Colony Survival News

A test-world for Zun's refactorings

A month ago, in the most recent Friday Blog, we wrote about new, rough plans for 0.9.0. Since then, we’ve been trying to turn these outlines into specific new crafting recipes and tech trees. While doing that, we ran into multiple problems - and we think we’ve solved them.

[h2]Tool Usage Percentage - TUP[/h2]

We’d like to implement Tool Usage for nearly all jobs - because IRL, nearly all jobs use tools. These generic (as in, all jobs use ‘tools’ but not specific pickaxes/axes/needles/hammers/screwdrivers etc) tools should come in multiple materials with different costs and benefits. Players would start with Stone Tools and would later develop Copper Tools, which are more complicated to make but yield higher productivity for jobs that use them. Bronze Tools require rare and expensive tin, but exceed Copper Tools in both productivity and durability. Iron Tools require more advanced tech to produce, but less expensive resources. The productivity would be near those of Bronze Tools, but without the durability. Last but not least, there are Steel Tools, an endgame achievement.

The difference in productivity should be significant to make developing these tools worthwhile. When you’re completely out of tools and workers have to work with their bare hands, productivity should decline dramatically. But how do we make this work at the start of the game? You don’t want to immediately starve to death a new player who doesn’t understand the tool mechanic yet. Nor should food be something that is very difficult to balance properly at the start of the game with low productivity, while it’s easy to create massive abundances a bit later on with more advanced tech.

Zun suggested a variable that is related to how important the tools are for the job. A miner or a blacksmith relies hard on their tools, but they’re much less significant for a berry gatherer. This should be reflected in the Tool Usage Percentage for that job. Let’s turn this into a specific example: (numbers aren’t definitive yet, just a hypothetical example)

No tools: 400% crafting time
Stone tools: 200%
Copper tools: 100%
Bronze tools: 50%
Iron tools: 55%
Steel tools: 33%

For a regular job with 100% TUP, this would be the full impact of using different tools. But a job with 50% TUP would see only half the impact of different tools, resulting in the following crafting times:

No tools: 250% crafting time
Stone tools: 150%
Copper tools: 100%
Bronze tools: 75%
Iron tools: 77.5%
Steel tools: 66%

TUP would also impact the durability of the tools. If tools are only "half as necessary", they'll last twice as long. Mainly early game jobs, and jobs that are crucial to survival of the colony like food jobs, will have a lower TUP. Other jobs might even have TUPs above 100%.

Of course, these numbers shouldn’t have to be calculated by players themselves: the UI should make this very clear. This does require some changes to the interface. For example, we've got to make it clear to players that they can investigate their miners by clicking on the jobs.

[h2]How to achieve progress?[/h2]

So we’d like to see a progression from primitive tools to advanced tools, through different eras and materials. What effort do players have to do to receive these new tools? Do they have to recruit lots of scientists, gather lots of different ingredients, earn large amounts of Colony Points? What is interesting gameplay, what is moderately historically realistic, what can we build in a reasonable amount of time?

Currently, a large part of the early to mid game relies on gathering a wide variety of ingredients. People need olive oil, wax, cabbages, buckets, fish, copper parts, iron rivets, and need to set up lots of different jobs, to unlock new jobs, which can be used to unlock other jobs. It can become quite confusing.

Another core pillar of Colony Survival until now has been the idea that you’re an isolated community on a deserted world. Everything you want to produce has to be made with resources and ingredients that you’ve gathered and crafted yourself.

We’re strongly considering changing both. The game should start earlier: in the Stone Age. Players should be able to set up a self-sustaining colony, but to progress, they have to trade with the wider (offscreen, probably) world. There’ll be a trader who is able to both buy and sell items. Instead of having to craft large amounts of diverse luxury goods for your own colonists, they’ll be exported. Instead of the luxury goods being “daily consumables” like candles and meals, they’ll be more durable and significant, like extensively decorated pottery, fancy textiles, artistic objects and expensive jewelry.

Exporting these items should earn you currency, which can be spent in many ways. The currency will probably replace Colony Points, allowing you to do all the Colony-Points-upgrades with currency. They could also be required in the tech tree, with certain unlocks requiring significant amounts of money. Last but not least, you can spend the currency at the trader to purchase rare items and resources like tin.

