Colony Survival News

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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The jobblock maker in the internal 0.9.0 dev branch. We're considering to allow an increased heigth for jobblocks.

Progress in the past week has been fairly steady and predictable. The refactoring of NPC movement has been completed, and caltrop traps actually slow down enemies now. The final items without icons or meshes have received the attention they needed. Instead of boring you with all the technical details, we’d like to bore you with philosophical details!

We’ll start with a story about Formula 1. Zun, Vobbert and I watch most races, certainly now that a Dutchman is leading the championship. When I was young, in the Schumacher-era, I thought Formula 1 was a competition between the fastest cars we could build.

Michael Schumacher at the 2004 United States Grand Prix, all F1 images from Wikipedia

When I grew older, I learned F1 has an enormous rulebook. There are all kinds of technical specifications the carmakers have to follow. The car must fit very specific dimensions, it has to be a certain weight, it has to use a specific kind of engine, they can’t exceed a certain fuel use, the aerodynamics are limited, assists like traction control are outlawed.

This means Formula 1 cars aren’t the fastest cars in the world. They’re not optimized for speed, nor are they optimized for beating the competition. They’re limited by all kinds of constraints, and could quite easily be much faster without them.

When I learned about that, I was quite disappointed. Formula 1 is exciting because the cars are so extremely fast and the technology is so advanced! Why would you limit that? Architects, musicians and writers don’t deliberately reduce the quality of their output by 30% because of arbitrary rules. Why does F1?!

A Mercedez-Benz W196, participated in the 1954 and 1955 F1 seasons

Nowadays, the F1 rulebook might actually be one of the things I appreciate the most about the sport. I wish the ‘real world’ was regulated that well! It turns out that although “a competition about designing and driving the fastest possible cars” does result in “exciting competitions to watch” to a degree, the correlation is far from 100%. Back in the 1950s, the rulebook might have been quite thin, resulting in a competition that largely did concern the fastest cars they could build.

But as technology advanced, speed and cost went up. This has all kinds of detrimental effects if you want a competition that is actually fun to watch. You don’t want crashes to regularly severely harm or kill drivers. You want to watch humans drive, not all kinds of onboard electronics. You don’t want one super-wealthy team to make a car that extremely outperforms all others which just wins championship after championship without competition.

A BRM P133 in 1968

The difference between #1 and #2 in a F1 race is regularly only a fraction of a second. Being able to lose 100 grams of weight can thus make or break your race, because the lower weight will give you increased speed. Without strict rules, this would mean starved drivers and no safety features.

The teams are continuously trying to find loopholes in the rules. If they can find a semi-legal way to improve their lap times even a tiny bit, they’ll do so. If you follow F1 for a while, you’ll be confronted with all kinds of discussions about flexible wings, novel steering methods and other weird rule-bending technology. At a certain moment McLaren introduced the F-Duct system, where the driver had to close off holes in the body of the car to change the aerodynamics - an unexpected way to circumvent the ban on movable aerodynamic devices.

To summarize:

• The Formula 1 organization wants to organize safe, exciting and relatively affordable races
  
• The teams and drivers are focused on winning those races, and they’re constantly in a very intense competition with others who try to achieve the same thing
  
• These goals are quite at odds with each other and this results in a continuous cat-and-mouse game between the organization and the teams, which throughout the decades has produced a rather massive rulebook. This is quite inevitable.

Fictional Red Bull X1 prototype: a racing car unconstrained by rules and regulations

This cat-and-mouse game can be observed in a lot of places. Big companies can profit by disregarding the environment, the government implements rules to prevent this, companies find a loophole, etcetera.

Here in the Netherlands, the government tried to reduce COVID infections by closing down pubs and restaurants. To circumvent these bans, people just started socializing with others at home. To prevent this, the government implemented a curfew: you weren’t allowed to walk the streets after 9PM. This ‘problem’ was also solved quickly: many just started hosting sleepovers.

We’re noticing the same pattern in Colony Survival over and over again. We want to generate interesting challenges for players. A pressure to improve their defenses, or their food production, or their mining operation. Players want to overcome these challenges, but that means that we as developers have pretty much completely opposed incentives, compared to players. Players often want powerful melee guards that can stab to death monsters with spears - we don’t want to add strong guards that don’t consume ammo, because that would make so many other guards useless.

Many players, myself included, build colonies with “bed-seas”. Rooms fully covered with beds, from wall to wall. We’ve regularly been asked to introduce measures to prevent or at least disincentivize this. But how do we do that in a way that’s intuitive for players, that doesn’t result in an infinite cat-and-mouse game, and that is not too costly too program? We could demand that players leave one block of free space between beds, but that would result in similar “bed warehouses”, just with a slightly less optimal pattern. There’s no easy way to add constraints that would result in ‘realistic’, cosy, good-looking bedrooms.

