We’d like to invite all of you to join the Official Colony Survival Discord! We’ve got multiple text channels to discuss everything related to Colony Survival. You can join our Discord by clicking here.

You might have noticed in the title that Science Packs have been renamed to Science Bags. We’ve thought about the Technologist, the colonist who makes Science Bags. What does he actually do? He gathers items that the Scientist can use to do research. How does he store those items? A bag is a solution that is pretty appropriate to the period, so we’ve decided to use those. The Tailor can make bags now, and the Technologist crafts them into Science Bags! The Technologist is now available on the 0.3.0-branch. WARNING: The 0.3.0-branch might break your savegames, especially if you go back to 0.2.7. New challenge: start from scratch, don’t use cheats, and craft 250 Life Science Bags and 250 Basic Science Bags in the shortest time possible!


The Technologist (left) and the Tailor (center) working together

We’ve started to work on the Scientist. The Technologist has a pretty standard job. It’s similar to many other crafting jobs. But the Scientist’s job is unique and requires a new interface. You’ll be able to choose technologies to research from a tabbed menu that’s accessible from the menu that currently contains the stockpile and crafting interface. We’ve redesigned that menu this week to allow for more tabs – science first, and later we could add for example a diplomacy or a colonists/jobs menu.

This week we also realized that we’ll have to change how mining works in the game. Currently, all ores are available on the bottom layer of the world. But we want to add two new ores in the second phase of the science update: saltpeter, for gunpowder, and galena, a source of lead and silver. The bottom layer of the world is already very crowded, containing iron, coal, gold, clay and gypsum ore. Adding galena and saltpeter to that same layer will be too confusing, certainly for new players. So we’ve decided that we want to spread the ores over multiple layers. The first layer will contain coal and iron ore, and a couple of blocks deeper there will be ores like clay and gypsum, etcetera.


The bottom layer is becoming a bit cluttered, and isn't ready for galena and saltpeter

Mod news: Scarabol has added colonists that can build to the game! There are multiple blueprints available, like walls, gates and houses. Place the block, and a colonist will go there and build the blueprint! You can watch a demo video of the mod here, and download the mod from GitHub here!


A builder working in the Colony Construction Mod

The ColonyPlusPlus team is adding more and more anti-griefing measures to their mod. Anti-griefing measures like this are server-side only, so you won’t have to download the mod to play on servers that use it to protect you from griefers.

Thanks a lot to the mod developers for creating these awesome additions, and thanks for reading this blog!