Friday Blog 262 - Update 0.15 Released - Top-Down View And Blueprints

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!

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