We probably should have used the word "projectiles". We're not planning to add modern self-propelled guided missiles to the game. We don't want to add weapons that are significantly more modern than the muskets that are currently in the game. Others warned us not to turn the game into a Tower Defense game. We fully agree with them! Colony Survival never was and never intended to be a simple Tower Defense game. We just want to add some extra guards and more monsters with more depth than just "more damage" and "more health". That's why we're thinking of for example guards that can do area-of-effect damage or that can poison monsters. Austria I'm going to Austria tomorrow! That's why the Friday Blog was released earlier than during other weeks. I'll be a lot less active on Steam and Discord next week, but I'll certainly check the replies to this Friday Blog. Our programmer Zun will continue working and he'll be available as usual. We would have loved to release the update before this short vacation, but we just aren't done yet. I'll return from Austria Sunday next week. We'll probably test the game and fix problems during the following week (March 12-16). We hope to be able to release 0.6.0 during the start of the week afterwards! Bedankt voor het lezen! Reddit // Twitter // YouTube // Website // Discord

Last week, we briefly mentioned boss monsters. We said we'd explain more next week - this week. We weren't merely interested in boss monsters for gameplay reasons. Our primary reason was performance. We have been building bigger and bigger colonies in our test worlds and we've noticed that colonies with 500+ colonists start to lag. It's worst during the nights, when hundreds of monsters spawn. Obviously, one 10,000HP monster causes less lag than hundred 100HP monsters, so this solution could help fix the problem. During the weekend, our programmer has worked on the NPC lag. Optimizing is his hobby :) We've been using a default Unity character system that was designed to be used for main characters. You might have a couple or even a dozen main characters, but it was never intended to be used for hundreds or even thousands of NPCs. The default system allows multiple animations to be combined dynamically. It's a powerful tool, but we barely used it. We did suffer the performance cost though. So we've created a new system. We still use the same character system, but instead of creating the animations in real-time, they're now baked while the game launches. Nearby, NPC animations will be rendered with 60 frames per second. But at 50m+ distance, they're rendered at 20FPS and animations at 100m+ distance are rendered at 5FPS. There are barely any noticeable drawbacks to this new system, and the performance gain is huge. A testworld with 10,000 colonists went from 10FPS to 40FPS. A world with ~650 colonists went from 40-55FPS to 120-160FPS. We've continued to work on the diggers as well. We fixed a long list of minor issues, for example:

• Diggers bring gathered blocks to crates now
• Digger jobs can't be stacked on top of each other anymore
• They won't remove "true" bedrock anymore, the lowest layer of the world
• They show the icon of the block/item they receive now, instead of the icon of the block they're removing. "Oreblocks" had no icon, ores do have an icon.
• Similar to players, there are now differences between "block breaking" times. It takes longer to remove stone&ores than to remove dirt&sand.
• Diggers can only be placed next to construction areas

Teleporting pads and apothecaries in the Settlers Mod We've gotten into the habit of releasing two kinds of updates. Big updates like 0.3.0, 0.4.0 and 0.5.0, and smaller updates like 0.5.1, 0.5.2, 0.5.3 etcetera. 0.6.0 is obviously one of the bigger updates, so apart from new jobs like the diggers & builders, it'll also contain plenty of small changes, fixes and updates. This week, we've spent most of our time on those smaller things. The most important new addition is crouching. There is no new animation, so you won't see other players duck, but as long as you crouch you won't fall of ledges. It was often requested and it's very useful when building tall structures! In 0.6.0, you can crouch by pressing CTRL. The same button can help when recruiting colonists as well: hold CTRL when you recruit a colonist, and you'll recruit 15 simultaneously. To see a full list of changes, visit this changelog. It's updated continuously! Work on the diggers has continued as well. We want to make sure their griefing potential is limited before we release the update. Diggers now also store the blocks they've collected in the stockpile. The last couple of Friday Blogs have all seen multiple replies that suggested adding boss monsters. We've thought about it and are definitely planning to add it. We'll tell you more about this next week!
Automated iron gates in the Settlers Mod Pandaros' Settlers Mod Soon after releasing the game last year, Pandaros appeared and has started modding the game. He has released many iterations of his Settlers Mod during the last months. He has cooperated with other modders like Scarabol and jjjjjjjack and has added a lot of their content to the Settlers Mod. The combined mod package is huge and adds many hours of extended gameplay and new features to Colony Survival. His mod adds machines and machine operators, teleporters, automated gates, apothecaries, mana, lots of new research, furniture and many other things! If you've seen most of the standard content and want more, it's certainly worth a try. Pandaros also hosts a Settlers Mod Server and if you join, you'll automatically download the content of the mod. If you want to test the content in singleplayer or in your own server, you can of course download it manually. If you want to learn more or download the mod, you can visit the official website: SettlersMod.com . The mod also has its own Discord.
New content in the Settlers Mod Bedankt Pandaros en lezers! Reddit // Twitter // YouTube // Website // Discord

The basics of the digger are done: there is a pretty functional prototype in our internal dev builds! Here's a short video of the diggers in action: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=koa_E3jkuVM There are still a lot of things that have to happen before the feature can be released in the default branch of the game.

• The interface needs to be improved. It's a pretty complicated feature and it should be a lot clearer how it works and where for example the digger jobs can be placed
• Diggers don't store the blocks they've removed yet; the blocks just disappear. They should gather a small amount of blocks, walk to a crate and store it in the stockpile.
• Every block is removed at the same speed now. We think it's best if the digger is three times slower than the player. Dirt should be removed quicker than stone.
• We're going to add new research that unlocks the digger. The first research should unlock diggers with a ~10,000 blocks cap, and we can add extra tiers that allow you to expand that to a ~1,000,000 blocks limit.
• It should be relatively easy to add builders to the update as well, once diggers are fully done. We want to add them to the 0.6.0 update as well. (Relatively simple builders that can build walls or fill an area with grass, no blueprints yet)

This week, we've started working on the next big update: 0.6.0! We've updated the command tool by adding a 'construction' button next to it. The construction submenu will contain both the digger and builder. We've been testing the 'selection tool' necessary for the digger as well. There's one screenshot later in this blog and we hope to be able to show you more next week! We receive multiple crash logs and reports of problems every week, either in the #bugreports channel on Discord or in our mailbox (contact [at] colonysurvival.nl). Last week, since releasing 0.5.3, we're received significantly more reports. We immediately suspected a problem with the update, but investigating the individual problems didn't lead to any bug related to 0.5.3. Now we suspect the increased amount of reports to be caused by recently updated antivirus software or graphics drivers, or something similar. Here are some steps that can resolve 90%+ of the problems in launching and playing Colony Survival:

• Reloading the world, rebooting the game, rebooting Steam and/or rebooting your PC
• Verify integrity of game files
• Disabling antivirus software or making an exception for Colony Survival
• Updating graphics drivers
• Deinstalling the game, deleting all folders except for screenshots & savegames, reinstalling the game

Since releasing 0.5.2 last Friday, we've got a number of reports of small issues. Today, we'll release 0.5.3, which fixes issues like the stack size of stairs and adds a couple of small optimizations and updated translations. Thank you translators! Next week, we're going to start working on 0.6.0 which will include the 'digger' feature. We've been thinking of how this feature should work. There already is an in-game 'savetool'. We used this tool to save the 'blueprints' of the trees that currently spawn in the world. You can see how it works in the screenshot below.
There's a group of trees in the middle, and I've selected them by clicking two blocks on opposite sides of the trees. The purple selection updates dynamically by hovering the cursor over blocks. The final digger tool will not turn blocks solid purple, but give them a transparent colored overlay instead, like the banner tool currently does. That's step 1. When you're happy with the area you've selected, you'll have to place 'job spots' similar to how you currently place miners or guards. These digger job spots can be placed on all the blocks that border the selected area. Unemployed colonists will move to the job spots and start removing blocks from the selected area. They will move to crates regularly to deposit the blocks they've collected. When they're done and the entire area is removed, their job spots automatically disappear and they move back to the banner, like all other unemployed colonists. In this approach, diggers will work pretty similar to most other jobs, which hopefully is the least confusing strategy!
Two weeks ago, we suggested a feature that could fix 'the bed problem'. We received a lot of enthusiastic replies and nearly all of you wanted to see the feature added. We'll work on diggers (and probably builders for 0.6.1 ) first, but there is a very big chance that job-specific beds will be added in 0.6.* or 0.7.*! Another very common suggestion is melee guards. We've thought about this idea, but it results in a number of problems: [olist]