Currently, the game doesn’t actually require you to recruit a lot of colonists and build a large colony, it just requires you to gather a bunch of diverse ingredients. Most players reach the musket-era-endgame somewhere between 80 and 150 colonists. We’d like to change that. You ought to need more colonists, but recruiting these colonists should be easier. The focus of the game should be more on the expansion and the actual colonists (building places to sleep, walls, new farms, managing new monster types) and less on balancing a whole bunch of different ingredients from different jobs at the cook.

With these changes, I believe we’ve got all the requirements to do a successful overhaul of the crafting recipes and the tech tree, resulting in a much more interesting and longer progression throughout the game. It’ll be quite different from what you’re used to though. Do you believe it’ll be a good thing? Let us know, in the comments here on Steam or on Discord!

Bedankt voor het lezen!

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Built by JoeMan

In December, we released 0.8.0, which tried to improve some fundamental systems and fix some flaws. In January and February, we were making huge plans for 0.9.0. We wanted to take our time, add a lot of new content, and introduce awesome new features. We were considering to implement realistic logistics.

This would be a huge change and impact a lot of other systems. We were trying to think through the entire plan. For example: with realistic logistics between colonies, it’s important to spread out resources. It doesn’t make sense for all ores to be present at every location. So resources like iron ore should only appear in certain specific places.

But that means players need multiple colonies when they get into the Iron Age! That’s a lot earlier than currently is the case. So we’ll need to add a lot of pre-Iron Age gameplay to balance things out.

We also added things like support for longer crafting times, which requires a full overhaul of all the crafting recipes. Zun optimized the savegames, which also leads to the requirement for new worlds in 0.9.0 (Disclaimer: Old worlds will always be accessible in old branches / 0.9.0 is a long way out / a converter might appear!). The need for savegame continuity is pretty restricting, and without that need, we have a lot of extra possibilities. We want to use as many as possible of them, to make sure future updates don’t require another continuity-break.

At the end of March, I started moving. It was quite a lot of work, and due to some unforeseen problems I spent nearly two weeks without proper access to the internet. But things are working now :D Things are still a bit Early Access but I don’t mind that too much.

I’ve had a lot of time to think, and things seemed a bit… overwhelming. Update 0.9.0 had become a gigantic overhaul with loads of uncertain but interdependent features, and a three year workload. The plans certainly sounded awesome, but doing it all in one gigantic step started to seem impractical.

So we had a long discussion and decided to change our plans for 0.9.0. It’s still not 100% certain, there are plenty of details to work out, and we’re open to your input! But here are our rough plans.

Update 0.4.0 added a nice progression system. From inventing bronze to smelting iron to producing steel, slings > bows > crossbows > muskets, from slow weak monsters to fast strong monsters. It works very well, and it’s still the core of the game. 0.5.0 and 0.6.0 added ‘branches’ to this framework, and 0.7.0 added multiple colonies to the end of this system. But the ‘spine’ of the game is still the bronze/iron/steel thing (with the related monsters and weapons), added after a couple of months of development in 2017.



We’re considering to refactor that spine. To improve it and to extend it. To make it work with all the other features we’ve added since 2017, and the features we’re planning to add in 0.9.0 (and keeping in mind the features we’re hoping to add afterwards!).

We want to increase the timespan. We’d love to start in the Stone Age and have players invent and use copper tools as a serious improvement above stone tools. Tin should become a rare resource, and to start the Bronze Age, players would have to export luxury goods and import tin.

To decrease their dependence on expensive imports, players should have the ability to start using iron. We’ve done quite a bit of extra research into iron, and apparently, producing it is hard. Iron loves to bind with oxygen, so you’ve got to remove it from your iron ore and prevent the oxygen from returning again too soon (which is known as ‘rust’). To do so, you’ve got to mix it with carbon while heated, but heating the ore up increases iron’s susceptibility to binding with oxygen. Leave too much carbon in your iron and it’ll become brittle; leave too little carbon in your iron and it’ll become soft.

