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

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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!

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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.

[h3]Cloud Sync [/h3]

More technical explanation of the lighting changes below, but other major news first: Colony Survival now supports Steam Cloud Sync! It will be automatically toggled on for worlds made in 0.10.2 or later, but it has to be manually enabled for pre-existing worlds. These worlds will be uploaded to the Steam Cloud, and automatically downloaded wherever they are missing from your Colony Survival install. Convenient if you switch from PC to laptop or Steam Deck, a lifesaver if your harddrive or entire PC suddenly fails.


[h3]In-depth with Lighting[/h3]

When we had to figure out lighting during the full day-night cycle for the first time, it was probably 2014. We had little experience and hadnt put much thought into it. I remember thinking that sunsets had deep, dark long shadows, and that dark shadows are pretty much the same things as night, right? So when the sun sets, shadows get longer until they cover everything in darkness, which we then call night. Sunrise is the reverse process.

It took embarrassingly long for me to properly witness a full sunrise in real life and fully comprehend whats actually happening. Its actually bright outside for a pretty long time before the sun becomes directly visible. Indirect sunlight is bounced through the atmosphere and makes things pretty bright before that happens.


When you can see the sun directly for the first time, the sunlight has to travel through the atmosphere for a very long time before it hits your eyeball. Which means that a large percentage of it has already scattered away and bounced around. As a consequence, when the sun is close to the horizon, you actually dont witness deep shadows. The direct sunlight is weak and the scattered light that is indirectly bouncing around is relatively strong.

Around noon, when the sun is in its highest position, sunlight is way less disrupted by the atmosphere. This makes the direct sunlight much stronger than the indirect light thats bouncing around, leading to deep, dark shadows.

Our old lighting didnt follow these rules, and went straight from deep sunset shadows to night. These deep shadows were also very yellowish, leading to a pretty weird, unnatural and unappealing look for many structures. The new settings should improve this.

The best solution would be full raytracing, but thats a very computationally intensive solution that is still not 100% practical, so weve got to approximate it as best we can.


Another problem is that our eyes absolutely do not register light objectively. They constantly adapt to the world around us. Two things that have the same brightness might look completely different to us, depending on the circumstances.

Lux is the unit of measurement for brightness. Bright sunlight is measured at 111,000 lux. A sunrise or sunset on a clear day only measures 400 lux. A candle generates roughly 10 lux, and a full moon 0.25 lux.

Our eyes will adapt to both bright sunlight and a full moon. When adapted to 111,000 lux sunlight, a 10 lux candle barely even registers. But when adapted to 0.25 lux moonlight, a 10 lux candle can visibly illuminate an entire room!

Such extreme differences and the adaptation between them arent present in Colony Survival. Which meant that torches that look realistic in the night, also turn cities orange in the middle of the day. The more I looked at it, the more it annoyed me.

So Zun added a system that reduces the lighting of torches and other player-placed lamps during the day, and increases it again during the night. Thats not how it works in real life, but this too seems to be a better approximation than the old system.

Feel free to share your opinions about the changed lighting with us! We might need to tweak it a little more. The previous blog has instructions on how to change the lighting settings yourself at the end.

Veel plezier met de update!

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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!

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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!

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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

[h3]The winners are:[/h3]

Araria

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

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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!

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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:

[h3]What are we looking for?[/h3]

• 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

• 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

• 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

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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 :)

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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

Do you want to test the new content? An open beta is available right now! Most of the new content is finished. A bunch of it is decorative: the roofs, flower boxes, street lanterns, doors, windows, pillars, stairs, crown moulding. Many of these have unique variants that are sensitive to their context. The doors and windows can be painted with special paint items.

All of these items should be unlockable without cheats, using the science system and a bunch of new recipes, at old jobs and a new one.

The rails mentioned above are available too, but theyre not totally finished yet. Auto-adaptation doesnt work yet, so you'll have to manually choose between regular straight pieces, corner pieces, and up/down-pieces.

The update also contains some other changes. The UI has been adapted to be much more controller-friendly, but it's still pretty wonky in regards to the stockpile. The networking code has been improved. There are some optimizations that are mainly noticeable in enormous worlds or on low-level hardware.

If youre playing the beta, please let us know your opinion! What works, what doesnt? Is the place of the new content in the tech tree appropriate? Are the recipes reasonable? Are there unexpected problems? Have you got ideas for potential easy additions that would fit this update well? Share your thoughts in our Discord in the #openbeta channel, or in the comments!

To access the beta, right-click on Colony Survival in the Steam Library. Go to Properties, then Betas, and enter the password ForBlogReadersOnly. Select the 0.9.2 branch.



Bedankt voor het lezen :D

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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!

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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

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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

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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

One of the unexpected results of the survey was a majority preference for us to focus on better building instead of better combat. So Ive done a lot of investigating and experimenting to see how we could integrate that into the game.

Weve looked at building from a bunch of angles. Better automated construction workers. Blueprints that allow you to copy and paste designs. New requirements for bed and jobs, to prevent massive caves filled with endless rows of beds and jobblocks, devoid of all light and privacy.

Finding the perfect solution has been difficult though. Take those extra requirements for beds and jobs. If theyre simple, players will find them easy to minmax, and the new solution will be a repetitive chore as well. If theyre very complex, it becomes a completely different game with much more complicated colonists. Let us know if youre interested in that!

Were converging at a different solution: allowing players to build more beautiful colonies. How do we make that possible? How do we encourage that? I have to admit, this is not one of my strengths. I find it hard to build truly beautiful things, both in Colony Survival and in other games.

These are complex questions. It involves the very nature of beauty, in a way that transcends current fashion and localised preferences, and asks us to translate that to the constraints of our voxel game.


Wernigerode, Germany

Beauty in architecture is a subject Ive long been interested in. Scott Alexander wrote a fascinating article about it that raises difficult questions. Last year, before the survey, I had already starting delving into the works of Christopher Alexander (not related to Scott), which strives to provide an answer to those questions.

Christopher Alexander writes a lot about dealing with constraints. Buildings face a lot of them. Take for example a home. It has to provide a place to cook, a place to sleep, a place to face the public world and meet strangers, a more intimate place to relax, a proper transition to the garden. It has to let in light without losing too much warmth. It has to deal with rain, with snow, with gravity.

Dealing with all these challenges properly in a consistent style while using natural materials seems to result in rather cosy places that humans like. But our colonists are very simple. You dont have to deal with rainwater, rotting wood, or gravity. Which results in the endless factory-caves being optimal.

So there doesnt seem to be a perfect solution that automatically helps players build the beautiful towns of the past. But were working on the next best solution: give players more tools to achieve a semblance of that look, if they choose to do so.

Currently, players can pretty much only use 1x1x1 cubes. Build a wall of them and each block is identical to the next one. We want to add more detailed meshes that are more interactive. Think of pillars which automatically add a decorative top and bottom. Think of fences which connect to each other. Think of doors and window frames.


An experiment with pillars

These automatic connections between meshes are perhaps a good stepping stone towards more complicated mechanics and infrastructure in future updates: think of pipelines and electric grids.

To prevent red stone pillar / green stone pillar / blue wooden pillar / white wooden pillar from cluttering your stockpile, were considering a paint feature. Equip the red-paint-item to paint pillars/doors/fences red, and certain blocks as well.

Let us know how you feel about this! Which detailed decorations would you like to have? What features do you need to make more beautiful colonies? How would you feel about more complex colonists with more realistic needs - perhaps in a totally separate mode?

Bedankt voor het lezen :D

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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

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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

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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

Colony Survival has been in Early Access for 5.5 years now. In that time, weve released a large amount of updates, adding loads of new content and features. Its a completely different game now, compared to 0.1 in June 2017.

To us, Early Access basically means Work In Progress. Which is slightly annoying to players because it causes minor inconveniences, but it is simultaneously beneficial: it means the game is getting bigger and better. Weve personally purchased a bunch of Early Access games, and we've never really longed for that Early Access phase to conclude. The end of Early Access often means the end of (major / free) development. As long as the devs can and want to work on their game, Early Access is fine with us.

The release of update 0.9.0 broke old worlds. This was fundamentally unavoidable: there was no way you were going to practically continue your old colony with the new tech tree and changed mechanics, even if wed put effort in technically enabling that. Choosing to break old worlds allowed us to overhaul the game in better and more significant ways.

We would not dare do something like that if we were not in Early Access. After the full release, an overhaul like 0.9.0 would be impossible. It would limit future potential.

But, Early Access has a different meaning to different people. Open world survival crafting indie game in Early Access is quite the meme. To some people, Early Access means shoddy, bug-filled game that hasnt reached its goals and the quality of a full release game. Seen in that light, we dont think the Early Access label does justice to Colony Survival.

Leaving Early Access would probably allow us to reach new audiences. It would also be a good moment to look at things like console ports.

Were a bit conflicted. Staying in Early Access has benefits and drawbacks; leaving Early Access has benefits and drawbacks. We would love to have your opinion! What do you think? Detailed responses are certainly welcome in the comments and Discord, but for added convenience, weve also created a survey which adds a bunch of other questions. Please participate in the survey here!



Updates & Worlds

Weve spent the past few weeks as a semi-holiday. On one hand, weve taken some time off and worked on some non-CS stuff. On the other hand, we did keep a close eye on all your feedback and bug reports. We did release some minor patches to fix some smaller problems. We made some improvements to the Thai, Spanish and Japanese localization. We tweaked the glider mechanics. Performance of guards has been optimized. For full changelogs, check the in-game info menu or #small-patch-changelogs on Discord.

Every Friday Blog contains a bunch of screenshots. The Steam Storepage is filled with screenshots, and were going to work on trailers reflecting the new content soon. Wed love to feature your worlds! If youve made something beautiful and want to help us, please put it on the Steam Workshop with some screenshots and a description! We regularly look for new worlds there.

Were not just looking for massive statues and temples: practical worlds reflecting how players actually build and what is useful to complete the tech tree are very welcome too!

We'll share the results of the survey in a couple of weeks.

Bedankt voor het lezen :D

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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

Of course, no big change is without drawbacks and issues. On the day of the release, the old achievements were removed and replaced with 50 new ones. Some people were very attached to their old achievements and did not like that. Sorry!

The new achievements didnt work perfectly. A part of them didnt unlock. This should be fixed by now, although you do have to open the statistics board and check the right pages to unlock the statistics achievements. We're working on a patch to make that easier.

The poison guard seemed to be broken at the moment of release. This has been fixed as well. In total, we released three patches with miscellaneous fixes and improvements - see #small-patch-changelogs in Discord or the in-game info-menu for a complete list.

