Colony Survival News

Culling frozen right in front of Lagoon's castle - invisible terrain does not get rendered

Colony Survival was a Daily Deal last Sunday. For an entire week, the game is 50% off! This is the moment to purchase the game for yourself, to recommend it to your friends - or to gift it to them!

Until this update, the game rendered everything the camera pointed at. But of course, visually rendering things that are not visible is a waste of computing power and energy.

So, if you can determine what is invisible to the player and skip that in the rendering process, you get serious optimization benefits. Except… that you kinda have to render the world to determine what is visible and what’s invisible.

But, this “test render” doesn’t have to be as detailed as the render output you actually see as a player. You can skip textures and lighting, you can do it in a lower resolution, and you can even combine individual voxels into larger blocks in the distance,

So this is what Zun has been working on these past few weeks. A quick “test render” determines what is invisible and excludes that from the “final render”, which is rendered in full resolution and detail. This process is called “culling”.

Correctly implementing this without glitching was quite difficult. There are a lot of edge cases. What if a hill isn’t visible - but the shadow it casts is? Solutions had to be found for all these problems.

And Zun succeeded in that! Culling seems to work in all situations. If you’re standing in an open field without player-built structures, it doesn’t have a very significant performance impact. But where fields of crops are hidden behind walls, castles or hills, or when you're inside underground colonies, or when walking through dense cities with twisty streets, there is a very serious performance improvement!

The "Culling Texture" right in front of Lagoon's towers

Optimization is always good, but this new feature is a necessary prerequisite before we can work on two other things we’d like to add in the future:

1. Cave generation. They cost performance compared to the flat, “2D” terrain we currently have, but now culling will make exploring and settling them actually less performance intensive than walking outdoors.
   
2. More meshes for wild plants and flowers, to make the world and terrain generation more interesting and diverse. They cost performance too, but if they’re culled when not visible, their impact is greatly reduced.
   

These will not arrive in 0.15.2 though. That update, which will be released in a couple of weeks, will focus on the “Oddity Press”, which gives access to a lot of decorative content, and some UI enhancements.

If you want to experiment with the details of culling, we have some tools available for that. Go to Gameplay Settings and enable developer buttons. Press F5 to display a performance graph. Press F6 to show dev features. There, you can enable and disable culling, show the “Culling Texture”, and freeze culling.

Is this causing visual glitches or performance issues for you? Running into other problems? Please let us know in the comments or on Discord.

Veel plezier met 0.15.1!

Reddit // Twitter // YouTube // Website // Discord

Colony Survival is currently 25% off until 5 January!

Welcome to the last blog of 2025! We want to start out with a heartfelt thank you to all our readers. To everybody who bought the game and has made it possible for us to be dedicated to this project full-time. To everybody who left feedback, wrote a Steam Review, recommended the game to friends, shared a blueprint, uploaded a world, created a mod. We literally could not have done this without you! We wish you all a very Merry Christmas and an amazing 2026.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S9mLnbCWU18
2025 saw a lot of work on polish, quality-of-life, accessibility and scaffolding that we can continue to build on for years to come. The year opened with a new collaboration with Allcorrect, which helped us translate the entire game into a bunch of major languages. We released 0.13, which added explosives and rubble that's visible every time you remove a block. 0.14 made paths relevant: blocks now affect the movement speed and pathfinding of colonists. It also gave colonists and monsters the ability to move diagonally.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QgYrI0gWX3g
The biggest update of the year was released less than a month ago: 0.15. It added the top-down view and blueprints. We have many plans to expand on this in the future!


We’ve already started working on 0.15.1. The main gameplay addition will be the “Oddity Press”. It will work in a similar way as the windmill: it can craft items without a colonist being present. But where the windmill is aimed at producing functional blocks for the early game, the Oddity Press is aimed at totally non-functional items. It will produce tables, chairs, desks, decorative items and furniture without any clear gameplay advantage, but that will be crucial to anyone trying to build a lively, immersive world.

The most popular mods are focused on delivering such items to players, and it’s still a very common request by players. With the new blueprint systems, it has become a lot easier to spread such decorations throughout the world.

We’re planning to organize another builder’s contest, focused on blueprints. But we will wait until the Oddity Press is finished and available to all!


Zun’s working on occlusion culling. Currently, all objects in the direction the camera aims at are rendered. But a bunch of these are often not actually visible to the player, like farms hidden behind buildings or hills. If you can figure out which of these are invisible before the scene is rendered, then you can just skip these objects completely. This has large performance benefits - especially for underground colonies.

