Friday Blog 211 - The Return of the Quiver

While testing my colony in the 0.9.0 dev build, I noticed that I had a hard time producing bronze and iron. To construct the kilns and bloomeries needed to expand iron production, some bronze is needed. Instead of the bronze ending up in the new jobblocks, it was quickly converted into bronze tools, which were soon taken by colonists. I did want some bronze tools in my inventory, for science unlocks and as ingredients in certain crafting recipes, so I did not want to reduce my bronze tool production to 0. I wanted to tell my colonists not to use the bronze tools as tools.

But I couldn’t. Zun and I had discussed this issue earlier, and we couldn’t come to a satisfying conclusion. I was imagining an interface where you could adjust the tool-priorities of your workers, and where you could change these preferences per job category. For example, gunsmiths should take the best tool available, while berry farmers should only take bronze/iron tools if copper/stone tools are not available.

We had a hard time converting this idea into a proper UI that is actually intuitive to use. After renewed efforts we settled on a different idea. A simple interface that determines a global limit for all colonists. The limit determines the amount of tools, per type of tool, that colonists will leave untouched in your stockpile (except when they need them as ingredients in a crafting recipe). By default this is something like 3, while the default production limit is higher, resulting in a continuous flow of tool production and tool use. But if you want to save your bronze/iron/steel, you can adjust these limits and force colonists to use other tools.

Where to put this menu? We could’ve put it into the colony menu, among a lot of other interfaces. But we found a solution: a “tool distribution table”. An actual in-game item that has to be placed in the world, and where colonists physically go to collect new tools. Walk up to it and click on it to activate its menu, and that’s where you can adjust the tool limits. We think this is more immersive and fun than one big colony menu with dozens of different functions hidden behind all kinds of buttons and links.

Before this new item, colonists automatically received new tools. This made the entire process very opaque. When they go to the tool distribution table, you’ll actually see an icon of the tool they’re grabbing. This makes it a lot easier to see what’s happening. We’re planning to do the same with the ‘grocery store’, the table where colonists collect their meals. 0.8.0 just shows a generic icon, we’re planning to display the actual meal that’s being grabbed there.



We decided to do the same with the statistics menu. We added a new in-game item, the Statistics Board, which can be placed in the world and can be clicked on to access the statistics UI. It’s still accessible in the traditional way, but we’re considering removing that entirely. Decluttering the UI will probably help to make the game more accessible to newcomers. We’d love to have your opinion. Is it good to connect UI elements to ‘physical’ in-game items wherever that makes sense, allowing you to build some kind of in-game HQ, or should the entire interface be collected and accessible in one abstract UI-space?

We made another change to make things more “real” and less UI-based. Colony Survival 0.1.0 released with quiver-items that needed to be placed in the world to recruit archers. With the addition of new guard types in 0.4.0, that was changed to abstract colored squares. We’ve got plans to add new guard types, but didn’t want a massive spreadsheet-menu, so we’ve converted that back to the old actual-item-gameplay. Here’s the metal rack that crossbow guards use to store their bolts:



We’ve heard some players ask for a more ‘living’ world, instead of a mechanical colony of robot-slaves. It doesn’t seem viable for us to develop super realistic human-like models with complex, unique animations for all their actions, nor are we able to add deep conversations with colonists, but we hope that a lot of relatively small changes like the ones above help to make the game feel more immersive.



Colony Survival 0.1.0 was released with a big temperate biome in the middle - the place where you spawn and where pretty much all players built their colonies. Far to the north was an arctic biome, and the tropics were in the south. They had zero impact on gameplay.

0.7.0 changed that. It added a New World in the west and a Far East in an obvious location, and it gave players the possibility to start a second, separate colony in these distant biomes, with new tech trees and new resources.



We loved the idea, but we were a bit disappointed in practice. It’s an interesting challenge for some, but the physical distance and the complete separation of colonies, only remedied by a trader with a cumbersome UI, makes it quite unappealing to many. Completing the tech tree in the original temperate biome is, in practice, the end of the game for most players. The content in the distant biomes is also quite artificial: things like potato farms and rice farms are only possible once you’ve crossed an arbitrary, invisible straight line on the world map.

The outposts-idea hopefully fixes these issues. Both their stockpile and their tech tree should be merged with the main colony, and they should be buildable relatively close to the main colony as well.

Currently, everything in a biome is possible in every location in that biome. All ores spawn everywhere, all farms can be built in one place. But we’re looking to change that up. Gold ore spawns everywhere in 0.8.0, but can only be purchased at the new Colony-Currency-trader in 0.9.0. What if it only spawns high in the mountains? Your main colony will be near water in a fertile valley, but building a mining outpost on top of a mountain, the only place to mine gold, sounds like an interesting challenge. Of course, the gold ore (and other fundamental but rare resources) will stay available at the 'currency-trader'.

So we want to make the temperate spawn-biome more diverse and interesting. That could happen with for example unique ores in the mountains, fens where coal can be mined or heathlands as the only place to gather silica sand for glass blowing. That will probably also result in a way bigger temperate biome.

This might result in a disappearance of the tropics, the far east and the new world, at least in the way they’re currently structured. Would you mind the loss of this content, in return for more content in the temperate biome and an earlier release of 0.9.0? Or should we put effort into maintaining the ‘distant content’? Let us know in the comments or on Discord!

Bedankt voor het lezen :D

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