Some people have criticised the cost of items, like building materials, in the early game, combined with the fact that you cant make things like planks yourself anymore. We understand their reasons, but we ultimately believe this is for the best. It does make it more rewarding to grow and improve your colony.

There is another point of criticism though which is very valid, but also applies to previous versions of CS. There is a long article on the Steam Forums titled Building in the Colony is Pointless. It has started a deep debate there. I do believe Profugo Barbatus describes a significant issue here, but I find it hard to come up with good solutions. How do we make constructing interesting, complex, unique and beautiful buildings more rewarding? Feel free to leave your suggestions in that thread, here in the comments and/or on Discord!



Mods

Already, a bunch of mods for 0.9.0 have been released. I havent tested all of them yet, but I did test the chisel mod and it is amazing! It works a lot more intuitively than I had expected, and it really opens up a lot of building possibilities. Ive seen talented people build truly beautiful architecture with it. Download it here!

Not everybody can develop mods, but everybody can build things, and its easy to share your world on the Steam Workshop. Were planning to film a new trailer for CS, and shoot new promotional screenshots, in the next weeks and months. Wed love to use a bunch of different worlds for that. Weve already seen loads of amazing screenshots made in 0.9.0, and wed love to walk through these worlds for ourselves! So please, if you have an interesting world and want to share it with the rest of us, please put it on the Workshop!

Bedankt voor het lezen :D

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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

Back in 2018-2019, we worked on 0.7.0 for over a year. The core of the update was multiple colonies: one player could start multiple colonies in the same world. It was probably the most badly implemented feature in the entire game.

• 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.

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!

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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

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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

After releasing 0.9.0.10, I did a full playthrough of the beta, in preparation for adding the last new content before publicly releasing 0.9.0. I really enjoyed myself, and one thing really stood out to me. Its now guiding my plans for the final batch of content, and Id like to share it with you.

For my main colony, I had chosen a spot right in between a tall mountain, a swamp and a heath. I later started outposts in all these areas. My network of little towns was growing smoothly, but I was consuming quite a lot of food. I had of course regularly expanded my food supply, but it seems I needed a big expansion - and I didnt have a lot of convenient space for that.

Standing on top of my 100-block-tall gliderlauncher-tower, I surveyed the surroundings. I quickly noticed a large, flat spot of fertile land nearby. I filled my inventory with building materials, bought an Outpost Banner and glided to the new area. My other outposts were relatively small, but I wanted to build this one big. I started building an extensive castle with complex defenses, specifically designed to conveniently incorporate traps, and spaces for colonists to reload those traps. It was a lot stronger than necessary for the small number of farmers living there, but I used Threat Statues to lure more monsters that way.



The entire project of building my Farming Outpost felt engaging and rewarding. But it didnt directly access any new content. Indirectly, it did support the expansion of my network of colonies, which was working towards new parts of the tech tree.

When did I quit my test? When I reached the end of the tech tree. I was still enjoying the process of growing my network of towns, but there was nothing left to grow for. And when that happens, the game quickly comes to an end.

And these were the forces I was wrestling with. How do we
1.) Extend the tech tree in a way that keeps players engaged as long as possible
2.) Do that in a way which doesnt feel like repetitive padding, as uninspired busywork
3.) Develop that relatively quickly, without extending the beta for many months

Thats quite hard to optimize for! Adding a late-game tech that requires players to recruit 10.000 new colonists is easy but no fun. Thinking of amazing features that would be loads of fun to explore, but that require many, many months of development time is easy as well. Finding a solution that combines the best of both worlds without the drawbacks is hard - but I think we did it.

So the last couple of days, Ive started working on the last batch of 0.9.0 content. It will introduce new content and features, like a failsafe machine that gives you one last chance if your colony is overwhelmed by monsters. Handcannons and explosive traps. A glider launched with gunpowder, so it doesnt need a 100 block tall tower. A people mover (the horizontal elevator from here).

We'll also reintroduce some old content, like beekeepers, chicken and cabbage farmers, and musket guards.



But unlocking these endgame techs will require you to scale up. To extend your main colony and to found new outposts. To coordinate many hundreds of colonists. 0.9.0 currently doesnt have science bags, but Im working on an updated version of that idea.

0.9.0 currently has a separate menu for points upgrades. This menu contains upgrades that can be boosted again and again, like the colonist cap and the banner range. Weve got an idea to quickly convert that to full repetitive science - upgrades that cost more than mere currency, but that could also consume for example the enhanced science bags.

Were planning to subtly and smoothly integrate these systems. At the start of the game, when youve got a very small colony, unlocking things in the tech tree is cheap and only requires a few relevant items. In the midgame, these costs expand and add requirements like medium amounts of colony points/currency. Thats roughly where the current content ends.

Unlocking tech in the endgame gradually becomes more and more expensive. Itll require large amounts of currency and science chests. Therell be multiple kinds of science chests, filled with more and more costly items. These same costs can also be used for the repetitive science, to purchase perpetual upgrades for your colony.

The goal is to offer a smooth transition into the postgame. At a certain moment, youll have unlocked the entire tech tree, and youve received access to all jobs, items and weapons. Currently, the only goal left at that moment is earning currency for the points upgrades. In the intended postgame, your entire colony will still be useful. All your copper miners, hemp farmers, writers, researchers, chicken farmers and blacksmiths should be necessary to produce massive amounts of science chests, and throughout the endgame you shouldve been subtly encouraged to focus on that kind of production. Expansion is still rewarding, encouraging you to actually produce and use the technology at the end of the tech tree, at scale.



Weve noticed a minor problem in the beta where people dont actually use the tech at the end of the tech tree. They unlock elevators and gliders, but then the tech tree ends so they stop scaling up and dont actually use those things. We think weve now got clear plans which can be developed relatively easily and that should fix this problem.

Well continue working on the endgame/postgame content and hope to be able to show and test a lot of it in a few weeks. When its tested and polished, 0.9.0 is ready for a full release!

In Dutch, weve got a saying de laatste loodjes wegen het zwaarst. It literally means the last pieces of lead weigh the heaviest, and apparently, English has a similar saying in the last mile is the longest one. Its completely true, and we understand that some players are getting tired of waiting for the update. Wed like to remind them that they can join the beta, and we hope all of you will enjoy 0.9.0 when its completely done. We really believe its by far the best version of CS!

Bedankt voor het lezen :D

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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

Two blogs ago, we revealed the very first pictures of the new terrain. One blog ago, we started the beta. In between, we made a lot of changes to the terrain generation, and we haven't shared that yet! So here is a overview of some of the major new features in the terrain.



Firstly, Zun got rivers to work, so the world will be crisscrossed by them. They allow players to build a colony next to water, but without being bound to the sea and certain lakes. They also make it much easier to explore the terrain without getting lost.



Randomly throughout the world, heaths will spawn. Technically, these are inspired by the anthropogenic heaths that are quite common in the Netherlands and nearby countries. These heaths offer access to unique resources. Youll either have to purchase them manually using the new currency at the merchant, or gather them by building an outpost in a heath.



Another unique mini-biome scattered throughout the world are marshes. These wet areas offer access to unique resources in the same way as heaths.



Tall mountains topped with snow indicate the presence of ores like tin and gold, which can only be found in those locations - or again, at the merchant. Thus, gathering all of the jobs and items in 0.9.0 requires a main colony and three outposts. As explained in a previous blog, the outposts work quite different from the multiple-colonies-system added in 0.7.0. You dont need to travel many kilometers of empty terrain to get to the unique biomes in 0.9.0, and the exchange of resources goes automatically, without requiring players to set up tedious trading rules in a primitive UI. This makes managing multiple colonies (/outposts) a much more intuitive and rewarding task.



Last but not least, the world now contains some rare mammoth trees! They help a lot, functioning as beacons that make it easier to orient yourself.

Bedankt voor het lezen :D

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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 ;)

Which skills/experiences/personality traits of yours make you especially suited to be a beta tester for 0.9.0?
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

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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

In previous versions of CS, the amount of monsters that assaulted your colony every night was purely determined by the amount of colonists living in your colony. In 0.9.0, these colonists generate only a small amount of threat, and most threat is generated by unlocking certain important technologies in the tech tree. This makes it a lot easier and more rewarding to recruit large amounts of colonists.

When you start a new outpost, this threat is divided proportionally according to the amount of colonists living there. So imagine there is a total of 1000 threat. If the main colony has 200 colonists, and the outpost has 50 inhabitants, the main colony gets 4/5th = 800 of the threat, and the outpost gets 200 of the threat.

When you expand the outpost until it also has 200 inhabitants, the threat is equally divided: 500 for the main colony, 500 for the outpost. This means the amount of monsters appearing at the gates of the main colony actually decreases!


Work-in-progress "monster attraction statues"

Once I playtested this, I instantly noticed how 'relieving' my outpost was for my colony. It lost some threat, and its defenses were overwhelmed by monsters a lot less frequently. Which leads to the thought of pushing this further. What if I build a dedicated fortress, one that doesn't contain hundreds of colonists which all need to farm the fields surrounding the place, with only one heavily defended entrance, and lead the monsters there?

But that would require building a basement filled to the brim with colonists... Unless, you actually turn this into an item! Weve added some kind of statues that attract monsters. Instead of having to recruit a bunch of colonists in your fortress to get the attention of monsters, you can place these objects to instantly shift a part of the total threat to that outpost. This opens up a lot of new possibilities!

NPC-models

While Zun is programming the new terrain generator, I'm working on new models for the NPCs. These aren't in-game yet; we're striving to release the beta first.

Most of the textured objects in Colony Survival are 1x1x1 blocks. That allows us to make square textures relatively easily. Currently, CS contains one way more complicated, textured 3D-object: Harry.

Harry is the internal name for our NPC model. Harry is used for colonists, monsters and players. Harry has a lot of small surfaces, and the way to transfer textures to all these surfaces is to use a UV map. A UV map is basically a relationship between specific areas on a 3D-model, and specific areas on a flat, square image.


Harry's colonist texture

That makes it a lot harder to make textures for Harry, than to make textures for square blocks. So for over five years, we basically ignored Harry - oops! Weve added textures for new blocks, we added new 3D objects that were vertex painted, but we didnt touch Harry. Harry became a scary, complicated mess of old texturing and animating techniques that we didnt want to break, so we left it alone.

Until now. Ive been working on making new, vertex-painted models for both colonists and monsters, and Ive been animating them. Vertex-painting is the technique that weve used on for example the banner since 2017, and a bit later we started to use that technique to create non-block-shaped job spots.

A problem I noticed when test-playing the 0.9.0 devbuild, is the indistinguishability of different monster types. We introduced some new monsters with huge amounts of HP, and currently, the only way to recognize them is by eye colour. Which I have a hard time remembering, and which is difficult to notice in a glance from a distance!


