Yesterday, we released update 0.5.1. It doesn't change or add anything major, but it changes a lot of little things. Berry farmers will replant your berry bushes in a slightly different pattern. The carpet achievement now counts white carpet. The loading screen often froze for a couple of seconds, and it should have stopped doing that. The old red and black planks that were removed in 0.5.0, are now available for the dyer to craft. Translations have been updated - thanks translators! There's an in-game changelog if you'd like to know more.

Stairs

Last week, we described how we wanted to add stairs. They'd look like "quarter blocks" that would add a step in between blocks. This week, we tested how it would look in-game, and we're pretty happy with the result! We hope to add the feature to the game in one or two weeks.

The work-in-progress block you can see in the screenshots doesn't have textures yet, and we want to add some simple normal mapping before releasing them. We also want to make the block available in different colors, like white, black, grey and brown.

We noticed that the blocks were pretty suitable as a way to add more detail to buildings. You can use them as windowsills, baseboards or crown moldings. That's why we want to add some variations of the blocks that can be used in corners.



Addendum

Last week's blog received a lot of comments, both here on Steam, on Reddit, on Facebook, on Discord and by mail. The overwhelming majority was positive, but it also raised some questions. I'll try to answer most of them here!

Will the new world in 0.7.0 be randomly generated?

Yes. There are some overarching parameters to make sure the tropics are in the center and the arctic is at the very edge of the world, but it's not a pre-rendered world that's the same every time. It'll be even more random than the current world generation.

What happens at the edges of the world in 0.7.0?

Infinite seas.

Why don't you visualize building blueprints like the Construction Mod does?

We looked at it and discussed it, and their solution is probably the best one! Thanks for reminding us.

How about the Mac port?

We hope to release that as well in 2018!

When will monsters finally start breaking down your walls?

This is a suggestion we hear pretty often and we've thought about it a lot. We might add some new monsters that can climb up walls or even flying monsters, but we're very hesitant regarding destructive monsters.

It would be awesome if monsters could attack your castle like humans do. Breach walls in strategic locations, place ladders, fill moats, etcetera. But Colony Survival is not a regular RTS where you place predefined buildings, walls and gates. Everything is blocks, and while it might be obvious for a human which blocks are part of a defensive wall and which blocks are part of a farm, this isn't clear to the AI.

And while most people build pretty realistic medieval structures, others build completely unpredictable structures. Floating colonies, skyscrapers, underground halls... It's very hard to write a "siege AI" that makes the right decisions regarding wall-destruction, moat-filling and tunnel-digging.

We could add "simple destructive monsters" that mostly move in a straight line from spawn to banner, filling any moats they encounter and destroying all walls, but we don't feel like this would be a great improvement. The ability to 'steer' monsters towards certain gates and mazes is part of the appeal of Colony Survival. Spending months of development time on a feature that completely removes that is probably not a wise decisions...

Are you going to allow us to assign beds to colonists to fix "the bed problem"?

We regularly hear complaints about 'the bed problem'. It involves colonists going to the 'wrong' beds. One of the main causes is the fact that colonists search for the closest bed in a straight line without calculating the length of the path required to get there. We might change this in the future, but calculating hundreds of path is obviously more straining for your hardware than just calculating straight lines.

Multiple people have asked us to add a tool that can be used to assign colonists to specific beds. We've thought about it, but found it hard to envision how it would work exactly. Only big colonies with hundreds of colonists encounter this problem. Manually assigning all of those colonists one by one to a bed will be a very tedious task.

Before we think of adding a tool like this, we'd like to add more and better ways to manage your colonists. A menu that allows you to prioritize certain jobs, and to see which jobs are filled and which are not, is sorely needed.

A different solution is adding beds that are restricted to certain jobs. Black beds for miners, green beds for farmers, red beds for guards. It would allow you to build barracks for your guards near the walls without those beds getting claimed by other colonists.

We'd love to hear your input. Do you encounter this problem as well? What do you think of the solutions above?



We hope we've cleared things up. If you've got any questions or other suggestions, we'd love to read them in the comments!

Bedankt voor het lezen!