Friday Blog 263 - Into the Future
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!
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