Vertex-painted alternative

Giving them a new texture on the Harry model is also difficult. But with the new vertex-painted NPC models, its a lot easier! And instead of merely repainting them, I can also adjust the 3D model itself. This makes it a lot easier to add multiple monster types that are properly distinguishable, which also opens up more gameplay possibilities. We cant add deeper variation in the combat if the variation isnt clear to players.

Beta

Zun's making good progress on terrain generation, and when thats finished, we can start opening the beta! Were fairly certain that the next blog will contain instructions on how to join the beta and get access to the 0.9.0 dev build :D

Bedankt voor het lezen!

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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

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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

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

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!

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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

Lizzy was born in 2006 and quickly adopted by our family. She was smart, careful, graceful and a bit anxious. She was present during a large part of our lives. She has given us enormous amounts of joy, and we hope to have done the same for her.

Last year, she started developing some medical problems. We cared for her as best as we could, but her condition slowly deteriorated. Yesterday evening, she started to have major difficulty breathing. We took her to the veterinarian. She decided that euthanasia was the least bad remaining option. Lizzy was put to sleep and she quickly passed.

Today, we buried Lizzy.

We have one other cat: Pip. Our company is named after both cats: Pipliz. It will remain so eternally.

She is loved tremendously.

22-03-2006 - 03-03-2022

[h3]2014[/h3]



[h3]Pip and Lizzy together[/h3]





[h3]2019[/h3]

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

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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

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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.

[h2]Animal Husbandry[/h2]

This feature was proposed way back in 2017, but we never actually implemented it. Due to the longer crafting times, 0.9.0 was getting quite heavily dependent on regular jobblocks, which means a lot of colonists standing next to randomly placed cubes. We were looking for a way to add some more non-jobblock production to balance things out. Instead of just putting more emphasis on regular miners/farmers/fishers, we were looking for something completely new.

After a while, we came back to the animal husbandry idea. Youd have colonists actually caring for cows and/or sheep and/or goats. Were unsure about the precise implementation, and its highly related to the dilemma above: should we delay 0.9.0 even further and add animal husbandry to it as well? Should we release 0.9.0 with an animal-husbandry-sized gap and add it in 0.9.1? Should we release 0.9.0 without that gap and then try to squeeze it in in a later update anyway? Wed love to have your opinion on that! Let us know in the comments or on Discord.



[h2]The Covid Situation[/h2]

Everybody is probably tired of thinking about this, but this seems like the right place to mention it for a bit. The past two years have been weird. We've had multiple periods of shops/events/gatherings/schools being limited, hospitals nearing capacity etc. There were some times where we had to digest quite some new information to properly grasp the situation, which took some time and effort. Earlier on this all slowed down development a bit, but over time it's mostly back on pace as the situation has become more known, vaccines & treatments have become available, and generally we got more used to it. Hopefully 2022 will be calmer (knocking on wood!).

[h2]2022[/h2]

Though we expect 2022 to be calmer in terms of COVID, we expect it to be a lot more exciting in terms of Colony Survival! Were really looking forward to releasing 0.9.0. Its going to be the biggest update CS has ever seen. It should both improve core mechanics and extend the gameplay with a lot of new content. The Yogscast often worked on the goal of recruiting 1000 colonists, but this was a stretch goal way beyond regular gameplay. We hope to make reaching 1000 colonists a sensible and expected part of completing the tech tree!

Thanks for being a part of the CS community, and we want to wish all of you a very Happy New Year :D

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Gelukkig Nieuwjaar!

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

Colony Survival 0.1.0 was released with a big temperate biome in the middle - the place where you spawn and where pretty much all players built their colonies. Far to the north was an arctic biome, and the tropics were in the south. They had zero impact on gameplay.

0.7.0 changed that. It added a New World in the west and a Far East in an obvious location, and it gave players the possibility to start a second, separate colony in these distant biomes, with new tech trees and new resources.



We loved the idea, but we were a bit disappointed in practice. Its an interesting challenge for some, but the physical distance and the complete separation of colonies, only remedied by a trader with a cumbersome UI, makes it quite unappealing to many. Completing the tech tree in the original temperate biome is, in practice, the end of the game for most players. The content in the distant biomes is also quite artificial: things like potato farms and rice farms are only possible once youve crossed an arbitrary, invisible straight line on the world map.

The outposts-idea hopefully fixes these issues. Both their stockpile and their tech tree should be merged with the main colony, and they should be buildable relatively close to the main colony as well.

Currently, everything in a biome is possible in every location in that biome. All ores spawn everywhere, all farms can be built in one place. But were looking to change that up. Gold ore spawns everywhere in 0.8.0, but can only be purchased at the new Colony-Currency-trader in 0.9.0. What if it only spawns high in the mountains? Your main colony will be near water in a fertile valley, but building a mining outpost on top of a mountain, the only place to mine gold, sounds like an interesting challenge. Of course, the gold ore (and other fundamental but rare resources) will stay available at the 'currency-trader'.

So we want to make the temperate spawn-biome more diverse and interesting. That could happen with for example unique ores in the mountains, fens where coal can be mined or heathlands as the only place to gather silica sand for glass blowing. That will probably also result in a way bigger temperate biome.

This might result in a disappearance of the tropics, the far east and the new world, at least in the way theyre currently structured. Would you mind the loss of this content, in return for more content in the temperate biome and an earlier release of 0.9.0? Or should we put effort into maintaining the distant content? Let us know in the comments or on Discord!

Bedankt voor het lezen :D

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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

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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.

[h3]Outposts
[/h3]

With the Iron Age unlocked and many dozens of colonists working on trap-production, I now had an overcrowded fort with many beds crammed into underground rooms. I barely had space left above ground to place new jobs. But while looking at the surrounding area from the walls of my fort, I felt a strong desire to make it habitable. Why should I build such a crowded place for the colonists when there is so much empty space around me?

...because thats how the game works. Youve got one banner, and you stick with it until youre pretty much at the endgame, and then you can start over in a very distant location. But then I remembered the server that I shared with Vobbert and Zun many years ago, in a certain other voxel game. We did explore that world and we spread out our buildings, but our settlements were all connected by roads and bridges and pretty much within viewing distance of other settlements. We didnt concentrate everything in a 200x200 area (the current core CS gameplay), nor did we go 10 miles in a random direction and build a new settlement in a fully isolated area (what 0.7.0 adds to CS).



At the start of this year, we did consider making CS more like that, with multiple settlements relatively nearby. We considered semi-realistic logistics to be a core part of that, and we couldnt think of a system that we could both A.) develop in an acceptable timescale, and B.) make fun and intuitive to use for players.

But is semi-realistic logistics actually a core requirement for outposts gameplay? Imagine youre able to build outposts with their own secondary banners, their own jobs, their own colonists and their own beds, in viewing range of your first and main colony. A small village focused on mining next to the mountain, a fishing town next to the sea, a farming outpost in the middle of a plain. But the tech tree and stockpile are completely, automatically connected to your main colony. The iron ingots of the mining village are instantly usable at your main colony, and the same is true for the wheat harvest of the farming outpost. Sure, it wouldnt be very realistic, but wouldnt it be a lot more fun than being forced to stay within a small safe zone in a nearly infinite world, or to be forced to use complex, tedious trading/logistics UIs to connect multiple colonies?

Weve discussed it and were highly enthusiastic about the outpost-plan. Weve already got support for multiple colonies, so it wouldnt require enormous amounts of development time. But we do expect the results of it to be pretty enormous. Using the resources of your main colony to transform an empty patch of nature into a new settlement seems like very fun and satisfying gameplay. Weve noticed that a lot of longtime players already used mods or cheats to achieve something like this; they dislike being constrained to a relatively small area, and want to spread their mini-civilization over a larger area.



But were not instantly going to develop this feature, so this is your chance to give us your feedback! Are you highly enthusiastic about this, and do you totally not mind us expanding 0.9.0 a bit further with this? Do you believe this new feature wont be very helpful? Or are you sick and tired of us constantly moving the goalposts and do you just want 0.9.0 to be released yesterday? Let us know and well consider your input!

During the next week, we're probably busy working on refining the content that was recently added. The traps are still work-in-progress, and a part of the new 0.9.0 content is still lacking icons, models and balance.

Bedankt voor het lezen :D

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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

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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.

[h2]Implemented: Tools[/h2]

Our current dev build contains a new feature that supports tools. Tools are used by workers when producing items. Tools break after having been used for a while. Different tools have different effects on productivity and different durabilities. Examples are stone, copper, bronze, iron and steel tools.

Jobs have a Tool Usage Percentage (TUP) that determines how important tools are for them. Jobs like blacksmiths are more reliant on tools than berry gatherers. The productivity of jobs with a high TUP are more affected by different tool types. It takes longer for a tool to break at low TUP jobs.

[h2]Implemented: Monsters linked to Science[/h2]

In all previous versions, the spawned amount of monsters in the night was linked to the amount of colonists in your colony. This incentives people to play very efficiently and to recruit as few colonists as possible. To further stimulate growth and expansion, we wanted to decouple this punishment from colony growth. Monsters are now coupled to major milestones in the tech tree.

[h2]Implemented: Better Crafting Times[/h2]

We had little room to vary crafting times in previous builds. Crafting times varied per job, not per recipe: all recipes at one job shared the same crafting time. The crafting time was also limited to about 15 seconds maximum. Both have changed. One job can now simultaneously have long and short crafting times, and the crafting times can be minutes long. Weve been using this to fix workaround recipes, recipes that include things like 15 copper nails and 20 linen to artificially boost crafting time.

[h2]Implemented: UI Science[/h2]

In the past, players needed to recruit an actual scientist who worked cycles to unlock new things in the tech tree. The idea was to eventually have dozens of scientists working on Manhattan Projects. In practice, this didnt happen. Quite often, there were significant delays between unlocks, where it makes sense to delete your Science Lab and the scientist-job, just to re-recruit 1 or 2 when needed. This isnt fun gameplay.

In our dev build, science can be unlocked in the UI without a Science Lab or a scientist, provided that the right ingredients are present and all requirements are met. There are new jobs like the writer, who take quite some time to produce parchment scrolls. They partially replace the scientist.

[h2]Implemented: Real Currency and Real Traders[/h2]

From the beginning, weve had coins, but these coins were items like all others. They had to be crafted at a job, and the merchant job worked like any other job, while using coins as ingredients.

In our current dev build, this has changed significantly. The Colony Points from 0.8.0 are now Colony Currency. Instead of automatically distributing luxury goods to colonists for points, they now have to be sold at the trader. The trader has its own unique interface, where things can be sold and purchased instantly, in large quantities if so desired.