Such techniques are essential if you want to render large, complex cave systems. Currently, the world generation doesn't render caves - but we’re definitely hoping to add them later!

Sadly, caves won’t be a 2026 Q1 thing. But the Oddity Press and new builder’s contest are definitely planned for that :D

Hele Fijne Kerstdagen en een Gelukkig Nieuwjaar!

Reddit // Twitter // YouTube // Website // Discord

https://youtu.be/QgYrI0gWX3g
For a quick and clear overview of all new features, read Blog 261

Ladies and gentlemen - welcome to a new era.

After more than a decade of development, this first-person strategy game finally acquired an (optional!) new perspective, the traditional view for strategy games: top-down.

This changes everything.

Think about real life. What jobs match strategy games the best? Architects and generals. But their main design work doesn’t happen on the frontline or in the middle of a construction site. It happens at a headquarters or office, standing next to a big table filled with maps, or a desk full of blueprints. This helps them to get an overview and see the whole picture, to make adjustments in a dozen different spots without physically travelling to a dozen different spots.


Colony Survival faced a bottleneck. We couldn’t make the game much more complex without making it too annoying and frustrating to deal with for a lot of players. But with the top-down view, we’re giving maps to generals and clear blueprints to architects. Things become easier to comprehend and to manage - which gives us new room for added complexity.


To start using the top-down view, complete the brand-new option in the tech tree: the Overseer’s Desk. It’s a desk full of maps and blueprints that can be used to activate the top-down view.

The buttons on the right allow you to adjust the view. The house icon activates X-Ray Vision, which filters out all blocks above a certain height. When it’s on, the blue arrows can be used to adjust that height. The lightbulb toggles the lamp on your cursor on and off. The icon with the monster allows you to see the area where monsters spawn.


The buttons at the bottom give you access to the command tool, the banner tool, and the tools related to blueprints. The one on the left is the “Scanner Tool” - it allows you to select a building in your world and turn it into a blueprint that can be used again and again.

On the right is the “Placer Tool”. It opens your list of blueprints, and allows you to select them and put them into your world. The “Import Blueprint” button is greyed out by default, but lights up when you’ve copied a string of characters that works as a blueprint.


To generate these blueprint-codes yourself, just press the “share” button. We’ve already got a channel on our Discord called Blueprints Collection, which is full of codes generated by beta testers. Feel free to share your best blueprints there, with some screenshots! Or grab the ones that others have produced. If you'd really like to avoid Discord, there's also a Steam Forum with the same purpose.

Blueprints work just like other construction areas. Place job spots around the area, and construction workers will come to build the blueprint block by block.


We'll highlight two specific blueprints. The first one is Darkwind Gatehouse by Acapla. It can be seen in the image above. It's part of a set of blueprints related to walls, and they all fit together. The blueprint-code is:

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

In contrast to the traditional and rustic Darkwind Gatehouse is the Piedmeutian Style Low-Income Housing Unit. Do you need a convenient rectangle to house your colonists or shelter your jobblocks? Build one of these - or a dozen! Credits go to the designer, Fenn.

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

Apart from the top-down view and blueprints, 0.15 has also replaced the old meshes for the merchant hub, grocery store, tool shop and sacred failsafe with new ones. The new ones are a lot more detailed, and larger too.

Wherever you’ve placed them already in your world, the old ones will remain. But as soon as you remove them and add them to your inventory, they will be converted to the new mesh!

Some other items, like wheat and berry bushes, have also received a fresh coat of paint.

Talking about painting - the paint system has been expanded! Fences, pillars and architraves are now paintable. Painted planks have also received an upgrade.

Last but certainly not least - plaster is back in the game!

Enjoy 0.15, and let us know how you feel about these changes :D We'll read all the comments here and we're monitoring Discord actively. Thank you beta testers!

Reddit // Twitter // YouTube // Website // Discord

Update 0.15 is available for a public test right now! The core new feature is the top-down perspective. Unlock the Overseer’s Desk in the tech tree, place it in your colony, and click on it to switch to this perspective.

From the top-down view, you get access to the new Blueprints feature. There is a “Scanner” which allows you to select and save parts of your world. Right next to it is a “Placer” that opens a list of all saved blueprints that you can place back into your colony. A placed blueprint will start a construction project, and you need to assign construction workers to build the project.

Blueprints can also be exported to codes, or imported from them. This allows you to easily share buildings between worlds, with friends or with strangers.