Wheat farming is already a more efficient source of food than berry gathering, but this would make it even more overpowered. Which means we'd have to adjust the balance again... which would make the entire change pointless.[/olist] The best fix would be to make growing wheat require some attention by the colonist. He could remove and prevent weeds, water the plants, etcetera. But that update would be nearly 100% visual in nature without any significant change in gameplay, so it doesn't have a high priority for us. We read, consider and appreciate all suggestions, but we wanted to let you know why we're currently not working on some of those common suggestions :)
Miscellaneous info

• Berry bushes do not need to grow before the berries are ripe. The limit for the effectiveness of the berry gatherer is limited by the time he needs to gather one berry, the low food value of one berry, and the time he needs to travel to and from crates. The amount of berry bushes in one 'berry field' is irrelevant. Creating larger 'berry fields' than the bare minimum is not necessary. For wheat/flax/herb farmers, the biggest field possible is the best option.
• When scientists consume science bags, there's a 90% chance an empty linen bag is added to the stockpile. When musketeers consume gunpowder pouches, there's also a 90% chance an empty linen pouch is returned to the stockpile.
• A forester plants 9 saplings in a 9x9 field. He also plants 9 saplings in a 10x10 field. He can plant 11 saplings in a 3x33 field.
• Our recent review rating exceeded 85% positive for the first time ever last week! :D

Bedankt voor het lezen!

[ 2018-01-26 12:44:18 CET ] [ Original post ]

0.5.2 has just been released! It contains five variants of quarter blocks. Placing a quarter block in front of a full block will allow you to climb the block without jumping. This way, you can create much more efficient stairs! The grey quarter block can be crafted by players without the need of any colonists. It's crafted from stone bricks. It can also be crafted by colonists, but it requires some research. When all of the research is unlocked, the stonemason can craft grey quarter blocks. Colonists can use the splitting stump and planks to craft the light brown and dark brown quarter block. And finally, the dyer can craft white and black quarter blocks by applying gypsum or charcoal to grey quarter blocks. We've been thinking about adding "corner quarter block" so you can use the new blocks as some kind of baseboard to decorate your buildings. We liked the idea, but adding two variants ('inside' corner and 'outside' corner) of each of the five different quarter blocks will clutter your stockpile too much. That's why we wanted to add an automated system that automatically adds a corner block when you place quarter blocks in the right pattern. We haven't added this yet though, and consider it to be a lower priority than builders & diggers. If your designs really need new 'corner blocks', please post a screenshot of your building in our Discord and we'll reconsider the priority :) Another change in 0.5.2 is an update to the lighting system. Placing multiple torches in a small area resulted in lagspikes when placing or removing blocks in that area. Older PCs encountered this problem earlier than more advanced computers. We've reworked the lighting and the lagspikes should be gone now! We've also added four new achievements to 0.5.2. We've added achievements for recruiting 100, 250 and 500 colonists, and for producing 1000 bronze arrows. The achievement stats are publicly available and they allow us to see exactly how many players have unlocked, crafted or used certain things.
Colony Survival Wiki Gamepedia has made a great template for an official Colony Survival Wiki. The game can be confusing and the manual isn't always updated to the latest game version. The Wiki can be a great tool to organize and find information. We hope some of you are willing to help us add content to the Wiki. It's greatly appreciated! --- The stairs aren't definitive yet nor have they been tested for a long time. If you encounter any problems or want to suggest changes, please post them in the comments or on Discord! Bedankt voor het lezen!

Yesterday, we released update 0.5.1. It doesn't change or add anything major, but it changes a lot of little things. Berry farmers will replant your berry bushes in a slightly different pattern. The carpet achievement now counts white carpet. The loading screen often froze for a couple of seconds, and it should have stopped doing that. The old red and black planks that were removed in 0.5.0, are now available for the dyer to craft. Translations have been updated - thanks translators! There's an in-game changelog if you'd like to know more. Stairs Last week, we described how we wanted to add stairs. They'd look like "quarter blocks" that would add a step in between blocks. This week, we tested how it would look in-game, and we're pretty happy with the result! We hope to add the feature to the game in one or two weeks. The work-in-progress block you can see in the screenshots doesn't have textures yet, and we want to add some simple normal mapping before releasing them. We also want to make the block available in different colors, like white, black, grey and brown. We noticed that the blocks were pretty suitable as a way to add more detail to buildings. You can use them as windowsills, baseboards or crown moldings. That's why we want to add some variations of the blocks that can be used in corners.
Addendum Last week's blog received a lot of comments, both here on Steam, on Reddit, on Facebook, on Discord and by mail. The overwhelming majority was positive, but it also raised some questions. I'll try to answer most of them here! Will the new world in 0.7.0 be randomly generated? Yes. There are some overarching parameters to make sure the tropics are in the center and the arctic is at the very edge of the world, but it's not a pre-rendered world that's the same every time. It'll be even more random than the current world generation. What happens at the edges of the world in 0.7.0? Infinite seas. Why don't you visualize building blueprints like the Construction Mod does? We looked at it and discussed it, and their solution is probably the best one! Thanks for reminding us. How about the Mac port? We hope to release that as well in 2018! When will monsters finally start breaking down your walls? This is a suggestion we hear pretty often and we've thought about it a lot. We might add some new monsters that can climb up walls or even flying monsters, but we're very hesitant regarding destructive monsters. It would be awesome if monsters could attack your castle like humans do. Breach walls in strategic locations, place ladders, fill moats, etcetera. But Colony Survival is not a regular RTS where you place predefined buildings, walls and gates. Everything is blocks, and while it might be obvious for a human which blocks are part of a defensive wall and which blocks are part of a farm, this isn't clear to the AI. And while most people build pretty realistic medieval structures, others build completely unpredictable structures. Floating colonies, skyscrapers, underground halls... It's very hard to write a "siege AI" that makes the right decisions regarding wall-destruction, moat-filling and tunnel-digging. We could add "simple destructive monsters" that mostly move in a straight line from spawn to banner, filling any moats they encounter and destroying all walls, but we don't feel like this would be a great improvement. The ability to 'steer' monsters towards certain gates and mazes is part of the appeal of Colony Survival. Spending months of development time on a feature that completely removes that is probably not a wise decisions... Are you going to allow us to assign beds to colonists to fix "the bed problem"? We regularly hear complaints about 'the bed problem'. It involves colonists going to the 'wrong' beds. One of the main causes is the fact that colonists search for the closest bed in a straight line without calculating the length of the path required to get there. We might change this in the future, but calculating hundreds of path is obviously more straining for your hardware than just calculating straight lines. Multiple people have asked us to add a tool that can be used to assign colonists to specific beds. We've thought about it, but found it hard to envision how it would work exactly. Only big colonies with hundreds of colonists encounter this problem. Manually assigning all of those colonists one by one to a bed will be a very tedious task. Before we think of adding a tool like this, we'd like to add more and better ways to manage your colonists. A menu that allows you to prioritize certain jobs, and to see which jobs are filled and which are not, is sorely needed. A different solution is adding beds that are restricted to certain jobs. Black beds for miners, green beds for farmers, red beds for guards. It would allow you to build barracks for your guards near the walls without those beds getting claimed by other colonists. We'd love to hear your input. Do you encounter this problem as well? What do you think of the solutions above?
We hope we've cleared things up. If you've got any questions or other suggestions, we'd love to read them in the comments! Bedankt voor het lezen!

This week, we've received a lot of updated translations for 0.5.0. Thank you translators! While our native language is Dutch, we still struggled to translate some words from English to Dutch. We understand how hard it can be to translate the game :) Last Sunday we released a new patch. The recently updated autosaving caused some issues where autosaving rapidly slowed done and save files grew quickly. It has been patched now. During the first week of the new year, we've had a lot of discussions regarding what we want to accomplish in 2018. We're very excited about the planned content and we'd love to hear what you think of it!