[h2]Implemented: Stone Age to Bronze Age Content[/h2]

To make the best use of all of these new features, were seriously refactoring the content of the game. Colonies grow bigger, quicker and weve added more jobs and items to make earlier ages feel worthwhile. This includes items like the tools and leather.



[h2]Not Yet Implemented: Iron Age to Gunpowder/Machine Age Content[/h2]

We havent moved past the Bronze Age, so things like iron smelting, crossbows and muskets are not in the game yet. Wed rather not release 0.9.0 while having removed such significant content. Were planning to add more ages, which will include a lot of the content from previous versions.

[h2]Not Yet Implemented: Models and Icons for all Content [/h2]

Most of the Stone Age to Bronze Age content has icons, but the models for new job blocks have not been made yet. Content in coming ages lacks both icons and models.

[h2]Not Yet Implemented: New Guards and Monsters [/h2]

Were planning to add new guards and monsters. Not merely variations on current features, but new mechanics like area of effect damage and ranged monsters as well. Were still debating if and how we should implement armored guards. Were also considering adding new 3D models for the colonists, guards and monsters.

[h2]Not Yet Implemented: UI Overhaul[/h2]

New features like the traders and the tools have a rudimentary UI so we can test them, but not yet a decent UI that is ready for release. Of course, we want to change that.

[h2]Not Yet Implemented: Colony Recover Mode[/h2]

With monsters not being linked to colonists anymore, a successful monster attack that wipes out half of your colony doesnt proportionally diminish monster attacks in the next night. Were planning a mode that costs a lot of Colony Currency and that removes your ability to unlock new tech which allows you to rebuild your colony while monster attacks are seriously diminished.

[h2]Not Yet Implemented: New Terrain Generation, and other Fundamental Changes that Require New Worlds [/h2]

Update 0.9.0 is the largest overhaul in years, and completely restructures a lot of content. Weve already refactored savegame structure for this update. Old worlds will not be compatible with 0.9.0. Disclaimer: We use the Steam Beta Branches to make major previous versions available, allowing you to replay older worlds! Nothing is lost.

There are things we cant improve, fix or refactor without breaking savegames, but of course, we want to do that as rarely as possible. Now that weve made this choice, we want to combine this with other world-breaking changes, like new terrain generation.

----------

These are the main features we have implemented or are planning to implement for 0.9.0. Therell probably be some minor changes, and we always encounter small unexpected issues, but the main structure of 0.9.0 is clear to us. We hope its clear for all of you as well now! Wed love to hear your opinion. If you want to hear what happened to earlier plans unmentioned now (like logistics), or what our other plans are post 0.9.0, or our opinion on specific proposals - let us know in the comments or on Discord!

Bedankt voor het lezen :D

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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.

[h3]The Previous Blog[/h3]

In last weeks blog, we wrote that we were starting from the ground up and totally reworking the tech tree, items and jobs. That resulted in some very concerned comments - youve already been working on this game for 4+ years and now youre going to start over?!

As soon as I read these comments, I realized that I hadnt properly explained the situation. Its not very intuitive. Technically, Colony Survival is a complex mixture of homemade systems and predefined standards. Its not always obvious how much effort it costs to change something. Its like replacing the same spelling error youve made 150 times in a 300 page text. That takes forever when youre dealing with handwritten notes, but it happens with the press of a button in the case of a digital text.

In some aspects, Colony Survival is a lot easier to change, adjust and improve than people think. In other aspects, changes are a lot harder to pull off. Our systems have been designed in a way that allows us (and modders!) to easily change things like crafting recipes (per job) and the tech tree. The main difficulty there is not weeks or months of difficult programming, but having a good idea for improved gameplay.

Those are the kind of things that are getting reworked from the ground up now. It should result in an entirely new and improved gameplay experience, but the development cost is relatively minimal. Most technical systems are working fine and were leaving them intact. A lot of old items and jobs are coming back in 0.9.0 as well - often with a twist. Problems like cooked fish not being a meal anymore will be fixed. We understand the concerns, but nobody has to worry that were pointlessly redoing all the systems in the game :)

Bedankt voor het lezen!

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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

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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

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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

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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.

[h2]Tool Usage Percentage - TUP[/h2]

Wed like to implement Tool Usage for nearly all jobs - because IRL, nearly all jobs use tools. These generic (as in, all jobs use tools but not specific pickaxes/axes/needles/hammers/screwdrivers etc) tools should come in multiple materials with different costs and benefits. Players would start with Stone Tools and would later develop Copper Tools, which are more complicated to make but yield higher productivity for jobs that use them. Bronze Tools require rare and expensive tin, but exceed Copper Tools in both productivity and durability. Iron Tools require more advanced tech to produce, but less expensive resources. The productivity would be near those of Bronze Tools, but without the durability. Last but not least, there are Steel Tools, an endgame achievement.

The difference in productivity should be significant to make developing these tools worthwhile. When youre completely out of tools and workers have to work with their bare hands, productivity should decline dramatically. But how do we make this work at the start of the game? You dont want to immediately starve to death a new player who doesnt understand the tool mechanic yet. Nor should food be something that is very difficult to balance properly at the start of the game with low productivity, while its easy to create massive abundances a bit later on with more advanced tech.

Zun suggested a variable that is related to how important the tools are for the job. A miner or a blacksmith relies hard on their tools, but theyre much less significant for a berry gatherer. This should be reflected in the Tool Usage Percentage for that job. Lets turn this into a specific example: (numbers arent definitive yet, just a hypothetical example)

No tools: 400% crafting time
Stone tools: 200%
Copper tools: 100%
Bronze tools: 50%
Iron tools: 55%
Steel tools: 33%

For a regular job with 100% TUP, this would be the full impact of using different tools. But a job with 50% TUP would see only half the impact of different tools, resulting in the following crafting times:

No tools: 250% crafting time
Stone tools: 150%
Copper tools: 100%
Bronze tools: 75%
Iron tools: 77.5%
Steel tools: 66%

TUP would also impact the durability of the tools. If tools are only "half as necessary", they'll last twice as long. Mainly early game jobs, and jobs that are crucial to survival of the colony like food jobs, will have a lower TUP. Other jobs might even have TUPs above 100%.

Of course, these numbers shouldnt have to be calculated by players themselves: the UI should make this very clear. This does require some changes to the interface. For example, we've got to make it clear to players that they can investigate their miners by clicking on the jobs.

[h2]How to achieve progress?[/h2]

So wed like to see a progression from primitive tools to advanced tools, through different eras and materials. What effort do players have to do to receive these new tools? Do they have to recruit lots of scientists, gather lots of different ingredients, earn large amounts of Colony Points? What is interesting gameplay, what is moderately historically realistic, what can we build in a reasonable amount of time?

Currently, a large part of the early to mid game relies on gathering a wide variety of ingredients. People need olive oil, wax, cabbages, buckets, fish, copper parts, iron rivets, and need to set up lots of different jobs, to unlock new jobs, which can be used to unlock other jobs. It can become quite confusing.

Another core pillar of Colony Survival until now has been the idea that youre an isolated community on a deserted world. Everything you want to produce has to be made with resources and ingredients that youve gathered and crafted yourself.

Were strongly considering changing both. The game should start earlier: in the Stone Age. Players should be able to set up a self-sustaining colony, but to progress, they have to trade with the wider (offscreen, probably) world. Therell be a trader who is able to both buy and sell items. Instead of having to craft large amounts of diverse luxury goods for your own colonists, theyll be exported. Instead of the luxury goods being daily consumables like candles and meals, theyll be more durable and significant, like extensively decorated pottery, fancy textiles, artistic objects and expensive jewelry.

Exporting these items should earn you currency, which can be spent in many ways. The currency will probably replace Colony Points, allowing you to do all the Colony-Points-upgrades with currency. They could also be required in the tech tree, with certain unlocks requiring significant amounts of money. Last but not least, you can spend the currency at the trader to purchase rare items and resources like tin.

Currently, the game doesnt actually require you to recruit a lot of colonists and build a large colony, it just requires you to gather a bunch of diverse ingredients. Most players reach the musket-era-endgame somewhere between 80 and 150 colonists. Wed like to change that. You ought to need more colonists, but recruiting these colonists should be easier. The focus of the game should be more on the expansion and the actual colonists (building places to sleep, walls, new farms, managing new monster types) and less on balancing a whole bunch of different ingredients from different jobs at the cook.

With these changes, I believe weve got all the requirements to do a successful overhaul of the crafting recipes and the tech tree, resulting in a much more interesting and longer progression throughout the game. Itll be quite different from what youre used to though. Do you believe itll be a good thing? Let us know, in the comments here on Steam or on Discord!

Bedankt voor het lezen!

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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!

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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

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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:

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?

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

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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!

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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:

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. 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!

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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

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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?

In last weeks blog, we mainly talked about logistics between colonies, with long paths marked by milestones and shipping routes. I assumed we also wanted realistic transport inside each colony, but Zun suggested that we could skip that. Current logistics could keep applying to intra-colony-logistics. This would make the start of the game easier for new players, and would in general just save a lot of hassle and performance. Transport in between colonies seems to be the more interesting challenge anyway.

But the plans also involve making it easier to set up new colonies. Were considering focusing the monster threat in one spot, making the rest of the world monster-free. That would make it a lot easier to expand wide, to build many colonies that are each relatively spread out (without the need to hide everything behind walls and moats). That contradicts the plan to only have realistic logistics between colonies.

A potential way out could be a wholly different approach to what constitutes a colony. Perhaps banners become a lot less important, and you just have Outposts, with smaller ranges than the current maximum banner range. In the Outpost Range logistics would be magical like they currently are in a colony, but in between Outposts, youve got to do realistic transport. This would be a pretty massive overhaul to the gameplay though! Were very careful about making such big steps.

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

While designing the Guilders Plan mentioned in the previous blogs, I was thinking about realistic societies. Societies where ultimately, most goods are used by individual consumers with relatively unstable, fluctuating needs. These consumers live spread out through the entire country and demand all kinds of different products that are produced in wildly different locations. One month a household orders a washing machine, the next month it needs a bicycle, and another month it buys a new laptop.

Do we want that in Colony Survival? Should the endgame look like a continent filled with many colonies, all relatively equal in size and importance, each one importing and exporting many goods to and from all other colonies? An alternative could be a hierarchy like the one in The Hunger Games: one rich and advanced Capitol, supplied by impoverished districts focused on specific industries like textiles and lumber. This would radically simplify the logistics system! Such a situation could do without Guilders and complex automated systems. Items flow from the outposts to the capital. There could be a backflow of tools and some other bare necessities, but that would be it.



