Today, king of the Netherlands Willem-Alexander turns 51. On his birthday, a national holiday named Koningsdag, he decided to visit the city of Groningen. Groningen is the confusingly named capital of the province of Groningen, which we live in.

Our king has been running his colony with over 17 million colonists for nearly 5 years without a single frame drop or lag spike. I decided I had to investigate this and went to Groningen. I managed to take the photo seen above and we're studying it to see if we can extract further performance gains from it!


Pantoufleee's amazing and detailed world

Work on the improved server browser has continued this week. It's nearly done, but we're still working on some small issues like making sure all text can be translated to other languages properly.

The new server browser adds a lot of new features. You'll be able to sort by ping or by the amount of players. It directly shows how many colonists are present on a server, which players are online, and whether it uses mods. If it does, it'll show you which mods are active. Update 0.6.1 also allows you to set a password for your server.

We're pretty sure 0.6.1 will have been released next Friday, and hope to be able to push it live significantly earlier!

In the most recent Yogscast Colony Survival video, they figured out they could use the new builders and diggers to quickly trade resources. One player uses builders to place hundreds or thousands of excess blocks, and the other player uses diggers to transfer them to his or her stockpile. Great idea, but it immediately frustrated me because it could not be used to trade vital resources like food.

Which made us think of a simple solution. 100 bread + 1 crate = 1 physical food crate that can actually be placed in the world and used for storage or gifted to a friend. We'd love to add the idea, but are unsure what the new block should look like. Here are the constraints:

• It's going to be a simple 1x1x1 cube like nearly all other blocks
  
• It should be very different from regular crates, to make sure people don't mistakenly assume colonists can use it like they use other crates
  
• We'll add only one new texture for the food crate. We could potentially use other textures (like planks or bricks) for the bottom/top/sides.