Friday Blog 226 - Two Weeks of 0.9.0

Happy New Year, or as they say in the north of the Netherlands, veul hail en zeeg’n!

The release of 0.9.0 went very well. A bunch of existing players returned to the new update, and another group decided to purchase the game for the very first time. It’s great to see all this activity. We’ve received an enormous amount of feedback, screenshots, videos and mods and we try to see and read all of it.

Our primary goals of the update seem to have been accomplished. Outposts work. They are used much more frequently than the previous multiple-colonies system. Instead of complaints about how tedious they are, we’re now receiving complaints that outposts might be overpowered! We believe it’s good that outposts are slightly overpowered - we want to reward players for expanding, building and travelling.

Most players seem to agree that 0.9.0 has more content and is engaging for a significantly longer time than previous versions. We can follow your progress by looking at the achievement statistics, and that progress is steady. There doesn’t seem to be one specific unintuitive part of the tech tree that causes a sudden drop-off of players.





Of course, no big change is without drawbacks and issues. On the day of the release, the old achievements were removed and replaced with 50 new ones. Some people were very attached to their old achievements and did not like that. Sorry!

The new achievements didn’t work perfectly. A part of them didn’t unlock. This should be fixed by now, although you do have to open the statistics board and check the right pages to unlock the statistics achievements. We're working on a patch to make that easier.

The poison guard seemed to be broken at the moment of release. This has been fixed as well. In total, we released three patches with miscellaneous fixes and improvements - see #small-patch-changelogs in Discord or the in-game info-menu for a complete list.

Some people have criticised the cost of items, like building materials, in the early game, combined with the fact that you can’t make things like planks yourself anymore. We understand their reasons, but we ultimately believe this is for the best. It does make it more rewarding to grow and improve your colony.

There is another point of criticism though which is very valid, but also applies to previous versions of CS. There is a long article on the Steam Forums titled Building in the Colony is Pointless. It has started a deep debate there. I do believe Profugo Barbatus describes a significant issue here, but I find it hard to come up with good solutions. How do we make constructing interesting, complex, unique and beautiful buildings more rewarding? Feel free to leave your suggestions in that thread, here in the comments and/or on Discord!





Already, a bunch of mods for 0.9.0 have been released. I haven’t tested all of them yet, but I did test the chisel mod and it is amazing! It works a lot more intuitively than I had expected, and it really opens up a lot of building possibilities. I’ve seen talented people build truly beautiful architecture with it. Download it here!

Not everybody can develop mods, but everybody can build things, and it’s easy to share your world on the Steam Workshop. We’re planning to film a new trailer for CS, and shoot new promotional screenshots, in the next weeks and months. We’d love to use a bunch of different worlds for that. We’ve already seen loads of amazing screenshots made in 0.9.0, and we’d love to walk through these worlds for ourselves! So please, if you have an interesting world and want to share it with the rest of us, please put it on the Workshop!

Bedankt voor het lezen :D

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