During last week's Friday Blog, version 0.7.0.123 was the most recent version of the game. Currently, the main branch is at 0.7.0.127! Firstly, the new broken achievements are fixed. You should be able to unlock all achievements related to 0.7.0 now. Secondly, we've patched some older achievements. The bloomery and the kiln were merged in the tech tree, just like the health improvements. This broke the achievements related to them. Everything should work as intended now! In last week's blog, we discussed issues regarding beds and the way colonists selected them. A fair share of players complained that colonists chose distant beds for unclear reasons. We explained the semi-broken way bed selection works (straight line through walls instead of actual path) and hoped this could help players solve their bed problems. But it turns out that is not the entire story. The bed selection in 0.7.0 was worse compared to 0.6.3. It was caused by a simplification that could easily lead to weird choices. So, that has been fixed. Bed selection still isn't perfect, but it shouldn't be incomprehensibly bad either. For those who had "bed problems": please let us know if you notice a difference!
When we released Colony Survival, wheat and flax were probably the only crops. It made sense that they required wheat seeds and flax seeds. In the past two years, we added plenty of other plants. Especially 0.7.0 adds a huge amount of crops: cabbages, barley, rice, sugar cane, tomatoes, potatoes and many more. In 0.1.0, wheat seeds were an important part of your economy. But we didn't think it would be fun to have to worry about dozens of different seeds in 0.7.0. So, we decided to remove the necessity for seeds entirely. You're still able to purchase them from the shop, but for example unlocking bread production doesn't grant 400 wheat seeds anymore, as it did in the past. This had one important negative side effect that we didn't think about: players are no longer able to revive a colony that lost its food supply by growing and harvesting their own wheat. We received some serious complaints about that, and decided to release a simple patch: the first five colonists are free. Set them to work as berry gatherers and you'll be able to restart a fallen colony! It's not a major change to the game, but it should be very useful in specific situations. Apart from these noticeable changes, there's a longer list of smaller improvements that might not affect gameplay directly but are still important. Some changes help with debugging, others improve networking. The full changelog can be found on Discord or GitHub.
In the middle of September, Zun is going to embark on his first big holiday since the release of Colony Survival more than two years ago. He'll be going to Japan for a month. While he's gone, it'll be very hard to release updates. We're planning to release some useful new features before Zun's holiday. One feature that we expect to be finished in time is a "Job Priority Menu". Currently, if you've got multiple unfilled jobs, it's impossible to determine which one will be picked by a newly recruited colonists. That's pretty unhandy in general, but can be dramatic in certain situations, especially when your colony is struggling, you've lost a bunch of colonists and you desperately need more guards or farmers. The Job Priority Menu will by default prioritize these jobs above for example scientists, and allow players to tweak it. Another thing we'd love to add is decent statistics, so players can better understand and predict what they need. We're planning to combine these statistics with the science menu, requiring for example 1000 bronze arrows to be fired before you can unlock the crossbow. We're unsure if this can be finished before Zun leaves though, so it might not be added until after he's back! Bedankt voor het lezen :) Reddit // Twitter // YouTube // Website // Discord