Last week, we were talking about the planned overhaul. We were very enthusiastic, but we got quite some skeptical replies! We think we understand your concerns, and we hope we can convince you that we can prevent the feared issues from arising.

We believe Colony Survival is the most fun when you grow pretty large. Dont stop at 20 colonists, recruit 200. Or 800. Or 1500! Of course, the game has to stay challenging, so the difficulty of the problems you face scale with you as your colony grows. Monsters keep becoming more numerous and stronger, youll need to produce more and more food, and overpopulation creates growing unhappiness that needs to be countered with happiness items.

But that means were punishing you for the thing were trying to encourage - growth. Currently, players are motivated to stay as small and as efficient as possible. Colonists have pretty high upkeep costs in the form of monsters, food and happiness items, so an inefficient colonist is a dangerous liability for the rest of the colony. In last weeks blog, we said we wanted to make things like textiles significantly more expensive. This would make a lot of current colonies unsustainable, with only the most efficient colonies surviving. This is not our goal!

While recruiting colonists is punished, there is another form of progress in the game that is actually extremely cheap. There is no durability or scientific regression in Colony Survival. Weapons and job blocks are usable for eternity, scientific unlocks will stay available and/or active until the end of time. While an inefficient colonist is a bad investment, these items and unlocks have infinite time to make a profit. No upkeep, no depreciation.

This means that raising the upkeep costs of colonists can literally make the game unplayable, but raising the cost of these eternal improvements could merely make the game slow. And theres a great way to boost your production in Colony Survival - recruit more colonists! Thats exactly what we want to encourage.



Currently, players will spend most of their time balancing things like the production of ammo, food and happiness items - the costs of having colonists. Unlocking things in the tech tree, or producing eternal items like weapons and job blocks, dont require much items or time. A matchlock gun gets crafted in roughly 10 seconds, perhaps less. Im not an expert, and it probably varied from gunsmith to gunsmith, but Im pretty sure it took people a lot longer than that to craft a gun in medieval times, without machine tools or similar modern improvements.

So instead of having very high variable costs (punishing players for recruiting colonists and not being very efficient) and very low fixed costs (making it possible to complete the important part of the tech tree quite easily with only ~100 colonists), we want to overhaul the game to be more like the opposite. Crafting advanced items and unlocking end-game content should be a very substantial task that requires a huge colony with many workers, but these individual workers shouldnt be too burdensome.

This shouldnt exactly make the game easy or way less challenging, but we believe setting up large scale production is a more interesting challenge than navigating the very unintuitive happiness menu and making exactly the right choices or your colony fails.

We hope this is a better explanation, and we hope youre also enthusiastic. If you are, or arent, please let us know in the comments or on Discord!



In the meanwhile, Zun has been continuing his work on improving the UI. He has added some nice small improvements that were pretty common requests: (not released yet)

• You can edit existing diplomacy rules
  
• You can close the quickstart menu with a close button instead of having to press F1 (was often problematic for Mac users)
  
• You can delete outdated worlds in the load menu now
  
• An in-game converter than can change SP worlds to co-op worlds and vice versa