Correctly executing this process requires a lot of knowledge, the right tools, and a lot of good fuel. We’d love to implement this into the game more realistically. We’re considering having multiple ‘levels’ of iron and multiple methods of smelting iron. There could be simple but lengthy processes that result in weak, brittle tools and weapons, and more complicated methods that result in better tools and weapons.

The final step could be steel - which requires very high temperatures or huge amounts of labor to achieve. Add some chromium to get stainless steel. The mass production of steel only became possible at the start of the Industrial Revolution.

Of course, each of these steps should have a purpose and not just be a messy crafting chain required to get to the endgame as soon as possible. We’re considering to add “Tools” as a crucial component of the game. Instead of just foresters and miners requiring a one-time specific tool, most jobs should use them. Instead of each job having their own specific requirement, the Tools would be more general. But Tools will have a trait ‘Durability’, and when it’s depleted, the tool breaks and the worker will require new tools. The tools should also impact productivity. That way, each tool can have their own unique set of benefits and drawbacks. Copper Tools could be cheap but with low durability. Bronze Tools could have high durability, a large boost to productivity, but cost a lot to produce. Primitive Iron Tools could have the same boost to productivity at a lower cost, but also with lower durability.

Now, we don’t just want to make the game more convoluted, with more steps and more requirements. The new crafting chain and the new tech tree should also lead to more possibilities! An underdeveloped aspect of the game, which players have often requested to be expanded, is the combat-side of the game. We’d love to add more monsters and more guards, with new abilities. How about ranged monsters? Guards with area-of-effect damage, and others with the ability to poison or slow down enemies? How about monsters that strengthen nearby monsters, and monsters that get harder to defeat the longer they live? That would make mazes less overpowered and allow for a more diverse array of strategies to be useful. We're also considering options to make some monsters more intelligent. They're harder to implement properly, but monsters that fill moats or scale walls would be very interesting.

Just as in 0.4.0, these things should be connected. Unlocking new materials requires expansion of the colony, new materials lead to new weapons, expansion of the colony leads to more and stronger monsters.



Compared to realistic logistics, these plans are a lot more achievable in less time, while we’re still very enthusiastic about the outcome. We think it would be a huge improvement above the current situation. Let us know your opinion and it’ll help us make a final decision!

The plans for realistic logistics aren’t completely scrapped. We do keep them in mind while working on 0.9.0 and make our choices appropriately. We’re pretty certain we want to make ores like tin scarce, requiring multiple colonies if you want to play without importing and exporting from (offscreen) ‘NPC colonies’. But logistics between multiple colonies were always intended as some kind of endgame, and we’d like to put a lot of effort into the early and midgame first.

TL;DR: I moved successfully, plans for 0.9.0 got extremely huge, considering a new plan for a refactored, improved and lengthened early-to-mid-game with more realistic metals and tools, and new weapons and monsters. Let us know what you think!

Bedankt voor het lezen!

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For nearly two hundred weeks now, there has been a Friday Blog every week. We've enjoyed some short holidays, but always prepared a Friday Blog to post at the appropriate date. Sadly, we don't expect to reach the milestone of two hundred continuous, weekly Friday Blogs :(

But for a pretty fun reason! I'm moving to a new place next week. It requires quite a lot of preparation before the move, and I'll have to spend some time doing odd jobs at the new place and setting up a new home office. The Netherlands is still a high-COVID-area with a rather stringent lockdown, and that doesn’t make things any easier. It’ll take some weeks before I’m fully set up again.

Apart from that, there’s also been a significant shift in the update cycle. Since the release of 0.7.0 in 2019, we’ve strived to release an update every couple of months. These updates added Steam Workshop support, UI overhauls, the statistics menu, an inbuilt savegame converter, the ability to trash items, the compass, improved pathfinding, and many other features.

With 0.9.0, that will change. Instead of adding incremental features, we want to add significant new things to the gameplay. We would have loved to do that in a bunch of small updates instead of in one big overhaul that will take a long time to develop. But…

Everything is connected. Monsters are connected to guards. Guards are connected to the tech tree. The tech tree is connected to the ores. The ores are connected to the world generation. Changing the world generation invalidates old worlds and requires people to start new savegames.