This is going to be a huge update with consequences for all major systems. Production chains will change, the monster threat will change, the entire goal of the game will shift. There are plenty of good reasons to do so: were seeing a lot of opportunity for exciting new gameplay. But dealing with all edge cases, crossing all the ts and dotting the is, is difficult. Scope creep is real. So once again, were asking for your input! How important is realistic logistics inside colonies, versus logistics between colonies? Would you prefer a complex network of interdependent colonies which requires automated systems to keep the balance, or do you think a hierarchical model with a capital supplied by outposts results in better gameplay? Let us know in the comments or on Discord!

Bedankt voor het lezen :D

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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:

[h3]1.) A Reworked World[/h3]

Our current (0.8.1, before realistic logistics) design idea is different useful areas, separated by useless terrain.

New World --- Ocean --- Default Terrain / Spawn --- Steppe --- Far East

The idea is to start a relatively self-sufficient colony in each unique area, and use it to get all the crops, jobs and ores that are unique to that area.

With the realistic logistics, were thinking of a wholly different system. Ores, and other useful things like fertile land (with hopefully a sensible system that makes different pieces of land optimal for different crops), should be spread throughout the world - but not all in the same location. Perhaps your main colony is near a source of fertile land and iron. Youve got a fishing outpost on the shore, and a mining outpost in the mountains to gather gold and coal. Deep in the woods, youve got a small colony that gathers wood and saltpeter.

Instead of the current magic, completely UI-based trading, trade should involve physical connections between the colonies. It would be good if you could build actual roads that speed up the colonist walking speed. To indicate trade routes, you could need to build milestones next to the road. For shipping routes, there would be buoys. There would be a primitive map that indicates the location of colonies, major stockpiles and the trade routes between them.

[h3]2.) Streamlined Crafting[/h3]

Currently, lots of items require specific and detailed ingredients. Bows need bow strings, there arent merely iron ingots but also wrought iron and iron rivets, lots of things require not merely copper but also copper nails and/or copper tools, etcetera, etcetera. Because of current technical limitations, we cant let item crafting take more than 15 seconds, so we used these ingredients to allow us to let certain items take a more sensible amount of crafting time.

We intend to remove these technical limitations, and that could also allow us to remove these cluttering ingredients. Things would merely require ingredients like wood/copper/iron, not specific processed versions of it. That would make implementing a realistic stockpile with logistics easier as well.

This would temporarily reduce item variety, but this would rise again with later updates that add for example industrial content. But these items would work in a similar fashion, with "rubber" being "rubber" and not "rubber piece", "rubber ring", etcetera.



To work out these ideas, weve been doing a lot of research and discussion. Zun has been working on a simple 2D simulation that allows us to test some of our ideas. We can include some moving footage in the next blog if theres interest! Ive been testing Kingdoms and Castles on the recommendation of Vobbert and multiple players. That game already includes realistic logistics. Its a lovely game that works brilliantly, and their system works mostly automatically. I did notice that logistics became a bit unwieldy at high colonist numbers, and when I started building more distant outposts. Job prioritization became a lot harder as well. Its still properly manageable in Kingdoms and Castles, but their maps are a bit smaller, and its a lot easier to keep a proper overview with their top-down perspective. We think Kingdoms-and-Castles-style-logistics will be pretty confusing in Colony Survival, especially when youre dealing with a larger variety of items over a longer distance.

We're still discussing and testing different ideas, and if anybody can recommend specific systems, we'd love to hear it!

Bedankt voor het lezen :D

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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:
[h3]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?[/h3]


A vast majority of players rates this change positively, and out of this majority, a large share has picked "7", the most positive option available. This is great to hear, and it's making us more confident in implementing this change.

[h3]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?[/h3]


To prevent disappointing players who don't like realistic logistics, we've proposed having two different systems in-game. This was rated rather negatively. In the comments, multiple people suggested making logistics a "toggleable" option. This will probably be difficult to develop, but there might be a great alternative. If logistics gets implemented, we need to assign each item a weight or volume. Hopefully, we could relatively easily make an alternate option where all items have significantly less weight, making them a lot easier to transport.

[h3]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?[/h3]


The alternative, not implementing logistics in Colony Survival (1), is even more impopular. Good news: we're probably not going to do what this question proposes, and we're very strongly considering to start working on realisitc logistics in CS(1) soon!

[h3]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?[/h3]


We're back to more popular proposals! This seems to be a very viable option.
[h3]
The idea above could also be combined with realistic logistics inside of the colony. How do you feel about having both?[/h3]


Yet implementing realistic logistics everywhere gets an even better response. There's one drawback: it's a bit more polarized, with more very excited voters, and simultaneously more participants who rate this suggestion "awful". The amount of votes for "1" went from 27 to 37.

[h3]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?[/h3]


Monsters portals get a more muted response. It's still generally positive, but significantly less compared to the two previous questions. We get it, it's a bit of a strange workaround. We've got some new ideas, but we're not exactly sure how to implement them. Still, we think it would be great if players could use a lot more area in the world, without having to place guards absolutely everywhere.

[h3]What's your opinion about the addition of delivery men as a feature, who bring items from one stack of crates to another?[/h3]


Delivery men get a "regular positive" response. Not extremely excited, but not seriously conflicted either.

[h3]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?[/h3]


This was the one exception in the entire survey. Instead of 1 to 7 being 'awful' to 'great', the options here were 1 to 5, representing "Automatically" to "Player controlled". The most popular response is right in the middle, which makes sense. Many systems in the game currently work relatively autonomously, but with the option for the player to intervene. Outside of the most popular response, most participants favor automation above explicit player control.

The last five questions have been combined in one chart. They all ask the same question, about five different subjects.
[h3]What's your opinion about the addition of conveyor belts / trains / ships / zeppelins / pipelines?[/h3]


Up till these questions, no proposal got even close to 400 votes for option 7. But here, both (automated, transport) "trains" and "ships" received 502 votes! It's great to see this amount of enthusiasm :D Conveyor belts and zeppelins received the most "conflicted" response, although it's still largely positive. Ships got the most appreciation. We think this has to do with "timeline issues"; people who feel that more modern tech doesn't fit Colony Survival. A topic for another blog :D

Bedankt voor het lezen!

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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
Bedankt voor het lezen!

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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?

[h3]Support for Longer Crafting Times[/h3]

Currently, 'colonist actions' like crafting and mining cannot take longer than ~15 seconds. This is to prevent colonists getting stuck at their workplace while night falls and monsters are approaching. But this also means no ore can take longer to mine and no item can take longer to craft. This is of course pretty silly and unrealistic, and it leads to workarounds like items having a bunch of costly requirements (lots of copper nails and iron rivets, for example). We hope to add a feature that makes it possible to "subdivide" item crafting: imagine a matchlock gun taking 10 cycles of 15 seconds to craft.

When this has been added, we can immediately alter crafting recipes to make more sense and be less confusing. It also allows us to add new "Colony Points Upgrade Paths", reducing the crafting time of these items. Last but not least, it makes it more worthwhile to add industrial content, with complex machines that can radically speed up your crafting.



[h3]More ways to earn and spend Colony Points[/h3]

Colony Points are still a new feature and could use some more flesh on their bones. We're thinking about for example different tiers of beds that produce a nightly boost to your point income, and the upgrades to crafting efficiency mentioned above.

[h3]Industrial Tech[/h3]

A long held dream of us, we'd love to add a new era to the game, with more modern tech. Players should be able to process oil and generate electricity. Perhaps there'll even be nuclear energy and primitive computers. We're thinking about the best way to implement this: there should be some new mechanics that allow players to make their own designs, with various benefits for different configurations. Simultaneously, these mechanics shouldn't be too difficult too understand.

[h3]Real Logistics[/h3]

Currently, there's a "magical stockpile" that immediately "transports" items from one crate to another. We could make it so that items have to be physically moved from place A to place B. This will force players to rethink the design of their colonies, and could allow for new features like 'delivery colonists', conveyor belts and 'item-elevators'. Perhaps the current content will still use the 'magical stockpile', with new industrial content requiring physical transport. We're still debating the best solution!



[h3]A Mission/Quest-System[/h3]

We lack a decent, in-game tutorial. We'd love to add a system that introduces players to all features, step by step. This should start with small steps like "recruit 4 berry gatherers", and end with missions like "start a colony in the Far East". These missions could have rewards like Colony Points, or be required for specific unlocks. Although the drawback is that this makes the system very essential, and perhaps it should be optional, so more experienced players can disable it. Perhaps there are "repeating missions", like "produce 1000 meals", "survive 10 nights" or "defeat 500 monsters".

[h3]New Guards, new Monsters and Monster Waves[/h3]

There are only a handful of guards and monster types in-game, at the moment. We'd love to add new ones. These could be tied to for example the industrial era. We're also thinking of having special monster waves, that have to be manually activated by the player. These monster waves should be extra difficult, and perhaps have their own special monster types and unique defense mechanics. They should give great rewards to those who manage to defeat them.

[h3]Parallel Worlds[/h3]

Last but not least, but probably least likely of all features mentioned here, are parallel worlds. Imagine a special teleporter at the end of the industrial era, that consumes huge amounts of energy to teleport you to a different world. These other worlds could have wildly different terrain generation, atmospheres or challenges. Your primary colony is required to produce the prerequisites to survive in or support the other worlds. Start a colony on Mars, a radioactive hellhole or a floating paradise!

All of the features mentioned above are rough ideas, not specific plans for 2021. Let us know which one are your favorites and why! If you want to improve an idea, or if you think you've got a better plan, let us know! We read all comments under the blogs, and if you want an active discussion, Discord is the best place. We're online there a lot of the time.

Gelukkig Nieuwjaar :)

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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 :)

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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!

[h2]2020 - Specific and Without Covid[/h2]

Halfway last year, July 2019, we released 0.7.0, the biggest overhaul and content update the game had ever seen. It introduced many new features and menus that needed adjustment and improvement. We learned a lot from watching your experiences and hearing your feedback, so thanks a lot for that!

Many updates were released to help finetune and improve 0.7.0. At the end of 2019, 0.7.1 added Steam Workshop support. In February 2020, we released 0.7.2, which contained a big overhaul to the way shadows were calculated and torch lights were rendered. A couple of months later, in May, 0.7.3 added the statistics menu.

August saw the release of 0.7.4, which changed a large part of the UI. Lots of menus were work-in-progress and pretty ugly, and 0.7.4 tried to improve that significantly. It also added new functionality, like support for UI scaling, the ability to trash items in the stockpile, and the option to convert worlds from SP to MP and back.

0.7.5 was released in October, and it updated how colonists choose their goals and find their paths. The new compass item hopefully does the same for players. Last but not least, we released 0.8.0 at the end of November, which replaces the old Happiness feature with Colony Points! This update was just in time for the Jingle Jam, where the Yogscast played Colony Survival for a large audience. The bundle earned millions for charity and brought a lot of new players into the game.

