Colony Survival News

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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Zun has mostly finished his work on the savegames. Previously, they were .JSON files. In some cases, they were prone to getting corrupted. They also required autosaves to save the data of all players who have been connected to the server, even if only a small minority of them have been connected since the last autosave.

The new savegames use SQLite. It should be quicker and more reliable. The problem above with the autosaves is solved as well!

This does have one serious drawback. Our dev-build of 0.9.0 already expects SQL saves and is incompatible with older savegames. No worries about your current worlds: they'll always be playable by using the 0.8.0 branch, and it'll take a long time before 0.9.0 is ready for release. But this does mean we can't easily release the new savegames as a 0.8.X patch. We could write a converter, but this takes a decent amount of time, and we'd rather invest that time in awesome features for 0.9.0. The new terrain generation and totally overhauled job/recipe structure will require new worlds anyway.

Another change that was completed this week is longer crafting times. In the past, all NPC actions were practically limited at a maximum of 15 seconds. This boundary has been removed. Previously, we worked around that boundary by making complex recipes that required many ingredients. Now that the limit is gone, we want to refactor these recipes. Intermediate steps like copper nails could be removed, with items just requiring "copper" and slightly longer crafting times.

Previously, crafting times were determined by the job block. Recipes at the tailor all take an equal amount of time. This can be changed as well now. Crafters can make both quick recipes take that only 1-5 seconds, and recipes that take for example 30 to 120 seconds. We want to use this new ability to make certain items take significantly longer to craft. Things like ammo should stay relatively similar, but items like weapons, which permanently improve your colony (instead of being "daily costs"), should take more effort from your colonists to produce. This ought to make them feel more valuable, and it allows us to add new features that allow players to reduce that crafting time again. For example, by crafting advanced tools for crafters to use, or by spending Colony Points to upgrade crafters.

Next Up: Overhauling the Crafting Recipes + Working on Trade Routes!

Bedankt voor het lezen!

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As explained in the last couple of blogs, adding realistic logistics between your main colony and its outposts will be a massive overhaul. There's a large amount of interdependency and edge cases. We're now 99% certain that we want to do this.

The rough order looks like this:

1. Longer Crafting Times: Crafting should be able to take longer than 15 seconds, and different items should be able to have different crafting times at the same jobblock. These old limitations led to certain choices like complex recipes and separate jobs. That will have to be refactored.
   
   
2. Improving the Trade Feature: There should be actual, physical paths linking colonies, marked by milestones or buoys. These should determine the cost and waiting time for trading items.
   
   
3. The Outpost System: Currently, starting a second colony is an end-game feature that requires difficult-to-unlock Colony Starter Kits. These later colonies pretty much stand alone as sepate places with their own tech tree. In 0.9.0, it should be way easier to start new outposts, like a mining town. They should be more connected, all being part of the same civilization/empire. It will be easiest to set up a capital that is supplied by its outposts, but you should be able to develop these outposts as well.
   
   
4. New Terrain Generation: At the moment, useful terrain features like ores and the ability to grow certain crops are spread out like tiles on a chessboard. There's a large square on the map called "Far East" were porcelain can be found and rice can be grown, and another large square for diamonds and sugar cane. These large squares are separated by large areas of uselessness: desert, steppe, ocean.
   
   These ores and the ability to (efficiently) grow certain crops should be spread out more organically. You shouldn't have to traverse large deserts or steppes for your first outpost. It should be a more natural expansion, fueled by the desire to gain "that resource just over there". This requires a new world with updated terrain generation.
   
   
5. We should investigate whether it's annoying to fight monsters everywhere in this system. If so, that should be fixed.
   
   
6. Jobs should be more sensible and "upgradeable". Jobs like berry farmers should benefit from having larger areas. Jobs like wheat farmers could have similar yields on smaller areas if they use items like fertilizer. It would be nice if jobs like flax farmers have better yields if a beekeeper is nearby. Smelters should be able to use different fuels, and crafters should be able to use better tools for improved crafting times.

We haven't decided on all details yet. Will there truly be no realistics logistics within colonies? Will certain item types be constrained to "special" stockpiles - weapons and ammo can only be stored in armories, wheat in granaries, etcetera? We're still debating these issues.

While we were making plans for the future, Zun has still been working on and releasing small patches for 0.8.1. The full details can be seen in #small-patch-changelogs on Discord, but here are the last three updates:



Developing 0.9.0 will be a large project that's going to take a relatively long time. We do believe it's a good idea. The plans will make way better use of the large world. The game is able to support tens of thousands of colonists, but only rewards recruiting a couple of hundred. That's a lot of unused potential that 0.9.0 should take advantage of. We could've chosen a different direction, or focused on smaller updates, but we think this path ultimately will result in a better game, compared to the alternative paths.

Zun has already started working on a savegame overhaul for 0.9.0, and we're expecting to start working on actual new features very soon!

Op hoop van zegen!

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