Friday Blog 195 - How Shall We Overhaul Crafting?

Last week, we wrote about the addition of longer crafting times to the dev build. This allows us to refactor crafting times. The total cost of daily necessities like food and ammo can’t change significantly (one day of food and ammo can’t cost two days of crafting). But permanent improvements like job blocks can be changed to be significantly more expensive in terms of crafting time. Currently, job blocks often have trivial crafting requirements and are made in seconds. Completing a job block should become more of a valuable accomplishment, especially the more advanced ones.

Currently, most job blocks can be made by the colonist operating the workbench, and by the player. The player has 0 crafting time. Nobody is going to wait 120 seconds for a new furnace if such an alternative is available. Should we remove a lot of recipes currently available for “player crafting”? Should there be an alternative “job block crafter” that takes a lot of recipes from the workbench?

Because we can increase the crafting time, we can remove some “ingredient items”. Instead of a job block taking 8 seconds to craft + copper nails/tools/parts that require 22 seconds to craft, the job block itself can just take 30 seconds + “pure” copper. But the workbench currently mostly makes these ingredient items and job blocks. Is it wise to remove all of these from the workbench?

While redesigning the crafting recipes and ingredients like this, it’s smart to keep our planned changes to resource distribution in mind. We’ve been thinking of the details there more clearly this week. When we started Colony Survival, we were thinking about roughly the Viking Era, 700-1000AD. With later updates, we added things like crossbows and the printing press, extending the timeline to ~1600AD.

Now that we’re thinking about making trade between colonies a more important part of the gameplay, we’ve tried to figure out when this became important in real life. It turns out long distance trade is already crucial when you’re producing bronze, because tin is a very rare resource. But civilizations started smelting bronze in 2000BC, nearly 3000 years before the start of CS’s current timeline!

Bronze is one of the earliest unlocks in CS. We don’t want second colonies to become important so soon in the gameplay. Do we “skip” it? Do we think of an unrealistic alternative (like tin being available everywhere)? Or do we extend the timeline to significantly before 2000BC, adding gameplay, progress and unlocks to the Stone Age? But which interesting, significant progression happened in the Stone Age, that we can utilize in Colony Survival? Domestication and selective breeding of crops and livestock seemed to have important consequences, but we can’t easily put that into the game.

We haven’t drawn any definitive conclusions yet, so let us know your opinion! How far back in time should CS start? How realistic should things be? Leave a comment here on Steam, or share your opinion on Discord!

Bedankt voor het lezen :D

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