This is just a short summary of the biggest changes made this year. For a full list of all changes, see the in-game changelog!

Despite all the problems in the general world this year, it has been a good year for Colony Survival. Weve fixed things we wanted to fix, weve added features were excited about, new players have joined the community, long time players have stuck around, and were looking forward to adding new content in 2021 (and were even making serious plans for the years after 2021!).

Your participation has been essential in that process. Your feedback, your purchase, your recommendations to friends, your participation in the community - all of it has been immensely valuable. Were very grateful, so thanks a million for making all of this possible! We wish you a very merry Christmas, and an amazing 2021.



[h2]2020 - Vague and With Covid[/h2]

We live in the Netherlands. For our entire lives, this has been a stable and tranquil place. That changed in 2020. In January, we saw weird videos emerging from China. Patients on the streets? Apartments being welded shut? It was worrisome, but we expected the problem to stay contained in the region. In February, we got anxious when the virus started spreading west. First Iran, then Italy. Would it reach the Netherlands - and then, what?

In March, things quickly escalated from the first handful of patients, to overwhelmed hospitals and a lockdown. We had never experienced something like this, and we were very worried. But Spring quickly arrived, and the amount of cases dwindled again.

But as Summer ended and the temperatures dropped, the amount of cases rose again. Thousands of people have died, normal life reached a standstill and the hospitality industry has been closed for months now. Weve failed to contain the virus, and now suffer the consequences. Its a frustrating situation, and it leads to difficult personal choices.

It also leads to a lot of philosophizing related to the game. Colony Survival is a society simulation - players build their own little city or kingdom. Theyve got to make choices to keep their colony safe and productive. The current crisis gives valuable insights into the way societies try to manage that, and how some succeed and others fail. We havent found specific ways to implement these insights, but Im sure theyll influence future developments (indirectly, were not planning to add literal pandemics as a feature).

[h3]A Calm Game?[/h3]

Weve also noticed how playing Colony Survival is in some ways the inverse experience of 2020. Unlike games like Rimworld and Dwarf Fortress, we dont have random events disturbing your colony. Mistakes can cause a chaotic cascade of failures, but the core of the game is pretty stable and predictable. So while 2020 feels like a messy chaos that you don't have any control over, your colony in CS is a predictable place where youve got full power.

Some players have asked for more chaos in Colony Survival - unexpected events that require quick and correct responses. Thats certainly a valid and sensible request, and a potential direction in which to develop. But were currently convinced that its best to stay the course: the stability of your colony is an essential part of the soul of the game, a core reason why many players enjoy it. Of course, this doesn't mean the game shouldn't be challenging. With the upcoming Job Management Menu, it's easier to recover from a loss of colonists - giving us more "room" to disrupt your colony in that way. We're also thinking about "voluntary chaos", like monster waves that have do be deliberately summoned by the player.

Do you recognize this feeling and agree with us? Or are we mistaken? Let us know!

[h3]Dune[/h3]

Last but not least, weve both been reading the Dune book series this year, and were enjoying them immensely. An impressive thing about the books, is the relatedness of everything. On one hand, the book is concerned with huge things, like the ecology of entire planets, genetic lines over hundreds of years, religious reorganizations and the way governments are structured. On the other hand, the book also focuses on little details, from forehead wrinkles and the way certain words are intoned to the effects of tiny plants and animals. The book manages to connect all of these to the central plot.

We would love to move in that direction. The way in which everything in Dune interacts with and affects each other, how the availability of resources shapes society and individual humans, and vice versa - it sounds like the perfect game. On the other hand, directly transferring these ideas to implementable features is hard. Once again, we dont know yet how it will influence future developments, but were sure itll have an impact.

Thanks for reading that entire wall of text! :D Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

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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 :)

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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

As explained last week, we're working on a Job Management Menu. This should make it possible to temporarily disable jobs, and to make sure new recruits take the right jobs. This is helpful in general, but crucial when your colony fails and lose a lot of colonists, resulting in lots of empty jobs.

Our internal dev-build now has a new prototype-menu that tests new features and offers new possibilities. It's possible to disable all jobs with one click. Another button automatically re-enables jobs and properly balances different jobs while taking into account how many colonists you have - to make sure you've got some wheat farmers and some bakers, instead of only bakers, for example.

We're planning to add sliders to this menu that allow players to manually reduce the amount of 'open job slots' per job type. Imagine you've got 8 flax farmers and a surplus of flax: you could decide to temporarily 'fire' 4 flax farmers, assigning them to different jobs, while the rest keeps working.



Last but not least, once again we're thinking "one update ahead". What will we do after 0.8.1 and the Job Management Menu? One interesting idea is "Special Monster Waves". Imagine a menu with a list of special wave attacks. A specific amount of strong, special monsters attacks your colony. Defeating such a wave unlocks special rewards. Perhaps the reward is 'Monster Points', or maybe it's required to defeat such waves before you can do specific upgrades.

The monsters could have special traits. Think of boss monsters with thousands of HP, or monsters with armor that require lots of damage or specific weapon types to break them. There could be new types of guards that do fire, poison or area of effect damage.

There are a lot of dilemmas to consider. Do the new monster types also appears in regular nights, outside of the "Special Monster Waves"? Do guards automatically choose the right ammo and the right strategy, or does the player have to manually decide how the special monsters are fought? If everything happens automatically, it might not be very interesting and engaging. On the other hand, if players have to do manual adjustments and assignments, and the special monsters appear every night, this might get tedious and repetitive very quickly.

We're unsure how to approach this, and your suggestions are welcome!

Bedankt voor het lezen :D

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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

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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!

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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

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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.

[h3]"The new system is less realistic"[/h3]
Agreed! It's less 'grounded', it's more game-like. We understand that it seems less appealing to 'grind points' instead of satisfying the concerns of your colonists. But the fact that it's a bit less realistic and more game-like should make it easier for players to understand and use.

We understand the appeal of the old happiness system - otherwise, we would've never taken the effort to develop and implement it. But in practice, it has never lived up to our expectations. It's not intuitive because it runs on some very strange logic (items generate a set amount of happiness regardless of your amount of colonists, and thus regardless of how many items you've got to produce). It punishes people for growing their colony and recruiting more colonists. It's hard to understand for many players, especially the "Calories-Slider". This is probably a large cause of the reason why only a small minority of all players actually reach the "end of content".

We've tried to make the system more intuitive, but we've finally decided to fix the root cause (the wonky system itself) instead of addressing the symptoms. We understand that the new system might not sound as appealing, but we believe the reworked incentives work a lot better in-game. The system is still pretty bare-bones, but we're planning to make it even better in the near future, both more satisfying to use and with more exciting rewards.

0.8.0 isn't merely an addition, it's a fundamental change, and that means that we're also losing some of the benefits of the older systems. We've tried to avoid that as much as possible, but we feel that the benefits of the new system are big enough to justify it.



[h3]"Why are you changing these systems instead of adding new content?"[/h3]
A handful of blogs ago, we released the results of our survey. They indicated that while most players would like to see some new content, their actual highest priority is better progression systems, a more engaging way to 'hook' the player. We were already suspecting that (because most players don't reach the earlier mentioned end of content), and are now working to improve this.

Another problem is the fact that the old Happiness system was not a stable foundation to work from. It worked in a highly specific way, and in itself, it was already too complex for a sizeable part of the community. Lots of players simply disabled it. The new system has been developed with these lessons and the future in mind. It should be easier to integrate new subsystems in it, like a system with different levels of beds and daily rewards for providing your colonists with better beds.

We understand that some players (especially those who have learned to work with the current happiness system) may feel like our priorities are misguided. Don't be too worried: we're planning to start working on actual content again relatively soon :)

[h3]-----[/h3]
We're really looking forward to seeing your reactions to 0.8.0, and we're planning to enhance and extend the new systems a lot further based on your experiences. We hope 0.8.0 will be the stable foundation that was lacking in 0.7.0, and are hoping to build a lot of exciting features on that new foundation. If you've still got concerns, questions, or feedback, please respond in the comments or on Discord!

Bedankt voor het lezen :D

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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!

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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!

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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!

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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!

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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!

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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
Disclaimer: none of this has been released yet, it all concerns internal dev builds

This week, we've started working on the biggest tech tree overhaul since 0.7.0 was released in the Summer of 2019. Earlier this year, we've concluded that we weren't 100% happy with the way you had to progress through the tech tree. Some parts felt disjointed, some parts had weird requirements, and it ended too soon. We're currently restructuring it to make a lot more sense and to be more enjoyable. Here's a mock-up of the first work-in-progress changes:


Fullscreen

Too many sciences weren't useful on their own. For example, technologists were unlocked without any recipes, and barley farmers don't have a purpose without chicken farmers. We've merged many of them to make science unlocks more relevant and satisfying, instead of administrative busywork.

On the other hand, the perpetual stew was meant to be way more primitive than the luxury meal, but they were both contained in a single unlock. Instead of a satisfying ladder where each step yielded something new, it was a long slog to climb a hill with all the reward at the end. This has been changed, and there should be a marked difference now.

Some of the unlocks require "HAPs". This is our work-in-progress name for "Happiness Points". Instead of having to balance your daily happiness production with the unhappiness caused by 'overpopulation', with a confusing system where the cost of your happiness items rises when your colony grows while the reward is stagnant, "HAPs" will be earned by every single happiness item you distribute to your colonists. These HAPs can be used for all kinds of vital and useful things: unlocking new science, recruiting new colonists, and killing monsters in difficult nights.

Some key steps of the tech tree will require rising amounts of HAPs, and there'll be a bunch of "repeating science" with the same exponentially growing requirement. We hope this will result in a satisfying gameplay loop where you can upgrade and expand your colony for a long time, with each improvement yielding the ability to produce more HAPs and to continue climbing the "HAPS-ladder".

We're deliberately separating this change from a more general overhaul, with the hope that we'll be able to release this update before the end of the year. Hopefully, by Christmas or even earlier, Colony Survival will simultaneously be more accessible for newcomers and more rewarding for veterans!

Bedankt voor het lezen!

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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.

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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 :)

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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!

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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

Last week, I had a little holiday (which was great!), and instead of a regular blog we released a roadmap. This resulted in a very enthusiastic response, which is always awesome. There were also some questions which would be useful to answer publicly.

Carrot_shark - i wonder if they could give us a timeline for the updates

Sorry - no :(. 0.7.5 would have been the colony-management-tools-update, but Zun got some brilliant ideas for pathfinding/simulation speed so we ended up here. Plans and priorities shift all the time, sneaky problems and hidden opportunities appear frequently, and this makes all precise long term planning pretty much useless.