To help navigate indoor and underground spaces from this new perspective, we’ve also added X-Ray vision as a toggleable option. When activated, it will make everything above the height of the Overseer’s Desk invisible. But it also comes with buttons that allow you to increase or decrease the height of this “slice”.


Like the mill we added last year, the Overseer’s Desk is a lot larger than one voxel. We like the consequences of that size, both visually and in terms of gameplay. So we’ve redesigned a bunch of meshes with this new philosophy. The merchant hub, grocery store, tool shop and sacred failsafe were all tiny and bland. They are now much larger and more lively and unique. This will not affect these blocks when they are pre-existing in your world, but each one placed while playing 0.15 will have the new shape.

That’s not the only visual change! The paint system has been expanded. Pillars, architraves, fences and planks are now all paintable. The berry bush switched from a textured voxel to a 3D mesh. Wheat and barley have new meshes. And last but not least: plaster has made it back into the game!


All these features should be working. The main things that are lacking are translations and controller support. But of course, we can’t test the blueprints and the X-Ray vision in all circumstances. And that’s why we need you! Have fun trying out all the new features of 0.15, and if you notice anything weird, let us know. We’ll be monitoring all channels, but Discord and the comments under this blog get checked most frequently. And apart from bug reports, general feedback about the update is also appreciated!

To get access to the beta:
- Right-click Colony Survival in your Steam Library, choose “Properties”
- Go the “Betas” tab, enter the code pleaseshareyourfeedback
- Select the 0.15.0 branch

The game will show the version number in the bottom-right corner in the main menu.

Have fun, and pleaseshareyourfeedback :D

Reddit // Twitter // YouTube // Website // Discord

All the progress talked about in this blog concerns the unreleased development branch and is not publicly available yet

In the last blog we announced “world slicing”, the ability to “cut the roof off” and see inside of buildings at the level of the “top-down trigger”. It’s a fun experiment, but because it’s just on one level, it’s not very practical. Many buildings have floors on wildly different levels, and it also makes it hard to see into underground spaces.

Zun has added a major improvement to this feature: you can now determine the height at which the world is “sliced open”! It’s a radical new way of looking at your colony. Previously invisible things become very visible. I’m certain this will affect how players build their worlds and I’m looking forward to seeing that impact. Screenshots in this blog should give you an idea of how it currently looks in-game.


And as you can see in these screenshots, the UI is a bit mediocre and work-in-progress. We still have to work on this before we can release the top-down feature.

The UI in general is a bit of a struggle for us. To make multiplayer functional, there has to be coordination between the “client” running on your local desktop and a server that can be anywhere in the world. Our singleplayer and multiplayer modes work nearly identically, so when you’re playing offline, there is still a server-client split. Both run separately on your local machine. This makes development of certain features, like UI, more difficult than developing for a purely local, undivided, singleplayer game.


We also have extensive mod support built into the game. This means that a mod can tell the game to render special buttons and menus for that mod. Taking all of this together means that developing our UI is more complicated than it seems at first glance.

This is one of the reasons why our UI is fairly barebones and primitive in general. We didn’t like engaging with the UI system, and often chose to add new UI elements in a janky manner. Which just made it even harder to engage with in the future.

The new top-down view both requires UI elements, and gives us a lot of opportunities for new ways of engaging with the world. But our “technical debt” is catching up with us.


So we’re planning to release the top-down view with slightly less features than hoped for, and our next big project is refactoring our UI system. Making it work more elegantly behind the scenes, and improving the in-game appearance as well. The goal is that it should be easier to add new, functional, good-looking UI systems when the refactor is done.

Another technical obstacle that Zun worked on this month: rotating and mirroring blueprints. They’re pretty essential features, and fairly easy to get to work for most blocks, but of course, there are extremely tedious edge cases. In recent years we’ve added pretty complex “adaptive” blocks like the dynamic quarterblocks and crown moulding. Making sure that all their variants are rotated and mirrored correctly was quite the struggle! But Zun did manage to make it work.


While Zun has been fighting these complex technical problems, I was working on replacing more old meshes. The primitive, small mesh for the sacred failsafe has been replaced by the massive statue of a divine protector. And berry bushes, previously a square block with textures, has now gotten its own 3D vertex-painted mesh, like many jobblocks and other objects in the game.

The new mesh of the berry bushes randomly rotates to make fields of them look more organic. Personally, I was surprised by how well it looked! We’re thinking of designing more plants in this style, and making them part of the world generation.


Bedankt voor het lezen :D

Reddit // Twitter // YouTube // Website // Discord