Stairs

0.6.0: Builders & Diggers

0.7.0: Brave New World

Animal Husbandry

Multiplayer improvements

2019: Splitscreen

From a world by IcyCaress After releasing 0.5.0 last Friday, it quickly became apparent that a number of small errors had sneaked into the game. We've worked on and released multiple hotfixes Friday night and Saturday. Since then we've haven't heard about new bugs, and we've had a pretty laid-back week celebrating Christmas and our programmer's birthday! Our programmer, and half of our team, is nicknamed Zun. He's the one who started the project back in 2013 and did all of the coding. Without him, Colony Survival would not exist! He turned 23 last Wednesday :)
We wish you a happy 2018! We want to use this last blog of 2017 to thank everybody who has supported Colony Survival. So many of you have written reviews, posted comments, encouraged friends to buy the game, made gameplay videos, shared awesome builds, made a fan translation, developed a mod or helped us in any other way, and we're very grateful! We'd like to give special thanks to certain people: Everyone who has bought the game - developing Colony Survival is our full time job now. This is only possible because of all the people who bought the game. You've made our dreams come true! Vobbert - he's an old friend who we've known since primary school. He has been testing versions of the game for years and he's now moderating our Discord! GrayStillPlays - a YouTuber with at the time over 200.000 subscribers who asked us pre-release if he could release a gameplay video of the testbuild. He's the one who lifted the game out of obscurity! KoutetsuSteel - he made the first translation of the game, into Japanese! He also made some of the first mods, and he runs a YouTube channel. We want to thank everybody who sent us fan translations! Pandaros - one of the most active modders, and creator of the Settlers mod! We've worked closely with him to optimize the moddability of Colony Survival. Draegast - he was one of the first YouTubers to release Colony Survival videos, and with over 1 million subscribers, he contributed to the game's success immensely! Scarabol - another active modder, who created among other things the Construction Mod, which allows colonists to build blueprints! Tjohei - Tjohei created the Colony Empire server, which has been active since the release of the game. They've even got their own Discord and website! GabGab - he pushed the game to its limits shortly after release, creating huge buildings with thousands of colonists. We're still using some of his worlds to optimize the game, and one of them is featured in our video "Patch for Mega Colonies"! IcyCaress - IcyCaress built some very impressive colonies this Summer, and is now working on a new world with the lanterns in 0.5.0! Here's one of his videos of his giant castle. Steam - it still feels amazing to see our own game on the Steam Store. Their software works great and we're very happy to work together with them! The awesome people on Discord - The Official Discord now has over 1000 members! It's of course used to discuss the game, but we've also got off-topic channels where all kinds of different subjects are shared and debated. Yogscast Lewis&Simon - they've made many episodes about Colony Survival, and they recently started a second season! We often hear from people who know about the game purely because of the Yogscast :) You - the entire Colony Survival community - we've worked on this game since 2013. Until June of this year, we developed "in silence". Barely anybody knew about Colony Survival. Suddenly, the game's popularity exploded. Now our blogs get read, our Tweets get shared and our videos get watched. It's very exciting and we're very grateful! We searched our archives for some old versions of the game and decided to make a video to show some of them of to you. It's long and barely edited, but you might be surprised to see what Colony Survival looked like in 2013! https://youtu.be/gtRRsLLMXHc
We hope all of you have a very awesome 2018, and we can't wait to see what the game looks like in another year!

Happy New Year!

Join the Discord and share your feedback! The 0.5.0 update has just been released! A short list of noticeable changes:

• Stonemason: crafts new building materials
• Dyer: can paint some blocks and lanterns in many different colors
• Herb farmers: can grow wolfsbane, hollyhocks and alkanet, three herbs used as dyes
• Lanterns: new blocks that emit light, can be crafted at the anvil and painted by the dyer to emit different colors of light
• Five new achievements
• Two varieties of "raw" stone, four varieties of bricks, four varieties of cobblestone and brown stone bricks can now be crafted by the stonemason
• Seven varieties of planks, three varieties of carpet, two varieties of bricks, seven varieties of lanterns and red cobblestone can now be crafted by the dyer
• Crystals have been added to the game, they're an ingredient of lanterns. They can be obtained by smelting rich galena.
• Bows and bow guards are now locked behind the "archery" research

You're welcome in our Discord! This week, we've continued our work on the new content for 0.5.0. Lanterns actually have textures now! We've been testing them and they function exactly like we wanted them to. In the past, we've added some colored blocks. The tailor and the workbench could be used to paint some blocks in a couple of specific colors, using pretty random items like coal. It wasn't very consistent, didn't provide many options and cluttered the crafting limits menu. The recipes of the old painted planks and carpet blocks will be removed when 0.5.0 releases, so craft them while you can! They will be replaced with a new dyer job. The dyer can use new herbs to produce dyes, and those dyes can be used to paint wood and carpet blocks in a wide variety of colors. The colored lanterns can be crafted with the same dyes. A new stonemason job will craft bricks and regular stone blocks in a couple of new patterns and natural colors. This way, all the cosmetic blocks will be easily accessible with two special jobs! The new herbs will be grown by three new herb farmers, comparable to the current flax farmer. The three different herbs will represent three primary colors. Mixing them allows you to produce a wide variety of paints. The seeds for the new herbs are obtained by unlocking new research.
The new textures in 0.5.0 required some updates to the way Colony Survival handles textures. While working on the code, we decided to fix some minor bugs. Normal, emissive and height maps should be slightly improved in the new update! Modders have asked us to improve the moddability (is that a word?) of the textures of the game. In 0.5.0, you should be able to add new textures without any coding! We've currently only got two crops in the game, flax and wheat. Three if you count trees. The code didn't allow us to easily add new crops, and that's definitely something we want to do! So we've improved that code as well.
Instead of merely working on code optimization, we've worked on something else that's a lot of fun and very exciting; tax! We haven't figured out the details of our new company yet. There are a lot of different ways to structure your company, pay your income and store money, and they've got a huge effect on the amount of tax you've got to pay. It's a difficult and boring job to figure this out, and we aren't familiar with it. But it is very important, so we enlisted the help of some great advisors! Finally, we've finished something that we promised months ago, but forgot to share it when it was done! Our new website is finally live. It has been live for a couple of weeks, but it went public during the sale and we forgot to mention it in the Friday Blog :) We promised we'd release 0.5.0 before Christmas, and next week is the last Friday before Christmas. We'll release it then, or perhaps slightly earlier! Bedankt voor het lezen!

The new lanterns - work in progress, no textures yet In Dutch we like to say over smaak valt niet te twisten; you can't argue about taste. Similar ideas are repeated often. The beauty of architecture, the quality of music and the taste of food aren't objective facts that can be understood with reason and debated with logic, they're subjective. They're personal preferences, unique to individuals. Yet, what is considered beautiful and what is not isn't 100% randomly distributed. Buildings like the Taj Mahal are considered beautiful by many people in different continents, cultures and time periods. A neighborhood filled to the brim with old Soviet concrete apartment buildings generally isn't a tourist destination.
Not a tourist destination A couple of weeks ago, we found a great video by School of Life. It tries to explain why certain towns are considered beautiful, while others are pretty universally seen as abhorrent. One of their ideas is that we need a balance of variety and order. According to School of Life, a town without any rules quickly devolves into chaos, and we don't like chaos. There must be recurrent patterns so we can make sense of what we're viewing. The buildings should have for example similar shapes or similar colors. Looking at the Taj Mahal, it's obvious that this monument conforms to these rules. The entire building is painted in similar shades of white, the four towers are identical, and the building is very symmetrical.
But old Soviet flats also conform to those rules. They're mostly the same color and they're constantly reusing the same shape. Before we declare Soviet flats beautiful, we have to take a look at School of Life's second rule: we also dislike boring repetition. If the same simple pattern is constantly reused, the result is probably going to be pretty ugly. Within the rules of similar shape or similar color established above, there should be some room for creativity. If all the buildings on a square have the same shape, the colors should vary. If the color palette is restricted, the buildings should have unique ornaments.
How do you fix spelling errors in YouTube's subtitles? The video, titled How to Make an Attractive City made us think about Colony Survival - which essentially is a city builder. We realized that many people were using the same three building materials; planks, stone bricks and clay bricks. Which makes sense, because they're currently still very popular building materials, and modern construction materials like steel and concrete don't fit the theme of Colony Survival. But there's a problem: every brick in Colony Survival has exactly the same color. Which is fine when you're building one house, but if you put 10 brick houses next to each other, they also have exactly the same color, probably causing your town to look uglier than it should. In real life, brick houses often have slightly different colors.
Amsterdam, the capital of our home country So while in real life a row of old brick houses looks like organized complexity, and thus beautiful, in Colony Survival it looks like bland repetition, and thus ugly. We want to solve this problem by offering players a range of variations on common building materials like clay bricks, stone bricks and planks. Stone and clay bricks can be crafted into a range of natural colors. Planks can be dyed in all kinds of colors, using new herbs similar to flax. Instead of making new textures for every different color, we've developed a system that allows us to simply enter an RGB color code to paint an existing block in a different color. Because every block uses multiple textures (for normal mapping, height mapping, specular mapping, etcetera), adding dozens of blocks in the old system would require hundreds of new texture, which would quickly decrease performance. With the new system, we can add all those new blocks without the performance drop! While thinking about the possibilities of the new ideas, we also decided to add a new lantern block. It's a full block that functions like a torch. In 0.5.0, you'll have the ability to produce lanterns that emit light in different colors! It really fits Christmas :)
According to School of Life, this looks like a chaotic mess and is thus ugly. I fully agree with them Here's School of Life's full video; https://youtu.be/Hy4QjmKzF1c We hope you're all going to build beautiful cities in 0.5.0 during Christmas ;) Bedankt voor het lezen!