Gary - So we will only be able to attack these AI Colonies? Would it be possible to friend them for trading resources?

AI Colonies are the most distant and uncertain feature, so its hard to guarantee specifics. I doubt were getting a complex diplomacy thing but you never know!

Growlingpie - What about something simple like assigning certain jobs to certain beds. I love the game but when my miners have to walk all the way up and across my base to their beds is just a waste of time.

Hopefully, the pathfinding update solves this problem entirely! If not, well consider other solutions, like job-specific beds (green beds for farmers, grey beds for guards, black beds for miners, etc).

Windvex21 - for the blueprints i would like if we can like go to like a 3D model type thing, build however we want the building to look like, then we can save and use it wherever we want

We would love that too!

Katyusha - I quite like the idea of the industrial era tech level, one thing I feel that could be a nice addition would be some fast mode of transport between colonies

Definitely agreed. Perhaps were getting transport modes like the glider but quicker, but weve also been thinking about adding teleporters with huge electricity costs as an end-game technology.

------------------------------------

Bedankt voor het lezen!

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[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

Game development is unpredictable. When working on a feature, we regularly discover its a lot harder or a lot easier to develop than we expected. Sometimes, good ideas get supplanted by better ideas. At other times unexpected problems or new opportunities get on our path. So our plans are not set in stone. We cannot give you a 100% guarantee that these things will unfold exactly as written here, but at least you can distill the rough outlines of what we're going for.

Better Colony Management Tools

The current tools for managing your colony are relatively primitive. A lot of things have to be arranged in-game - you can only remove/disable jobs by physically walking to the right job-block. You receive some text notifications when things go wrong, but theres no nice interface which summarizes these problems. Were working to change this. This should simultaneously help new players understand the game quicker, and help more experienced players to manage their large colonies. Its currently our highest priority.

A Decent Tutorial

Currently, we dont have something that could truly be called a tutorial. The game starts out with a pop-up that contains core information, and theres a link to a PDF manual that explains the details necessary to set up a self-sustaining colony. It works, but it could be better. Thats why were planning to add a Mission System. The missions will start out simple enough: plant a banner, recruit a berry farmer, let an NPC kill a monster. Ultimately, they will pull you through most of the game, with missions like recruit 1000 colonists and build a steam engine. Experienced players will complete these missions automatically, without being hindered by them. Newcomers can find in-game instructions on how to fulfill the requirements.

Blueprint Builders?

Back in 2018, we added both builders and diggers to the game. You can select an area, and these colonists will either remove all blocks there or fill the area with a selected block. Theyre very useful, but are hard to use for generating complex, detailed structures. There are some mods that have added primitive Blueprint Builders, a new job that allows colonists to automatically build predefined houses, cathedrals and castles. It seems like a very useful feature, but making it work properly in-game is pretty hard. Youd also need a tool that defines blueprints, and there are other tough problems like rotation: how do we intuitively clarify to players in which direction the blueprint is facing? We hope well be able to figure this out. Weve played around with adding a top-down view to help solve this issue, but were highly unsure about that last plan at the moment.

Streamlining and Extending the Core Gameplay Flows

Over the years, weve noticed different problems and tried different solutions to fix those. The main path of the game has become a bit of a patchwork because of this. Wed like to redo a large part of the tech tree with a new design philosophy that can scale from tiny colonies to huge megacolonies. The full process of growing your colony from the former to the latter should be a smooth and steady progression, with new goals and rewards continuously appearing at a steady interval.

To accomplish this, we want to add a new resource: Data. Progressing your colony will require ever larger amounts of Data. Historically, this has scaled really well with the development of civilization: starting from handwritten manuscripts to the printing press, and eventually moving from punched cards to the computers and the internet. Players will be able to use Data to improve the fundamentals of their colony: more output for farmers, more damage for guards, more efficient crafters, more productive miners, etcetera.

Were also considering two other new resources: VAT and XP. VAT is earned by handing out valuable items as happiness goods to your colonists. XP is earned by letting your guards slay monsters. We will try to integrate them with the fundamentals of the progression of the gameplay.

Fixing Happiness

The Happiness Mechanic that we added in 0.7.0 is pretty complicated, and the UI that should explain it is imperfect and confusing. Were planning to improve the UI, but were also considering to overhaul how Happiness works fundamentally. Expect major changes here!

Industrial Content

When we released Colony Survival back in 2017, we were thinking of a Viking-theme, roughly 800-900AD. 0.4.0 added crossbows and matchlock guns, and 0.7.0 further extended the timeline with a printing press. Were hoping to extend the tech tree into the Industrial Revolution. Steam engines, oil, electricity - these could offer plenty of interesting gameplay opportunities, and a reason for mega colonies.

These new technologies should also impact your guards. We'd like to add new types that use more complex weapons and ammo to deal more damage. Perhaps we'll even add new "weapon styles" like weapons that do area-of-effect damage, weapons that slow down monsters and weapons that do damage over time. Of course, to keep things balanced, these more powerful guards will also have to face new types of powerful monsters!

AI Colonies

AI Colonies have been a common suggestion, that weve often dismissed. We thought we couldnt make it work. After a lot of discussion, weve thought of a potential solution. Perhaps well add enemy colonies that can be attacked in the same tower defense way that monsters attack your colonies. Youll only be able to select which troops attack the enemy colony, and where youll spawn them. There wont be any complex siege-gameplay, just that. If thats something a majority of you is interested in, and we have finished all the other things on this list, we might add something like that! But consider it the least likely thing that youve read here.

Bedankt voor het lezen!

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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

In the past months, plenty of people have asked us for our roadmap. Weve linked them to a handful of Friday Blogs, but had to admit that we lacked a clear, updated roadmap. Weve decided to make one, and well release it next week. Its going to be featured on the official website - which coincidentally already had a roadmap! Its over three years old, and very outdated. Before replacing it, wed like to discuss the old roadmap with you point by point.



Weve got trading, decent co-op features, builders, removers and Steam Workshop support now! Blueprint builders arent there yet, but were still strongly considering them. Colony vs colony combat is a lot more distant and uncertain, and anti-griefing measures are difficult to implement. Making an area ungriefable allows players to trap each other, which is not an improvement.



Pretty much all the things mentioned here have been implemented :) Just no animals (except for the chicken coop) and were still generating the world from a 2D height map.



As mentioned before: no animals, but there is Steam Workshop support!

Many other things that werent on the roadmap have been implemented in the past three years, and new things have appeared in our list of future plans. Next week, a freshly updated roadmap will be presented!

Bedankt voor het lezen :)

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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!

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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!

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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

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!

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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

In previous blogs, weve been discussing our ideas and plans to overhaul some core elements of the current gameplay. Decoupling the size of the monster threat and the amount of required happiness items from the amount of colonists still sounds like a good idea to us, but as many of you have warned us, the change has to be implemented very carefully. It could easily backfire. Were still fine-tuning our plans!

In last weeks comments, we got multiple replies that suggested an interesting idea. They wanted to build wider. Instead of multiple small colonies, or a very tall one, a bigger colony with more land area. This requires a larger safe zone. There even was some suggestion that this was the case in the past. Although the way monsters spawn has changed a bit, it shouldnt be forcing players to build a more constrained colony?

Anyway, we like the idea of larger safe zones, allowing players to build larger colonies that still look good (meaning they dont rely on gigantic farm towers). But this also requires better, more efficient pathfinding, as it quickly gets very expensive when you increase the search radius. Potentially, we could limit colonists to not even search the whole colony for a bed - if a bed isnt in a decent range of their corner of the (large) colony, theyll start complaining.

It could also require a different way of fighting monsters, if the distance from the banner to the unsafe zone gets too large. Perhaps youll need to place monster-banners at the edges of your colony, perhaps youll have to build a monster-portal and a containment facility in the middle of your colony to unlock a much larger safe zone. There are lots of discussions about the future of the game happening these weeks! And we do listen to your input, so please keep sharing it :)

Bedankt voor het lezen!

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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

This part of the blog will concern wider societal problems that are certainly tied to us and our work indirectly, but are not directly related. If you strictly want game-related updates, stop reading here.

This week, we arrived in the second half of 2020. We dont want to adopt any controversial viewpoints, but I guess we can all be in agreement that up to this point, in regards to world events, the year has been intense, suboptimal and worrisome.

The contrast got particularly big when I visited the Waterloopbos last Sunday (see pic above). Large parts of the Netherlands lie below sea level, so they need decent protection or they will flood. Currently, we mostly rely on computer simulations to test old and new coast defenses, but in the 20th century we built physical scale models and tested them with real water. The Waterloopbos was one such place where these models were built. Heres Tom Scott visiting it right before Covid-19:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SFkoLYrJGCM
Apparently, according to Dutch law the government must ensure our water defenses are prepared for weather events that are so bad they only occur once every 10,000 years. At the Waterloopbos, technical experts made sure our country was ready for that.

I can be pretty skeptical about the Dutch government, its not perfect, but not once in my life have I feared flooding and after 27 years of inhabiting and roaming this country I havent got a single complaint in regards to water management. There have been a couple of instances where water rose to a high point and floodplains that seldomly saw action got filled, but that only increased my faith that things are managed decently.

When I walked through the Waterloopbos, I noticed a skilled level of engineering and knowledge of water that far exceeds my own. I have no reason to doubt them, and I dont know any Dutch person who does. Its not a politicized, partisan issue. Companies dont have to make statements about it. Flooding is bad, we need well-funded experts to stop it, and thats what was organized. And thus, we dont have to worry about it and can focus on other things, like developing games.

Thats the sanity that I was used to. We reach an agreement about which risks we want to prevent, we assign a bunch of experts to do so, problem solved, and we can all focus on our daily lives.

Things seem to be going a lot different in 2020. Perhaps its because weve grown older and its par for the course to realize things arent perfect. Perhaps were exaggerating problems that have always existed. But we feel like theres a wider consensus that things are going off the rails.



Covid-19 seems to be a massive problem. In Europe and the US, over 300,000 people have died, despite invasive and disruptive measures that heavily disrupt the economy and peoples well-being. This situation was not inevitable: countries like South Korea (282 deaths), Mongolia (0 deaths), Taiwan (7 deaths) and Vietnam (0 deaths) prove that its possible to successfully and quickly contain and prevent the further spread of the virus. Key ingredients seem to be a quick response time, the widespread adoption of facemasks and large amounts of testing.

The societal and economic destabilization, compounded by pre-existing problems, seems to have reached a boiling point in the US. Legitimate issues have led to peaceful protests, but also to violent riots, destruction and increased polarization and partisanship. To a lesser degree, these same issues are spilling over to Europe.