Another example. It’s currently quite easy to “guide” the monsters to a certain entrance - often a big maze. Players mention they would like to see monsters that can break or scale your walls. We do see the appeal, but widely distributing such an ability would quickly lead to a new dominant strategy: just place guards along your entire wall, because you need to be able to defend from all angles. That seems more boring to me than fighting ‘dumb’ monsters that can be guided along certain paths.

Trapmaker and goldsmith, internal 0.9.0 dev build

Last example: we want to offer better items to advanced colonies. Your reward for expansion and progress in the tech tree should be stronger weapons, better foods, and more valuable luxury items. But if they’re superior in all dimensions, players are pushed to replace the production chains of previous items, and it gets boring and annoying to continuously place and replace production chains. That’s why we’re striving to keep older items relevant later in the game, to make sure the optimal strategy isn’t frustrating. But finding ways to offer continuous improvement without outdating earlier items is very hard!

It feels a bit like we’re trying to stop water from flowing downhill. Every time we put a barrier in its path, it just finds the easiest way to flow around it. This is a persistent issue that returns again and again, both in Colony Survival and outside of it. Problems seem like they have an easy solution, but each solution has its own side-effects, often convincing us to choose to just tolerate the original problem.

We hope this helps you understand that we do recognize quite a lot of problems and potential solutions, and why we chose not to implement certain apparently ‘easy’ solutions. Things are complex, puzzle-designers and puzzle-solvers have quite conflicting goals, and we’d like to prevent infinite cat-and-mouse games.

We don’t want to discourage offering suggestions! They’ve been very valuable in the past, and even if we can’t directly implement them, they at least tell us where the bottlenecks are. Please keep doing so. And if the suggestions help deal with the dynamics above, they are extra useful.

If you find these concepts interesting, you might want to read Why the tails come apart
and Meditations on Moloch. If you're still interested after these walls of texts, jump into #serious on our Discord!

Bedankt voor het lezen :D

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All mentioned changes concern the internal, unreleased dev build

Last Friday Blog mentioned the idea of ‘outposts’. This resulted in massive support: lots of you shared their enthusiasm! That was great to see, and it strengthens our dedication to this plan.

Since then, progress has been good. In the image above, a trap can be seen. Traps were very much work-in-progress two weeks ago, and they’re a lot more finished in our current internal dev build. They are properly reloaded by special colonists, and there are now also variants of traps that can drop items on monsters that pass below them. They’ve also received their own, new 3D model. We’re still planning to update it though.

Zun is now working on a new effect: slowdown. We’re planning to add traps that can drop caltrops, which would slow down monsters. This requires new info to be saved for each monster though. We’re also planning to have other things that can affect monsters for a longer time, like poison. Properly saving these statuses for each and every monster and sending them to each connected player in multiplayer requires a minor technical overhaul, which is happening right now.

A trap from below

The last two weeks also saw the addition of many new icons for 0.9.0-items, and 3D-models for new jobs. We’ve also redone certain old icons that didn’t fit the new style and standards. Here are two screenshots of some of the new content:



Another project was updating the ‘spreadsheet calculator’. Since 0.7.0, we’ve got an internal system that can ‘print’ a spreadsheet with all kinds of data, especially data regarding the total labor cost of items. How many seconds of work are required to make an anvil and all of its ingredients?

0.9.0 adds some major new changes to this process. Some items can’t simply be crafted by a colonist, and have to be purchased from the trader with currency. And the crafting time isn’t static: it decreases when you use better tools. This makes calculating the total cost of a product significantly more complex.

With the new spreadsheet calculator, we now have access to a lot of new data. We’re going to use it to rebalance the costs of in-game items. Until now, it has been the result of ‘guesswork’. That has resulted in some weird things. The Golden Shield costs a lot of time to craft, but it can be sold for 250 coins. But the calculator concluded that the ingredients of the Golden Shield cost 230 coins already! All the work crafting the shield and its ingredients are better spent crafting linen, which can be sold for more coins with less work. Weird things like that will be fixed.

One of the results of the calculator. Spot the problems!

Bedankt voor het lezen :D

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As promised last week, the dev build now has a functional Iron Age! Playtesting it has legitimately been a lot of fun. Currently, the Iron Age is also the first time players are able to unlock and use traps. We’re seriously considering introducing this new feature earlier in the game.

The Iron Age is now the most advanced age in 0.9.0. It’s the hardest to unlock, and producing enough iron to unlock traps and to craft a bunch of them is relatively difficult. I was surprised by the amount of miners and smelters I had to unlock. At first, I wanted to ‘fix’ that, to reduce the costs of the crafting recipes. But then I realized that this is exactly what we want to encourage. We want players to build big colonies and to recruit a large number of colonists, and these accomplishments should be meaningful.