You're all welcome in our Discord! We've been working on lots of different minor issues this week. There were some issues with torches on certain hardware, and the servers had a problem on Linux. Those were fixed in 0.4.4, released Tuesday. We've nearly finished 0.4.5 and are planning to release it tomorrow. The single most noticeable change is autosaving for non-block data! Blocks were the only thing getting saved during gameplay. All the other thing, like jobs, were only saved when exiting a world or quitting a server. If your game crashed, it wouldn't properly save, causing you to lose most of your progress since the moment you loaded the world. The game now autosaves every 5 minutes by default, mostly solving this problem! Of course, progress since the last autosave is lost on a crash. Server hosts can change this setting in the game files. Here's the full changelog for 0.4.5. In the coming week, we hope to finish patching minor issues and start working on new content again! We've had time to think about the next couple of big updates and we've decided on a schedule that we're very enthusiastic about. We've still got some big questions regarding 0.7.0, and we'd love to have your input!

0.5.0 - The Christmas Update

0.6.0 - Diggers & Builders

0.7.0 - Enhanced world generation, boats and useful biomes

The survey we created last week was answered by over 600 people! We want to thank everybody who participated very much. We're going to use the results to improve the game and to balance our priorities. We want to share some of the results with you!
The colonists that can build and dig were very popular, and a huge majority of those who answered were very enthusiastic about them. We're currently working on some minor issues and improvements, but the next big update will very likely contain this feature!
The proposed change to stockpiles & crates was received less positively. We've lowered the priority. We still think it would be a good idea, but it's a lot of work and will significantly increase the difficulty of the game again. It seems like the game is difficult enough currently :)
On one hand, nearly 75% of those surveyed thought this change was awesome. One the other hand, a similar percentage said it wasn't a high priority or not important. We definitely want to add it before the definitive release, but we're working on more content (SP+MP instead of MP only) first.
The conclusions of the previous question are confirmed by the results of the question regarding priorities. Stairs were generally considered a high priority. Animal husbandry and improved world generation were seen as slightly less important. Changes to multiplayer were ranked the lowest priority.
It was very interesting to see how many players had done certain things. Google Forms shortens the names of the questions so here is the full list, from left to right:

• Multiplayer with friends
• Multiplayer in a public server with strangers
• Joined the Discord
• Posted in the Steam Forum
• Replied to a Friday Blog
• Wrote a Steam Review for Colony Survival
• Wrote a Steam Review for a different game

Colony Survival is now temporarily 25% off! We've recently released 0.4.0, a huge content patch. We're thinking of raising the price in Q1 2018, so this is a great moment to buy Colony Survival! For those who've already purchased Colony Survival, this is the day you should convince your friends to buy the game as well ;) We hope to welcome lots of new players and have worked to make the early game more intuitive. In last week's Friday Blog, we asked our readers to participate in a survey. Over 500 people answered our questions, and we are very grateful to them! This was our first question: Would you mind if we locked more content behind quick & easy research, to help streamline the early game? For example, lock wheat farms, grindstones & ovens behind a single research, just like mints & shops. The majority of those surveyed didn't mind the change, and over 85% agreed that the change would help new players. So during the last couple of days, we've worked to streamline the early game. When you start a new colony in 0.4.3, you won't have wheat seeds or flax seeds. You won't be able to craft grindstones, splitting stumps, shops or any of the other blocks that isn't required for a small but stable colony. You'll have to unlock those blocks with science now. We've worked to make those early science unlocks properly accessible for new players, as unobtrusive as possible for experienced players, and more aesthetically pleasing in general. We hope this makes the game a lot more accessible to new players! Changelog Summary:

• New colonies don't start with wheat seeds and flax seeds anymore, but gain them by unlocking the related research
• New colonies start with extra straw to compensate for wheat being locked behind research
• Swords actually deal extra damage now
• We added a shortcut to the science interface in the Banner Menu.
• We've motivated the tailor to work quicker
• Wheat farmers, flax farmers, archers, crossbow guards, matchlock gunners, ovens, grindstones, kilns, splitting stumps, mints & shops are now locked behind (mostly quick & easy) research
• Categories in the science interface are now labeled clearly; available, unavailable & unlocked.
• Unavailable research is now black & white, to make it appear less overwhelming and important
• Added a text to to the science interface that explains how to recruit scientists
• Updated some tooltips to better reflect the changes in 0.4.0

We've been having a difficult discussion this week and we're still not fully sure what we're going to do. We'd love to have your input! Would you please answers these questions in Google Forms? When we decided to organize a 'poll', we immediately thought of some other questions we'd like to know the answers of :) Update 0.4.0 added lots of new content and significantly increased the complexity of the game. This is wat a lot of people have been asking for, but we've noticed that the game might have become too confusing for some new players. When players start a new colony, they instantly have the ability to craft lots of job blocks that they don't need. We believe this overwhelms a lot of players. It leads to suboptimal choices, like trying to grow wheat and bake bread before harvesting berries, and worrying about mints & shops instead of science labs & bronze anvils. These suboptimal choices make the game even more difficult. So we're thinking about adding four "technologies": -"Bread": Wheat farms, grindstones and ovens -"Economy" - Mint & shops -"Kiln" -"Splitting Stump" Like the bronze anvil and the tailor, they'll be quick & cheap unlocks, requiring 3x ingredients or something similar. It might be annoying for experienced players, but it'll make the early game a lot more intuitive for new players. So, should we lock more content behind research? We'd love to have your input. Please reply here, on Discord, or in the survey!
0.4.2: Better collision, better performance, less crashes! There has been a rare issue in the game for a long time that causes players to randomly clip through blocks, causing them to float through the world. This week, we've looked at the collision code and we found a couple of ways to improve it. The issue should be totally gone now! Simultaneously, optimizing the code should've slightly improved performance. The new code is also a lot better prepared for colliding with non-cube items. Currently, you'll often accidentally remove torches and wheat when removing blocks in close vicinity of them. This happens because the game doesn't check whether you're actually aiming at the torch or wheat itself, it just checks if you're looking at the "cube" that "contains" the torch or wheat. This is easier to improve with the new code. Another new feature that would rely on proper collision with non-cube items is stairs, and we know that they're in high demand :) They're not in 0.4.2, but they're easier to add in a future update now. 0.4.0 has resulted in a significant amount of crashes for a small amount of players. Last week, we narrowed the problem down to the change in torch rendering. Apparently, that change doesn't work well with Intel integrated graphics cards, often found in for example laptops. We've updated the code and those problems shouldn't happen anymore in 0.4.2! PingPerfect Server Hosting Last week, we released the Dedicated Server Tool. Within a couple of hours, we received a message from PingPerfect. They wanted to add Colony Survival Server Hosting to their services! We've been testing the combination of PingPerfect's hardware and our server software, and it seems to work flawlessly. If you want to host a 24/7 server without running your own PC 24/7, it's now possible to rent a server at PingPerfect! Bedankt voor het lezen!

