Last week, I said there would be three different monsters in 0.4.0. Now, it's more accurate to say there are going to be nine monsters in the update!

There will be three different basic types: 100HP, 300HP and 500HP. Every basic type has three different versions: slow, medium and quick.

When you start a new colony, you will first encounter slow, weak monsters. You'll have to fight them with slingers, which only damage 50HP and so will need two shots. As your colony grows, the amount of monsters grows and two new types of monsters will spawn: quicker but weak monsters and slow but stronger monsters.

Later on, three new types will spawn: fast and weak monsters, "medium-medium" monsters and slow monsters with 500HP. Eventually, even the strongest monsters will attack you with high speed! By then, you really should have deployed crossbow and musket guards.

At first, weak and slow monsters will be the majority. This will evolve into a more evenly distributed mix. Eventually, for ultra large colonies, the majority of attackers will be strong and quick.


How the bannertool visualizes the safe area and the area where monsters spawn

There were two questions that we've received very often since the release of the game:
1.) How big is the area that the banner protects from spawning monsters?
2.) Can you increase it?

Those questions made a lot of sense and we've worked to visualize the answers in 0.4.0. In the image above, you can see the result. Equipping the bannertool will result in all blocks being shown in either green or red. The green area is safe and monsters spawn in the red area.

The 2nd question can be answered with "yes" now. The safe area in 0.4.0 is smaller than it was in 0.3.0 by default, but by doing research you can increase the safe area until it's a lot bigger than the default area from 0.3.0!

Balancing

Apart from adding the new monsters and the new visualization of the bannertool, we've spent a lot of time on balancing. Yesterday, the game was actually so hard that I could not stay alive without cheating! My production of bronze arrows could not keep up with the monsters.

We've worked on lowering the difficulty a bit, but update 0.4.0 is certainly going to be a lot harder than 'old' Colony Survival. And that's a good thing, because a lot of people complained that the game was too simple! And we fully agreed with them. We can't wait to hear about your experiences with 0.4.0! One thing we've done to slightly lower the difficulty is adding "punching". You can now punch monsters for 35HP of damage :)

There are still some small issues we want to work on before releasing the update Tuesday, October the 31st:

-Achievements. Easy to do. The achievements are not going to be very exciting, just some small ones like "reach # of item" and "unlock research", but they let us track how many players have reached a certain stage of the game.

-Priority targeting. A musketeer shouldn't waste his shot on a 100HP monster if there are 500HP monsters in range.

-Let players use the new weapons themselves. Slings, crossbows and muskets can't be used by players yet.

-Testing and balancing. We've changed a lot, so we've certainly introduced some new glitches and bugs. We're trying to find all of them before the release. We're also trying to balance the cost of production, expansions and research, the strength of guards and the difficulty of monsters. wemightstealthreleasethepasswordofthedevbranchondiscord

-Increasing colonist recruitment costs. We thought it was a good idea a couple of weeks ago, but the game has already gotten pretty complex and difficult with the new update. Not sure if we're going to be able to add it before the release date, but it's also less important now.

We hope to see you on Discord or on this same place next Tuesday when we release 0.4.0!

Thanks for reading this,
two proud inhabitants of a nation that declared independence from Spain 429 years ago