[h3]Outposts
[/h3]

With the Iron Age unlocked and many dozens of colonists working on trap-production, I now had an overcrowded fort with many beds crammed into underground rooms. I barely had space left above ground to place new jobs. But while looking at the surrounding area from the walls of my fort, I felt a strong desire to “make it habitable”. Why should I build such a crowded place for the colonists when there is so much empty space around me?

...because that’s how the game works. You’ve got one banner, and you stick with it until you’re pretty much at the endgame, and then you can start over in a very distant location. But then I remembered the server that I shared with Vobbert and Zun many years ago, in a certain other voxel game. We did explore that world and we spread out our buildings, but our settlements were all connected by roads and bridges and pretty much within viewing distance of other settlements. We didn’t concentrate everything in a 200x200 area (the current core CS gameplay), nor did we go 10 miles in a random direction and build a new settlement in a fully isolated area (what 0.7.0 adds to CS).



At the start of this year, we did consider making CS more like that, with multiple settlements relatively nearby. We considered semi-realistic logistics to be a core part of that, and we couldn’t think of a system that we could both A.) develop in an acceptable timescale, and B.) make fun and intuitive to use for players.

But… is semi-realistic logistics actually a core requirement for ‘outposts’ gameplay? Imagine you’re able to build outposts with their own ‘secondary banners’, their own jobs, their own colonists and their own beds, in viewing range of your first and main colony. A small village focused on mining next to the mountain, a fishing town next to the sea, a farming outpost in the middle of a plain. But the tech tree and stockpile are completely, automatically connected to your main colony. The iron ingots of the mining village are instantly usable at your main colony, and the same is true for the wheat harvest of the farming outpost. Sure, it wouldn’t be very realistic, but wouldn’t it be a lot more fun than being forced to stay within a small safe zone in a nearly infinite world, or to be forced to use complex, tedious trading/logistics UIs to connect multiple colonies?

We’ve discussed it and we’re highly enthusiastic about the “outpost-plan”. We’ve already got support for multiple colonies, so it wouldn’t require enormous amounts of development time. But we do expect the results of it to be pretty enormous. Using the resources of your main colony to transform an empty patch of nature into a new settlement seems like very fun and satisfying gameplay. We’ve noticed that a lot of longtime players already used mods or cheats to achieve something like this; they dislike being constrained to a relatively small area, and want to spread their mini-civilization over a larger area.



But we’re not instantly going to develop this feature, so this is your chance to give us your feedback! Are you highly enthusiastic about this, and do you totally not mind us expanding 0.9.0 a bit further with this? Do you believe this new feature won’t be very helpful? Or are you sick and tired of us constantly moving the goalposts and do you just want 0.9.0 to be released yesterday? Let us know and we’ll consider your input!

During the next week, we're probably busy working on refining the content that was recently added. The traps are still work-in-progress, and a part of the new 0.9.0 content is still lacking icons, models and balance.

Bedankt voor het lezen :D

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Image from Wikipedia

In our last blog, we suggested traps as the solution to a myriad of problems. The general response was enthusiastic, so we’ve been working on implementing it. Zun worked on the technical side of things, and things went very well there.

I had to work on integrating the new jobs and recipes properly in the 0.9.0 tech tree. And I struggled quite a bit with that. It felt like the keystone that completes an arch. We stacked up features on the left, we stacked up features on the right, and traps were the last feature needed to complete the system. And that last step is the most difficult one, because it has to make sure everything is properly ‘balanced’. An issue comparable to this one, 140 blogs ago. It took a while, but we’ve figured it out and things are moving forward again!

In the meanwhile, Zun tested prototype-traps. Here’s an image of such a trap defeating monsters!

Loaded traps are temporarily using the stove mesh, empty traps use the writer's desk mesh

We ran into a new technical problem that had some interesting visualizations. Blocks like crates and jobblocks have “access points”. These are places right next to the crate where colonists can stand to use these blocks. In 0.8.0, that’s only right next to the block.

...crates like here are visualized as… ....green = crate, red = “access point”

This is problematic for certain new traps. Some traps can only be aimed upwards, others can only be aimed downwards. It makes sense to reload these traps when standing on top of them, or below them. It also makes sense to integrate traps in walls at the height of the torso instead of on the floor - these should also be able to be reloaded by colonists standing next to them. So Zun improved the “access points system” to be able to deal with these new situations.



So we’ve now got an internal dev build with functional prototype traps, and a detailed path on how to integrate them in the tech tree. We expect to have pretty functional 0.9.0 gameplay, from the Stone Age to the Iron Age, by this time next week!

Bedankt voor het lezen :D

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