While testing all the new jobs and items in 0.4.0, we noticed how annoying it could be to watch your colonists craft non-vital items while you were quite literally dying for a bow and/or arrows. Since releasing the update last week we've heard that many of you encountered exactly the same problem. This issue became our highest priority and we just released 0.4.1, a small update that includes different priorities for crafting recipes! Every recipe can be assigned a low (+), medium (++) or high (+++) priority. Once they've reached the crafting limit of the high priority crafting recipes, they turn their attention to the ++ crafting recipes. Finally, they craft the recipes in the lowest category. It works pretty intuitively with only one caveat: colonists can't work on high priority crafting recipes when they lack ingredients, even if they themselves can craft the ingredients. The default priorities solve this problem by assigning arrows and crossbow bolts a high priority, arrow ingredients a medium priority, and all other items a low priority. The crafting limits were always pretty confusing. Sometimes colonists crafted way more items than required to meet the limit. This happened because the limit was multiplied by the amount of items crafted in the recipe. For example, the bronze arrow recipe crafts 5 bronze arrows. This means that with a 200 item limit, colonists would craft 200 x 5 = 1000 arrows. This was totally not intuitive, and we've fixed this issue as well. With the most recent update, colonists will actually properly obey the limits! When you've got a lot of colonists working the same job simultaneously, they might still overshoot the limit slightly :)
The new interface for job blocks. There's a space that shouldn't be there in front of the last sentence in the tooltip, it should be gone in the update that just went live While teaching the colonists how to prioritize certain recipes, we also taught the guards to prioritize certain monsters. In version 0.4.0, guards targeted monsters pretty randomly. With update 0.4.1, they've learned not to waste strong but expensive missiles on weak monsters. For example, guards with matchlock guns now strongly prefer to shoot monsters with a full 500HP health bar. In theory, this should increase your nightly damage output without any extra cost, so it should make the game slightly easier. But the effect does depend on the mix of guards you've got and the mix of monsters that attacks you, and it's impossible the test the new update on all possible combinations. If the update has a weird effect on your guards and monsters, please notify us! Another important update this week is the release of the Colony Survival Dedicated Server as a Tool on Steam, to be used through SteamCMD, the command-line version of the Steam client. It has three main benefits: 1.) You can now run the server on a 'real' server without a monitor 2.) You don't need to run Steam anymore to host a server 3.) You can automate launching and stopping servers
Two examples of mysterious floating objects, captured on film just before they cloaked themselves again We've started receiving more and more reports of people encountering mysterious floating objects. Some people have speculated that they might be alien gods. Apparently, they're benevolent and guide people towards great spots to build colonies. Personally, we suspect they're chunks rendered with errors because the chunk has been loaded, unloaded and loaded again too quickly. It seems to happen more often when people fly (rapidly). Unloading and loading the area with the mysterious objects seem to fix the problem in all reported and encountered cases. You can do this by either moving away until the area is outside your viewing range, or by exiting to the main menu and loading the world again. We're trying to fix the problem entirely but haven't succeeded yet! If you read all of this, you're more than welcome in our Official Discord! Bedankt voor het lezen!

It's Friday in Australia & Japan The release of the update was a great success! Not a lot of bugs have been reported, people seem to like it and are rapidly unlocking the new achievements, and the amount of active players has gone up dramatically. We're watching nearly all Colony Survival videos that are being uploaded to YouTube right now to figure out how people play the update! There has been one error that we can't fix. People who've used mods in previous versions are sometimes unable to play 0.4.0. To fix this, the gamedata/structures folder has to be manually removed, after which the integrity of the game cache has to be verified to restore the removed files. We have already released several hotfixes. These are the errors that we patched:

• Ardumus helped us find the source of a bug that deleted the entire stockpile. By default, colonists eat from the stack with the highest total food value, to balance the consumption of berries and bread. When they've consumed all food items, they instantly consume all other items because they've got a food value of zero. There was a line of code to prevent this, but instead of only letting colonists eat items with a food value bigger than zero, it allowed colonists to eat items with a food value bigger than or equal to zero... Thanks Ardumus for helping us find the error!
• We forgot to update the version number used for matchmaking. We quickly updated that within hours of the first release.
• When people unlocked the anvil, they instantly unlocked both the anvil and the bloomery achievement. We fixed that too.

• People seem to think 0.4.0 is complicated enough
• It's a big overhaul of a lot of systems and can't be released in multiple parts, meaning players will have to wait longer without receiving updates

• Colonists that can dig; they could flatten hills and dig moats
• Colonists that can build simple structures like walls and cuboids.
• Colonists that can build structures from blueprints created by the player
• Colonists that can build structures from blueprints downloaded from the Steam Workshop

We've just made all the new content publicly available! Update your game to access it right now! https://youtu.be/wCtP_ajFwvA We strongly recommend you to start a new world. The new ores are fundamental to your colony and do not spawn in old worlds. The new guard system is incompatible with the old quivers. Monsters might not spawn, permanently enabling siege mode. Because the new world is a lot higher, water might flood your old world. You can always restore the game to the 0.3.0 version and continue playing in your old worlds. The update adds a lot of new content, changes things and fixes issues. Here's a short summary:

• New ores and metals like copper, tin, bronze, steel, galena and saltpeter
• A new mining system: ores are spread over multiple layers, and you can dig into the side of mountains to find them
• New weapons: slings, crossbows and matchlock guns
• New jobs like the metalsmith, the woodsplitter, the gunsmith and the kiln operator
• New items like copper nails, bronze plates, iron blocks and charcoal
• Science has become fundamental for the development of your colony, even for small colonies
• New Science Bags
• Four different guards, and both a day and a night version of them (they actually have to sleep now!)
• Three different monster types (100, 300 and 500HP) that spawn in three different speeds, increasing in difficulty as your colony grows
• New achievements!
• It's now possible to punch monsters
• It's now possible to punch and shoot colonists
• Fixed a pretty big bug in the pathfinding code, and optimized it as well
• Moved nearly all gamedata files to the server, giving modders more options and letting people join modded servers without first installing mods
• Optimized torch rendering
• Fixed some savegame problems

Last week, I said there would be three different monsters in 0.4.0. Now, it's more accurate to say there are going to be nine monsters in the update! There will be three different basic types: 100HP, 300HP and 500HP. Every basic type has three different versions: slow, medium and quick. When you start a new colony, you will first encounter slow, weak monsters. You'll have to fight them with slingers, which only damage 50HP and so will need two shots. As your colony grows, the amount of monsters grows and two new types of monsters will spawn: quicker but weak monsters and slow but stronger monsters. Later on, three new types will spawn: fast and weak monsters, "medium-medium" monsters and slow monsters with 500HP. Eventually, even the strongest monsters will attack you with high speed! By then, you really should have deployed crossbow and musket guards. At first, weak and slow monsters will be the majority. This will evolve into a more evenly distributed mix. Eventually, for ultra large colonies, the majority of attackers will be strong and quick.
How the bannertool visualizes the safe area and the area where monsters spawn There were two questions that we've received very often since the release of the game: 1.) How big is the area that the banner protects from spawning monsters? 2.) Can you increase it? Those questions made a lot of sense and we've worked to visualize the answers in 0.4.0. In the image above, you can see the result. Equipping the bannertool will result in all blocks being shown in either green or red. The green area is safe and monsters spawn in the red area. The 2nd question can be answered with "yes" now. The safe area in 0.4.0 is smaller than it was in 0.3.0 by default, but by doing research you can increase the safe area until it's a lot bigger than the default area from 0.3.0! Balancing Apart from adding the new monsters and the new visualization of the bannertool, we've spent a lot of time on balancing. Yesterday, the game was actually so hard that I could not stay alive without cheating! My production of bronze arrows could not keep up with the monsters. We've worked on lowering the difficulty a bit, but update 0.4.0 is certainly going to be a lot harder than 'old' Colony Survival. And that's a good thing, because a lot of people complained that the game was too simple! And we fully agreed with them. We can't wait to hear about your experiences with 0.4.0! One thing we've done to slightly lower the difficulty is adding "punching". You can now punch monsters for 35HP of damage :) There are still some small issues we want to work on before releasing the update Tuesday, October the 31st: -Achievements. Easy to do. The achievements are not going to be very exciting, just some small ones like "reach # of item" and "unlock research", but they let us track how many players have reached a certain stage of the game. -Priority targeting. A musketeer shouldn't waste his shot on a 100HP monster if there are 500HP monsters in range. -Let players use the new weapons themselves. Slings, crossbows and muskets can't be used by players yet. -Testing and balancing. We've changed a lot, so we've certainly introduced some new glitches and bugs. We're trying to find all of them before the release. We're also trying to balance the cost of production, expansions and research, the strength of guards and the difficulty of monsters. [strike]wemightstealthreleasethepasswordofthedevbranchondiscord[/strike] -Increasing colonist recruitment costs. We thought it was a good idea a couple of weeks ago, but the game has already gotten pretty complex and difficult with the new update. Not sure if we're going to be able to add it before the release date, but it's also less important now. We hope to see you on Discord or on this same place next Tuesday when we release 0.4.0! Thanks for reading this, two proud inhabitants of a nation that declared independence from Spain 429 years ago

