You're welcome in our Discord! This week, we've continued our work on the new content for 0.5.0. Lanterns actually have textures now! We've been testing them and they function exactly like we wanted them to. In the past, we've added some colored blocks. The tailor and the workbench could be used to paint some blocks in a couple of specific colors, using pretty random items like coal. It wasn't very consistent, didn't provide many options and cluttered the crafting limits menu. The recipes of the old painted planks and carpet blocks will be removed when 0.5.0 releases, so craft them while you can! They will be replaced with a new dyer job. The dyer can use new herbs to produce dyes, and those dyes can be used to paint wood and carpet blocks in a wide variety of colors. The colored lanterns can be crafted with the same dyes. A new stonemason job will craft bricks and regular stone blocks in a couple of new patterns and natural colors. This way, all the cosmetic blocks will be easily accessible with two special jobs! The new herbs will be grown by three new herb farmers, comparable to the current flax farmer. The three different herbs will represent three primary colors. Mixing them allows you to produce a wide variety of paints. The seeds for the new herbs are obtained by unlocking new research.
The new textures in 0.5.0 required some updates to the way Colony Survival handles textures. While working on the code, we decided to fix some minor bugs. Normal, emissive and height maps should be slightly improved in the new update! Modders have asked us to improve the moddability (is that a word?) of the textures of the game. In 0.5.0, you should be able to add new textures without any coding! We've currently only got two crops in the game, flax and wheat. Three if you count trees. The code didn't allow us to easily add new crops, and that's definitely something we want to do! So we've improved that code as well.
Instead of merely working on code optimization, we've worked on something else that's a lot of fun and very exciting; tax! We haven't figured out the details of our new company yet. There are a lot of different ways to structure your company, pay your income and store money, and they've got a huge effect on the amount of tax you've got to pay. It's a difficult and boring job to figure this out, and we aren't familiar with it. But it is very important, so we enlisted the help of some great advisors! Finally, we've finished something that we promised months ago, but forgot to share it when it was done! Our new website is finally live. It has been live for a couple of weeks, but it went public during the sale and we forgot to mention it in the Friday Blog :) We promised we'd release 0.5.0 before Christmas, and next week is the last Friday before Christmas. We'll release it then, or perhaps slightly earlier! Bedankt voor het lezen!