While testing all the new jobs and items in 0.4.0, we noticed how annoying it could be to watch your colonists craft non-vital items while you were quite literally dying for a bow and/or arrows. Since releasing the update last week we've heard that many of you encountered exactly the same problem. This issue became our highest priority and we just released 0.4.1, a small update that includes different priorities for crafting recipes!

Every recipe can be assigned a low (+), medium (++) or high (+++) priority. Once they've reached the crafting limit of the high priority crafting recipes, they turn their attention to the ++ crafting recipes. Finally, they craft the recipes in the lowest category. It works pretty intuitively with only one caveat: colonists can't work on high priority crafting recipes when they lack ingredients, even if they themselves can craft the ingredients. The default priorities solve this problem by assigning arrows and crossbow bolts a high priority, arrow ingredients a medium priority, and all other items a low priority.

The crafting limits were always pretty confusing. Sometimes colonists crafted way more items than required to meet the limit. This happened because the limit was multiplied by the amount of items crafted in the recipe. For example, the bronze arrow recipe crafts 5 bronze arrows. This means that with a 200 item limit, colonists would craft 200 x 5 = 1000 arrows. This was totally not intuitive, and we've fixed this issue as well. With the most recent update, colonists will actually properly obey the limits! When you've got a lot of colonists working the same job simultaneously, they might still overshoot the limit slightly :)


The new interface for job blocks. There's a space that shouldn't be there in front of the last sentence in the tooltip, it should be gone in the update that just went live

While teaching the colonists how to prioritize certain recipes, we also taught the guards to prioritize certain monsters. In version 0.4.0, guards targeted monsters pretty randomly. With update 0.4.1, they've learned not to waste strong but expensive missiles on weak monsters. For example, guards with matchlock guns now strongly prefer to shoot monsters with a full 500HP health bar.

In theory, this should increase your nightly damage output without any extra cost, so it should make the game slightly easier. But the effect does depend on the mix of guards you've got and the mix of monsters that attacks you, and it's impossible the test the new update on all possible combinations. If the update has a weird effect on your guards and monsters, please notify us!

Another important update this week is the release of the Colony Survival Dedicated Server as a Tool on Steam, to be used through SteamCMD, the command-line version of the Steam client. It has three main benefits:

1.) You can now run the server on a 'real' server without a monitor
2.) You don't need to run Steam anymore to host a server
3.) You can automate launching and stopping servers


Two examples of mysterious floating objects, captured on film just before they cloaked themselves again

We've started receiving more and more reports of people encountering mysterious floating objects. Some people have speculated that they might be alien gods. Apparently, they're benevolent and guide people towards great spots to build colonies.

Personally, we suspect they're chunks rendered with errors because the chunk has been loaded, unloaded and loaded again too quickly. It seems to happen more often when people fly (rapidly). Unloading and loading the area with the mysterious objects seem to fix the problem in all reported and encountered cases. You can do this by either moving away until the area is outside your viewing range, or by exiting to the main menu and loading the world again. We're trying to fix the problem entirely but haven't succeeded yet!

If you read all of this, you're more than welcome in our Official Discord!

Bedankt voor het lezen!