This might be the first time I use the word "penultimate" in an appropriate context In last week's blog, I wrote how satisfying it was to finally play the game with proper icons, recipes and tooltips for the new items. This week, we've done a lot of balancing and just testing the game has become very addictive! The game keeps motivating you to push forward by making new research and jobs available. Once you've expanded, gathered new resources and recruited the new jobs, new research and jobs become available to push you even further. This is exactly what we've been hoping for but it's awesome to see everything come together in a testbuild! We've also worked on the new guards and monsters. The guards are nearly done. Here is the new menu that can be accessed with the command tool:
"Night guards" are the most important, but guards have become more important during the day as well because monsters don't die because of sunlight anymore. They only spawn during the night though. In normal circumstances, your guards should kill all monsters before they go to bed. But if monsters are slowed down by long mazes, your guards might leave their posts before all monsters are dead! Mazes will give guards more time to kill the monsters, but they won't be saved by the sunrise.
The different guards have very different stats.There will be three different monsters in 0.4.0. They'll have 100, 300 and 500HP. Slinger guards

• Throws stones, crafted from stone bricks
• Damage: 50HP
• Range: 12 blocks
• Reload speed: 3 seconds

• Fires bronze arrows, crafted from bronze ingots and planks
• Damage: 100HP
• Range: 20 blocks
• Reload speed: 5 seconds

• Fires bolts, crafted from wrought iron and iron rivets
• Damage: 300HP
• Range 25 blocks
• Reload speed: 8 seconds

• Fires lead bullets using gunpowder pouches made from linen, saltpeter and charcoal
• Damage: 500HP
• Range 30 blocks
• Reload speed: 12 seconds

Three new job blocks. From left to right: Splitter's Stump, Finery Forge, Gunsmith's Workbench I want to start by thanking all people who've commented on the past blogs! We can't respond to each and every one of you, but we do read all the replies. Lots of them contain good insights or heartwarming encouragements. They really do mean a lot to us! We've worked on this game for three years while barely anybody knew about it, and we're glad that that has changed :) Game development can be slow and frustrating, but last week has been a lot of fun! Everything is coming together in a very good way. The new ores, the new items, the new jobs, all of the new research - they were very unbalanced, but fixing that and reshaping the basics of Colony Survival is very rewarding work. We've finally got a version of the game that contains all the new items with their own icons, tooltips and recipes that can be played from copper to steel without having to /loot items :) It doesn't contain new guards or new monsters though, so we aren't going to make the current version publicly available. But we have made a small trailer to show some of the changes! There was one last issue to be fixed before I could make the video this morning. The gunsmith was still bright pink. That issue was... issue #666. We aren't superstitious though, so we'll release the trailer now on Friday the 13th. But if update 0.4.0 fails, you can find the cause in this blog ;) Here's the trailer: https://youtu.be/nGnGDJjrMlU Lots of small changes to the game have been made this week. The changelog for 0.4.0 will be a very long list! One of the small changes is an improvement to the sliders. The slider defaults to a list of pretty random numbers. You don't slide it from 400 to 500, it goes from 372 to 512. This has been fixed in 0.4.0:
I wasn't even bothered by the problem, but I did notice that gameplay was smoother immediately after it was fixed. Here are some of the other new items in 0.4.0:

Just two and a half weeks left until October the 31st. We're going to be very busy, but we believe 0.4.0 is certainly worth it! Bedankt voor het lezen!

New job blocks, work in progress! From left to right: bloomery, anvil, kiln In the most recent content update, 0.3.0, we added scientists and technologists. They produce Science Bags and you can use them to unlock health upgrades. Some people were disappointed because they had expected more and different 'researchables'. Well, 0.4.0 is going to add a lot of new science! It's partly used as some kind of tutorial, to prevent new players from having to choose between lots of job blocks that aren't useful for them yet. Its other purpose is to give big colonies a purpose to work towards to. We made a tech tree to visualize how science will work in 0.4.0. The tech tree simplifies things and is liable to change!
At the start, you can choose between unlocking the anvil (required to craft a lot of metal items) and increasing the colonist limit. This will also add items like clothing, a bronze knife or silver coins to the colonist recruitment cost. There will be roughly 10 steps in the colonist limit tech tree, going from 50 to 250, to 1000, to infinite. When the technologist is unlocked, you can unlock Basic Science Bags, Life Science Bags and Military Science Bags. Military Science Bags are required to extend the safe range around banners. Life Science Bags are necessary for the health upgrades. Basic Science Bags are used to unlock the bloomery (to smelt iron), crossbows, the finery forge (to forge steel) and muskets. Items like gunpowder and muskets are part of the recipe of Advanced Science Bags and Colony Science Bags. They are required to unlock the highest level health upgrades, colonist limits and banner range upgrades. In 0.3.0, science was added to extend gameplay when people had explored most of the content. In 0.4.0, science is going to be important at the start of the game. This means we had to update the inventory at the start of the game.
New player inventory in 0.4.0 Players will now start with a slinger and stones instead of a bow and arrows. Flax seeds will be available at the start. Iron ingots have been removed from the inventory. You'll spawn with a science lab. Pickaxes have finally received a proper icon :) Improved pathfinding Since the release of the game, we've received reports of wonky pathfinding. A great example happens here in ConflictNerd's video. While working on the new monster spawning in 0.4.0, we took a good look at the pathfinding code and found some significant errors.
Wonky pathfinding
Fixed pathfinding We've fixed the errors and improved the performance. In 0.4.0, your colonists should behave a lot better and the game should run better! Paperwork Two weeks ago, we wrote that our "general partnership" has been turned into a private limited liability company. We'd been waiting for that moment for months and had been looking forward to it. It turns out that properly setting up a private limited liability company comes with a lot of complex paperwork. Everything is more complicated. Setting up a bank account is more difficult now. Taxes are more complicated. Administration is more work. We've been printing, signing, scanning and mailing a lot of forms this week! We've also run into some legal trouble. It's been a tough week, but once everything is up and running it should have a lot of benefits! Last but not least, we've chosen a pretty definitive release date for 0.4.0. Unforeseen disasters might cause delays, but we believe we can release the update Tuesday the 31st of October! 0.4.0 is centered around mining new ores and unlocking new weapons to fight new monsters. What is more appropriate than releasing new monsters during Halloween? :) Bedankt voor het lezen!

The new iron blocks, work in progress Last week, we asked you for your opinion about future pricing. We received a lot of responses. The outcome partly surprised us, so we’re glad we posed the question and want to thank you for sharing your ideas! The idea of gradually raising the price was very popular. Perhaps because most of you already own the game, but there were multiple examples of people who didn’t own the game yet and still supported raising the price. Content DLC was less popular than expected. Most people replied that they opposed it. We didn’t have any detailed ideas for DLC so we can promise that we won’t release content DLC this decade :) Cosmetic DLC received an opposite response: it was a lot more popular than we expected! But it’ll be hard to compete with mods, and cluttering the Steam Store with skins and such might discourage some people from buying the game itself. So we find it hard to think of a way to make cosmetic DLC profitable and worth the development time, so we’re focussing on other things first. Some people were worried about the pay-to-win loot crates, so we want to clarify that we were joking and that we're never going to add terrible mechanics like that. We hate seeing them in other games and will certainly not add them in our own game! We now believe that the best path forward is a slight price hike in Q1 2018. We also read the comments of people who thought Colony Survival currently did not have enough content to justify a price hike. We fully agree with them, and we want to add a lot more content before we raise the price. We hope to release explosives and more realistic stockpiles before we raise the price, and we’re not sure whether the new price is going to be $22,49 or $24,95. The price hike has multiple benefits: [olist]