Were seriously worried about these issues. And were trying to look for a root cause. Strong systems dont collapse randomly: at first, they get hollowed out. Did our systems get hollow? Why? How hollow are they? Can they be fixed, and how? These are very complex questions, and we dont have all the answers. We dont believe any single person, party or movement has them either. Were probably going to require a whole lot of listening and talking, and as little partisanship as we can manage.

One of the things we believe is relevant is a transition from traditional media to new media. Releasing Colony Survival gave us some experience with that. If youre interested in hearing about that, well write about it in a future Friday Blog. But this is probably already getting quite controversial, so let us know how you feel about this blog first! Do you worry about the direction the world is heading in? Should we be saying anything about this subject at all? Tell us, here or on Discord!

Bedankt voor het lezen!

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"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:

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
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

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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

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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.

[h2]Covid-19[/h2]
We live in the northernmost part of the Netherlands, in a province called Groningen. Sadly enough, Covid-19 did arrive here, but the south of the Netherlands was hit way more severely. After the lockdown started, the amount of infections has dropped rapidly, and it seems the entire province of Groningen hasnt seen a single new confirmed case of Covid-19 in a week! [Scratch that we had one new case][Double-scratch seems to be two] New rules that were implemented during the lockdown are starting to be lifted again. We hope itll be possible to simultaneously get closer to pre-corona life and keep the virus under control. How are you holding up? Have the virus and the measures to prevent it disrupted life in the region where you live? Are things getting back to normal or is it getting worse?

Bedankt voor het lezen :D

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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.

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

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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

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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

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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

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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!

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

• 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, we wrote quite a bit about Corona. When I started writing that blog, we had just received news of the first infection in the Netherlands. Yesterday, the amount of officially confirmed infections here jumped from 38 to 82. During the same day, Italian authorities confirmed that the amount of mortalities there jumped from ~100 to 148 (with nearly 4000 infections). And just before writing this blog, Corona claimed its first deadly victim in the Netherlands.

Last weeks blog received quite a lot of reactions. Some people shared the same concerns, others thought people panicked way too much, and some wondered why a development blog about a game talked extensively about Corona.

To answer that last question: theres multiple reasons. Firstly, were Dutch while a large part of Colony Survival players seem to be located in North America. Europe was initially hit more severe than North America, and it seems that Corona got relatively little attention there while we were pretty concerned about it. We wanted to explain our local problems to people who didnt know about them yet. Since the last blog, Corona has spread further in the United States as well and it seems to be getting a lot more attention there as well now.

Secondly, were not a massive studio with offices spread around the world. We dont have separate departments where one focuses on game development and another focuses on practical stuff like health risks, human resources and risk management. Companies like Twitter have announced all kinds of measures to deal with Corona, and Im sure theyve got experts who are currently focused fulltime on this problem. Every hour we spend researching, thinking and talking about Corona is an hour where were not doing the same thing in regards to Colony Survival. And I can assure you that weve spent quite a couple of hours worried about Corona.

Were not worried too excessively - even if we personally get infected, itll probably act like a regular flu because were young and healthy. But this is the first time in our lives that we experience a epidemic like this, and the quickly rising number of deaths is pretty scary. Were worried about more vulnerable older relatives, and problems like hospitals getting too crowded to deal with both Corona and regular health concerns at once. So we expect Corona to stay around the coming weeks and months, which will probably have some impact on the development of Colony Survival. Well keep you updated!

Bedankt voor het lezen!

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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
Last Sunday, I was driving in a rented van listening to the radio - something I seldom do. The news came on and it reported about Corona in Northern Italy and a rapidly rising number of infections. We had seen pretty terrifying videos from China, but China is far away. Northern Italy is only 11 hours of driving removed from us here in the Netherlands. I got a bit concerned.

In the following days, reports of Corona infections came closer and closer to home - soon arriving in German regions close to the Dutch border. Last weekend, people in the south of the Netherlands have been celebrating carnaval, and there were stories of Corona-infected Germans participating there.

Yesterday evening, officials confirmed the news: a Dutch person has been infected in the south of the Netherlands. He and everyone who he has been in contact with will be isolated.

That might be the end of Corona in the Netherlands, but it seems unlikely. The amount of infections outside of China is growing exponentially, and a handful of people have quickly spread the disease to many hundreds in countries like Italy. That first Dutch carrier has probably already infected others - who have also infected others.

Which means that right now, we might be on the precipice of a massive wave of Corona in the Netherlands. But there are a lot of unknowns in regards to Corona. Whats the exact mortality rate? Do only people with severely weakened immune systems die, or is it capable of killing healthy and younger people as well? Are Western nations with modern healthcare systems able to nip this in the bud, or will this eventually infect a large part of the population? Relatively mild scenarios are possible, but more severe scenarios arent unrealistic either.

[At this exact moment we learned about the second confirmed Corona infection in the Netherlands. Its separate from the person in the south of the Netherlands, its somebody who had also visited northern Italy, and its a person who lives in Amsterdam]

Apart from the disease itself and its deadly consequences, theres another problem. Systems are being disrupted. Supermarkets already face shortages of products like disposable gloves, disinfectants and rice. One of the biggest Dutch online retailers has pulled its advertising and raised its prices, fearing disruptions in the supply line from China. And of course weve seen footage of deserted cities where everybody is forced to stay indoors.



So were a bit anxious about the near future. Should we stockpile food and other supplies - and if so, how much? Should we already try to self-isolate as much as possible? Theyre tough questions with unclear answers. Wed love to know how youre dealing with this problem! I hope you understand that this news has been a bit disruptive to our workflow.

Bedankt voor het lezen!

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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!

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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
One week ago we released 0.7.2! Luckily, it has caused no serious problems. Thanks to some helpful players on Discord we did figure out that the new handheld lantern colors didnt match the actual lantern color. This was fixed in a hotpatch released Saturday evening.
Since then, Zun noticed some other minor unintended effects and offsets in the lighting that were fixed in 0.7.2.2, released today.
Apart from that, Zun has done lots of playtesting and weve been thinking about how to start implementing the planned UI changes. Were looking forward to making it a lot more streamlined and intuitive!

Bedankt voor het lezen :)

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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!

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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!

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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
A couple of weeks ago, Zun started working on floodfill lighting for torches/lanterns. He got it to work pretty quickly nd decently. This week, he tried to apply floodfill lighting to the sun/moon. It has been highly problematic.

Torches only need to keep track of what's happening in ~16 blocks of range. That range is a lot bigger for the sun/moon. If you build a large roof 300 blocks above the ground, that should have an effect on how those blocks on the ground are lit. So every spot in the map has to check countless spots in a long range around it. We're not going to be able to make that work performance-wise in a reasonable timescale.

Zun did think of a feasible alternative. He's working on a system that checks the air blocks in the vicinity of the player. To what degree are they lit by the sun? Do they have a straight connection to the open sky? More air blocks with higher scores translate into a higher ambient light value - this is the value that determines how dark shadows are.

So when you're in the middle of the open desert, the ambient lighting will be pretty strong, meaning that shadows on the side of blocks won't appear as harsh. When you walk into a building, shadows will appear darker. And when you descent into a deep mine, shielded from the outside world by lots and lots of blocks, ambient lighting will be (nearly) nonexistent, making those mines truly dark. That should solve two of the biggest problems that currently exist with the lighting system!

Here's our rough roadmap for the next month:

• 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

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.

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

Most of the updates in 2017 added new content in the form of renamed and retextured old content. Copper ore was very similar to iron ore, crossbow guards function pretty much just like bow guards, and the tailor is just a reskinned workbench. To a degree, this is healthy game development. But you cant do it indefinitely. In the first half of 2018, we started focussing on new kinds of content. In January, 0.5.2 added stair blocks. At the end of March, 0.6.0 added builders and diggers. And in June, 0.6.3 improved the UI with for example a search bar in the stockpile and a decent loading screen.

After 0.6.3, we embarked on the long(er than expected) road to 0.7.0. We had very ambitious ideals where we wanted to give players the tools to utilize the entire world, instead of only the small area surrounding their first banner. But thats a huge overhaul which requires a lot of new features. This problem is explained pretty decently in Friday Blog 66 - "Roundness" in Game of Thrones.
Still, we managed to hit some major goals that year, as the video below from October 2018 demonstrates. We already had multiple colonies per player, updated world generation and vertical farms in there.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2t07K9_QuBs
2019

During the first half of 2019, we had to finish, test and polish 0.7.0. The beta slowly grew from small and closed to big and wide open. Many features that were in popular demand made it into the game back then: trading between colonies (even if theyre owned by different players), co-op sharing of the ownership of a single colony, quality-of-life improvements like auto-recruitment, etcetera.

At the end of July, we finally released 0.7.0. It resulted in a big spike of returning players, new attention and new sales. The Yogscast kept playing the game for many months. The overall response seems to be very positive!

We kept patching small problems and adding small improvements until the middle of September. Then, Zun travelled to Japan for his first big holiday in years. He returned to the Netherlands in the middle of October. He spent six weeks refactoring things behind the scenes, extending mod support and adding the Steam Workshop, allowing us to release that at the start of this month.

Were very happy with how things are going. Our community is still active and positive, the Steam Reviews are doing better than ever, and sales have been very decent in 2019. But that doesnt mean we believe the game itself is perfect at the moment. 0.7.0 added all kinds of new complex mechanics and features that arent always explained very well. Some of them rely on vague, unclear and ugly interfaces. We definitely want to fix that in 2020!

Young or Old?

In some aspects, 2019 felt like a contradictory mix of young and old. In 2017, we really lived in Emergency Mode; we didnt want to disappoint all of the new players and wanted to add as much as possible as soon as possible. Inevitably, things have cooled down a bit; emergencies cant last forever.

On one hand, Colony Survival feels pretty old. Since the Early Access release, three full Call of Duty titles and two full Assassins Creed games have been released. On the other hand, things feel brand new. Our LLC turned two only a couple of months ago. Were still only 24 25 and 26 years old, we didnt study game development or how to run a business, so were having to figure that out on the fly. Were rapidly learning new things about game design, programming and development.

In a couple of days, a new year and a new decade will start. We cant predict exactly what the future will hold, but were planning to keep working on Colony Survival for multiple years. Weve got many plans to make the game more fun, more beautiful, more complex nd simultaneously more accessible. When we leave Early Access, we want the game to be as good as we possibly can make it! We hope to be able to look back at this moment in a decade and see it as an awesome starting point - not a high point :D

Lots of Thanks

We couldnt have done this without you! Were very grateful for all the support weve received. Were going to forget people in this list but were going to try anyway. Many, many thanks to everybody: