You're all welcome in our Discord!

We've been working on lots of different minor issues this week. There were some issues with torches on certain hardware, and the servers had a problem on Linux. Those were fixed in 0.4.4, released Tuesday.

We've nearly finished 0.4.5 and are planning to release it tomorrow. The single most noticeable change is autosaving for non-block data! Blocks were the only thing getting saved during gameplay. All the other thing, like jobs, were only saved when exiting a world or quitting a server. If your game crashed, it wouldn't properly save, causing you to lose most of your progress since the moment you loaded the world. The game now autosaves every 5 minutes by default, mostly solving this problem! Of course, progress since the last autosave is lost on a crash. Server hosts can change this setting in the game files. Here's the full changelog for 0.4.5.

In the coming week, we hope to finish patching minor issues and start working on new content again! We've had time to think about the next couple of big updates and we've decided on a schedule that we're very enthusiastic about. We've still got some big questions regarding 0.7.0, and we'd love to have your input!

0.5.0 - The Christmas Update

We hoped to be able to release colonists that can remove blocks before Christmas, but that currently seems unrealistic. We've heard a lot of players demanding new building materials, and we do agree that current building materials are limited. We'd love to add a couple of new ones before Christmas.

A potential new job would be the stonemason. He could craft some different kinds of stone bricks. We're also planning to add new herbs/flowers like flax in multiple colors. These flowers could be grown by colonists, and used to paint planks/bricks/carpet in a wide range of different colors.

Another thing I'm really looking forward to is lanterns. It's going to be a full block that emits lights in all directions. We want to give you the ability to craft the lantern in the same variety of colors as other blocks, so you can light your colony in the color of your own choice!


A potential new block

0.6.0 - Diggers & Builders

The long awaited colonists that can place and remove blocks. To reduce the waiting time, we'll probably release the update in parts. For example;
-0.6.0: Colonists that can remove blocks
-0.6.1: Colonists that can build simple shapes like walls and floors
-0.6.2: Colonists that can build custom blueprints
-0.6.3: Colonists that can build blueprints from the Steam Workshop

0.7.0 - Enhanced world generation, boats and useful biomes

Currently, the world contains a lot of different biomes, but they're barely explored by players and they don't have a significant purpose. We'd like to give players the ability to start a second (and a third, and a fourth, etc!) colony in a different biome and gather new resources.

For example, we could restrict precious resources like diamonds to mines in the arctic area, sugar and coffee beans to the tropics, tobacco to the "New World", and silk to the "Far East".

A thing we're not sure about and like to request your help for, is the purpose of these items. What's the use of diamonds, sugar and silk going to be for your colony? We want to avoid modeling stats like colonist happiness for now. We've been thinking of "upper class colonists" who are necessary for special jobs and who require luxury goods. But what are these "upper class colonists" going to do? If you've got a good idea, please share it with us! The plans for 0.7.0 are far from definitive, so every idea regarding the purpose of resources from far-off biomes is welcome.

Currently, our world generation relies on a 2D height map. This causes the world to be fairly boring. A certain other voxel game that includes mining & crafting has a way more interesting world. We'd like to improve our world generation to make exploration a lot more intriguing!

To spare player's feet we'd like to add boats that can be used to explore continents more quickly.

We hope to be able to show you some progress on the Christmas update next week.

Bedankt voor het lezen!