Hopefully, a higher income to sustain development of Colony Survival for a longer period.[/olist] We will not suddenly raise the price, we’ll warn everybody well ahead! Update Progress In the last couple of weeks, a lot of code has been refactored to make future development easier, to extend mod support and to improve performance. This week, we’ve actually started adding a lot of the new items and blocks of 0.4.0. A lot of them still lack icons, textures and functionality but we’re working to add that as well! We’ve totally rearranged underground blocks to improve mining and finding ores. We thought that adding more ores to the bottom layer of the world would make it way too cluttered, especially for new players. So in 0.4.0, it’s possible to remove the darker stone blocks and ores themselves, and mine deeper to discover new ores. The first layer of ores will contain copper and tin. Iron, clay and the other ores can be found in deeper layers.
The new ore system, visible because of glitches The location of the ores is determined counting down from the surface, instead of counting up from the bedrock. This means that it’s viable to start a colony on top of a mountain and mine for resources there. It also means you can find all the ores on the same level by mining a straight corridor into the side of a mountain! Update 0.4.0 more than doubles the amount of ‘smelting blocks’. It adds kilns, bloomeries and finery forges. So we’ve updated the code behind them. The amount of fuel consumed is pretty vague now and it will be a lot clearer in 0.4.0. Fuel will become part of the recipe of an item, so every time you’re baking bread or smelting iron ingots, a fuel-item will be consumed. You’ll be able to split planks into firewood, so you don’t have to be afraid that all of your wood will be consumed :) Firewood can be crafted slowly by the artisan (the colonist who crafts items at the workbench), but it can be made quicker by recruiting a woodcutter. This is especially useful for bigger colonies that consume lots of firewood. Our current to-do list before we can release 0.4.0 looks like this: - Add more icons, textures and functionality to the new items - Balance the recipes and crafting times of the new items - Add a guard recruiting interface so you can recruit the 8 different guards - Add the new monsters - Add the technologies that allow you to expand the safe zone around the banner - Add a way to visualize the safe zone - Add the technologies to unlock the new items - Add gradually increasing colonist recruitment costs - Add new achievements We hope to release the update in October and we’ll keep you up to date on the progress! Mod News A lot of the progress in the mod support in the past few weeks has happened in close cooperation with Pandaros. He made some awesome mods and even wrote a Beginners Guide to Modding! You can find his work here. We try to support modders as much as possible in our Official Discord. Everybody is welcome there! Bedankt voor het lezen!

[ 2017-09-29 14:57:23 CET ] [ Original post ]

The website that can hopefully be launched soon Today is a pretty monumental day! We visited the notary to turn our “general partnership” into some kind of private limited liability company. This is the first game our company has released so we had to do some work to make sure our company had the appropriate legal business form. Our new legal form is being registered as we speak, so next week we should finally be able to set up proper bank accounts, get a credit card, and start paying a salary. We actually haven’t been able to use a single penny of our earnings yet :) With the credit card, we can start paying for our new website and a proper e-mail address, so we hope we can share them soon. Bow guards are currently the only guard in the game, so arrows are the only form of missiles. They were hardcoded, so the code needed a significant rewrite to support other missiles like crossbow bolts and bullets from muskets. The missile is a client-side mesh and is activated by the server. Our programmer decided to do rewrite this entire system. Meshes, sounds, icons, localizations and block- and NPC-textures are now entirely server-side instead of client-side. This means that you can join servers with mods without having to download these mods yourself first. They will be automatically downloaded from the server you’re joining, so this an extra feature for the 0.4.0 update! It’s also an important step towards Steam Workshop support, and it made the launch time of the game a lot quicker. Colony Survival Pricing The game has been a huge success. Thanks to all of you who purchased the game, we can keep working on it for years! This also means that our ideas of what the final game should look like are growing more ambitious. A couple of months ago we were planning to release the definitive edition in June 2018. We’re now thinking of postponing the definitive release to the Summer of 2019 – one extra year of free content updates! A higher price could be justified when the game gets big content updates. Software development can be very unpredictable, but we're considering to increase the price to somewhere between $25 and $30 during the Early Access period. We’d love to hear what you believe to be the best strategy! 1.) No price increases, Colony Survival will always be $20 Pro: More players, keeps the game affordable Con: Perhaps less funds to invest in the development of the game 2.) Gradually raising the price to $25/$30 after big content updates Pro: Hopefully, more funds to invest in the development of the game Con: Less players, people might feel ripped off 3.) Content DLC after the definitive release We could also keep the price for the main game at $20 but charge for big content updates when Colony Survival is out of Early Access. We believe the DLC policy of Bohemia Interactive for Arma III is very reasonable. They’ve released many free updates, 2 free DLCs and a couple of paid DLCs many months and often years after the release of the game. Pro: Keeps the main game affordable but also makes further development affordable for us, the developers Con: Might split the MP playerbase, makes purchasing the game more complex 4.) Cosmetic DLC We could add banners, player skins, hats and knife skins as paid DLC. Pro: Everybody will have access to gameplay updates, people can support the development of the game and receive some cosmetic items in return Con: Might turn some people off, will cost precious development time that could have been spent on gameplay content 5.) Pay-to-win loot boxes and microtransactions to speed up the grind You know that we have been kidnapped and secretly replaced if this ever gets added! --- So, what is your favorite pricing strategy? We’d sincerely love to hear it in the comments! Thanks for reading this!

The update from 0.3.0 to 0.4.0 will be the biggest change to Colony Survival yet! It will add a lot of new content and change things you’re used to. It’s highly recommended to start a new colony in 0.4.0 – you’ll need new resources that will not spawn in areas that have already been generated before 0.4.0. Expandable banner safe zone Research technology to increase the area where monsters will not spawn. Currently, monsters will not spawn in an area around the banner the size of 22,500 square meter. (For the Americans; 1 block = 1 square meter) We are thinking of decreasing this area to 10,000 square meter. Then you can use the Scientist to research a bigger safe area. The max safe area will probably be somewhere between 40,000 and 90,000 square meter. Day and night guards When placing a guard in 0.4.0, you’ll have 8 options. Will the guard use a sling, bow, crossbow or musket, and will he work during the day or during the night? Colonies with long mazes or 24/7 monsters will certainly need guards during the day. In the future, ‘day guards’ will be useful when fighting other players as well. Decreased maze effectiveness A common strategy to defeat monsters is building long and winded mazes. Currently, most monsters will die because of the rising sun before they actually reach the castle. Stronger and faster monsters will make mazes less effective. But there is another big change we want to implement: the sun shouldn’t kill monsters anymore. Monsters will stop spawning earlier, so with a normal travel time they should still be dead when the day begins. But increasing their travel distance will not save you – you will have to kill each and every monster! Different ore spawns The first “orelayer” you encounter when digging down will only contain the first basic resources: tin and copper. To find iron and clay, you’ll have to dig deeper. Ores like galena (lead/silver) and saltpeter (gunpowder) will be hidden even deeper down. The depth of the ores will be determined based on the height of the world. This means it will actually become viable to build on top of a high hill or mountain. More complex production chains Bronze ingots require two different ores. Iron ingots will need charcoal as fuel, which will have to be produced in a kiln. Steel needs coal cokes as fuel. The cokes are created by burning coal in the kiln. Items like crates, beds and workbenches will have more complex recipes and they’ll require items like copper nails, bronze plates and wrought iron. Those last two items will have to be crafted by a metalsmith, who is recruited by placing an anvil. Use Sciencebags and scientists to unlock new weapons, new jobs, a more powerful banner and to increase the colonist limit and their recruitment cost! More consistent guards Currently, the guards actually have to hit approaching monsters. Monsters walking straight to the guard are easily hit, but guards often miss when monsters walk from the left to the right or vice versa. We’re working to make it more consistent by making the arrows pretty much ‘guided’. This allows us to determine the accuracy much more precisely.
Why one big update instead of multiple smaller updates? A lot of the features in the new update are either interdependent or incompatible with older colonies. The new guards, technologies, jobs and items require the new ore system. The new ores don’t spawn in areas that have been generated before 0.4.0. The new guard system makes quivers obsolete. We want to avoid breaking older worlds as much as possible. Sometimes it’s necessary, but we certainly don’t want to do it often. This means that the new update will take some time before it’s released, but it’s going to be a big improvement :) Minor reassurance: nobody will be forced to abandon his or her beloved colonies. It will always be possible to switch back to the 0.3.0 branch and load old colonies. It’s even possible to continue playing older worlds in 0.4.0. It’s just going to be pretty inconvenient (ores not spawning in old areas, items becoming obsolete, job-blocks that have to be removed) and we recommend most players to just start a new colony once 0.4.0 has been released. Thanks for reading this!