Of course, we could do some simple changes to one of these aspects. Add a monster with more HP, and a guard that does more damage. We could have a release like that ready in a couple of days. But that wouldn’t be a substantial improvement, just an iteration of already existing content. There are plenty of impressive mods that have content way better than the simple changes above.

So an interesting, serious update should do more than that, it should add exciting new features. These new features take more time to develop. And when you change one system, you’ll have to look at all connected systems as well. When you eventually get to the point where new savegames are required, it becomes very important to add as many of the other changes you’re interested in that also require new worlds.

Eventually, it leads to massive plans that will overhaul a large part of the game. We would have loved to choose “good, fast and cheap (we’re a small company and can't hire 200 programmers and 3D artists)”, but as they say, you can only pick two. We’ll have to settle for good and ‘cheap’. So 0.9.0 will take a while, and there will be a decent amount of weeks with relatively boring “refactored a system” and “changes some JSONs” style updates. We’re planning to skip the Friday Blog in some of these weeks, and only post when there’s something relatively significant to share, preferably something with a visual impact.

Of course, we’re always available on Discord, and we’ll probably make a separate channel there for “mini-blogs”, small updates on what we’re doing. Let us know what you think of this choice, and we’ll calibrate the amount of blogs based on that!

Bedankt voor het lezen :D

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Last week, we wrote about a new problem we encountered. With the plans for more spread out resources, it would make sense to make bronze more realistic. In real life, tin is actually a very rare resource. But if players require a second colony to produce bronze, those second colonies will be necessary very early in the game. That will be pretty difficult and confusing! We asked for help and received a lot of replies. They were very useful, especially this one from EZJ:

Bronze age trade wasn't one person organizing multiple colonies and trading between them. Maybe adding small NPC colonies that can trade rare resources in the early game before you can start expanding and getting those resources yourself?

That does make sense. Most bronze-smelters, historically, would not have personally set up a tin outpost, they would have bought some from a trader. In 0.1.0, purchasing flax seeds with gold coins was a fundamental element of the game. It was a bit confusing because it worked like very other crafter, and it could benefit from a better interface. But having a good way to buy "outside goods" (and to sell to "outsiders"!) would be beneficial in many ways. It could be a way to give players access to more resources that aren't available in the first colony, at a cost. And it could incentivize players to produce certain goods on a large scale.

We were already considering "MonsterForts", which would be custom built fortresses in other dimensions. With the other-dimension feature added, it would be relatively easy to add "friendly" fortresses as well. These could pretty much be NPC colonies! Perhaps you'd need to visit them to set up trade. NPC colonies have consistently been a very popular request, but we found it hard to imagine ways to add them, and to make them useful. We might be close to solving those problems!

But eventually, players want to move beyond purchasing exotic resources, and they actually want to go out in the world and find these ores. How do players recognize them on the surface? Zun suggested that we might add caves and put the ores there. That could be a solution! Another idea is to generate deserted mining towns on the surface of significant ore deposits. It would work, but it would simultaneously imply that you live in some kind of post-apocalyptic scenario. That would be interesting, lore-wise.



So, if bronze is rather difficult to produce in real life because tin is so scarce, what stops people from immediately moving to iron production? In-game, we could just require players to produce a lot of bronze to unlock iron, but we'd rather make it a bit more realistic. What exactly is difficult about iron production?

Apparently, the temperature required to smelt iron is a lot higher, and reaching a temperature that is twice as high requires more than just a double amount of fuel. It requires different fuels and different furnaces.

It's not just that. Iron ore is generally pretty unpure and needs to be refined before it's properly usable. If all these processes are done well, you get strong iron that doesn't rust quickly. But that's hard to do. Most early iron was probably brittle and rusted easily. It took a lot of experimenting to get it right.

We're unsure about the best way to translate these realities into interesting gameplay. We've been thinking about having dynamic tools for jobs: for example, foresters could use different axes, with better axes being more durable and allowing for faster logging. Perhaps there'll be a similar thing for smelting, with 'dynamic' fuels, allowing players to choose different options for different results. But it's complicated and we haven't fully decided on one solution yet. If there are any experts on metallurgy, we'd love to have your help :D

Bedankt voor het lezen!

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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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