Apparently the creators of the Yogscast read this blog. Hello! They didn’t like the fact that we made it a bit harder to get to a thousand colonists. So we’ve thought about it… and we’re going to make it A LOT harder to recruit 1000 colonists! :) Our idea to add copper, bronze and steel to the game received a very enthusiastic response. We wanted to use the new metals to add some small items like cups, plates and jewellery. But we didn’t want to make them just be cosmetic – they needed to serve some purpose. We’ve thought about adding “happiness” to the game but we couldn’t think of a way to make it fun and easily understandable. What we’re probably going to do is add these new small items to the cost of recruiting colonists. To prevent the game from becoming too complicated in the first phase of the game, the cost will increase when you reach certain amounts of colonists. And to prepare people for the increasing costs, we will add new ‘researchables’ that increase the colonist limit. So imagine something like this: Colonist Limit I – Increases colonist limit from 30 to 50, adds copper tools to the colonist recruitment cost Items required to complete research: 30 copper tools Colonist Limit II – Increases the limit to 75, adds tin tableware to the cost Required items: 50 sets of tin tableware Colonist Limit III – Increases the limit to 100, adds clothing to the cost Required items: 75 pieces of clothing Server hosts will be able to disable some of these researchables to limit the amount of colonists per player. Currently, the game suffers from rapid exponential expansion. Setting up a colony can be slow in the beginning, but when people have lots of farmers and use new colonists as extra farmers, the growth can become very quick. The increasing recruitment costs should slow down this growth, increase the diversity of required jobs and add to the depth, content and complexity of the game.
How we choose what to work on We’ve received a lot of suggestions, and we definitely want to implement a lot of them. But while people are asking us to add stairs, doors and PVP, we’re working on adding bronze and scientists. Why?! When an emergency or a war happens, a concept called "triage" is used. There are often more injured persons than medical personnel and resources. Doctors have to decide who gets treated first and who will have to wait. They try to determine where their efforts get the most results. People who will probably live, whether they receive medical care or not, are not a high priority. But those who are very likely to die aren’t a priority either. Patients that have problems where quick medical assistance makes a huge positive difference are the highest priority. While game development is very different from medical care, we do feel like we're using some kind of "triage". We’re just two developers, and only one of us can program. And there are way more things that would be good to add to the game than can be created by us in a couple of months. Steam Workshop support, a Mac port, improved multiplayer, new monsters, new cosmetic blocks, new guards, extra banners to extend the area where monsters don’t spawn, stairs, windows, doors, more jobs, more interesting biomes, controller support, splitscreen, console releases, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. We have to determine what features we will work on first. And like doctors, we start where we can have the biggest positive difference in the shortest time. There are four criteria that we use to choose which features have priority: How much gameplay does it add? Adding scientists and increasing the recruitment cost of colonists for big colonies adds a lot of things you will have to produce before you’ve seen all content. Adding doors will make a minor cosmetic difference, but doesn’t really extend gameplay. How long will we have to work to add it? Adding new metals requires me, the non-programmer, to make some extra textures and icons, and doesn’t require lots of effort from our programmer. Doors that can be properly opened by both players and colonists, making sure they work in multiplayer too and that they’re saved properly, requires a lot more effort. How will it affect performance? Stronger monsters will actually improve performance, because rendering a smaller amount of strong monsters is easier than rendering a bigger amount of weak monsters. Growing crops use a lot more resources than static ores. How will it affect future updates? The recent science-update might not mean much by itself, but it will be used a lot in other updates. It will be used to unlock new jobs, new options and new items. The gradual unlocking will also improve the experience for new players, by not overwhelming them with unnecessary options, and giving them a way to explore the game step by step. Something like first person animations will actually make future game development slower. When all items and blocks have first person animations, players will expect them for new updates like crossbows and rifles as well. If your suggestion is simple to add, provides a lot of extra gameplay, doesn’t negatively impact the performance and works well with future updates, we’re very likely to add it soon. If your suggestion takes a lot of development time, has mainly cosmetic benefits, significantly hampers the performance and makes future development harder, it’s very low on our priority list… Features that have been demanded by the community that we’re currently working on:

• New, stronger monsters
• Making mazes less effective
• New guards
• More content, depth and complexity

• Secondary banners to extend the area where monsters don’t spawn
• Stairs
• A menu where players have more control over which jobs should be done and which shouldn’t
• PVP
• More advanced multiplayer / anti griefing measures
• Mac/console port

Update 0.3.0 led to a big increase in active players, which we love to see! Thousands of players have already crafted science labs and science bags. Only 0.7% of all players have finished the Health Regeneration IV research though, which means most of you still have some work to do ;) Sadly, there was a wave of new bug reports too. There was a savegame problem that we quickly fixed in a small update last Saturday. Nearly all other problems were caused by mods getting outdated. You can fix these errors by removing the mod. If that doesn’t work, try uninstalling the game, manually removing all files (you can keep the savegames and screenshots folders inside /gamedata) and reinstalling the game. This should fix all problems caused by mods. We’ve spent this week optimizing the game and preparing for the next update. A pathfinding bug has been fixed and RAM usage by the server has been decreased 50%. We’ve also added the ability to research new recipes with the science lab. We want to make the recipes for the tailor, technologist and science bag locked by default and unlockable with the science lab.
The Colony Empire server with associated mods A couple of blogs ago I wrote about the cluttered bottom layer of the world, and how we’re going to spread out ores over multiple layers to improve mining gameplay. This is something we definitely need to do before adding new ores. We want to use this period of reordering the ores to fundamentally change mining, metalworking and the weapons used by guards. The game released with bread as the only source of food. Shortly after release, we made the production of bread more complex by requiring the grindstone as an intermediate step. We also added berries, to give people a quick and simple food source during the first phase of the game. We want to apply this same principle to mining, metals and guards. We’re going to make it more complex, and add a simpler method for the start of your colony. We want to do this by adding a full copper>bronze>iron>steel chain. Our idea isn’t 100% definitive yet, but we’re considering to add something like this:

• Copper: doesn’t need to be smelted, can be crafted into nails and copper parts. The nails are necessary to craft for example beds and crates. Your first guard will be some kind of slinger, who can throw stone projectiles.
• Bronze: smelt copper and tin ore to produce bronze ingots. The furnace consumes planks as fuel. Bronze can be used by a blacksmith to craft for example (pick)axes and bronze arrowheads for guards with bows.
• Iron: iron ore needs to be smelted in a bloomery, which requires charcoal as fuel. Charcoal is made in a kiln by burning planks. A blacksmith can use them to craft crossbows and crossbow bolts.
• Steel: iron ingots need to be put into a special finery forge with cokes as fuel to produce steel. Cokes are made by putting coal ore and planks into the kiln. Steel is required for the production of muskets.

The new update is now live on the main branch! Version 0.3.0 adds three new jobs that cooperate to produce and consume thousands of items to do scientific research. Currently, the research unlocks only basic HP upgrades. We’re working to add new jobs, blocks and items that can be unlocked with the science system. In previous versions, survival was the only goal in the game. A lot of items and blocks existed purely for cosmetic reasons. Many of them are now part of the recipes for Science Bags. This means that your colony will have to produce a lot of these items. Now there’s a good reason to greatly expand the size and production of your colony! We didn’t want to make survival itself a lot more complicated – this would unnecessarily hinder new players, and those who are more focused on the creative side of things. A colony will not collapse without a science system, but it does exist to let players unlock new things and to stimulate them to expand their colony.
There are other important changes in 0.3.0. The production of some items has been slowed down, another way to encourage players to grow their colonies. Flax seeds were the previous “end game content”, requiring hundreds of coins to unlock. They are a lot cheaper now. Flax is an important item in 0.3.0. It’s necessary to craft coated planks, which are part of the recipe of both the Technologist’s Table and the Science Lab. It can also be used to craft linen. Linen is an important component of bags and clothing (both required for Science Bags) and carpet blocks. The default amount of regenerated HP has been reduced from 50 to 30. The speed of regeneration has also been lowered. Both can be boosted to higher levels than before by unlocking new technologies. Five new achievements have been added, and they’re all related to the new content. There has been a lot of cooperation with modders in the past couple of weeks. This is reflected in significantly expanded mod support. All those improvements have now been released to the main branch. Modders have had access to these changes in the [dev] branch, and they’ve already made a lot of content that only works in 0.3.0. One of the improvements by modders is a certain level of anti-griefing protection. Some servers have gone non-public, waiting for 0.3.0 to be released so they can include proper anti-griefing measures. Now that 0.3.0 has been released, those servers will become available again!
We’ve been plagued for months by a problem that causes savegames to become corrupted on quitting. We’ve recently found the cause, and this bug is gone from 0.3.0! We want to thank everybody for all the encouragement, the mods, the playtesting, and other support! We appreciate it immensely. We hope you’ll have a lot of fun with the new content, and we’d love to hear your feedback! You’re welcome in the Official Colony Survival Discord!