Colony Survival News

The newest update is available on Steam right now! It’s fully compatible with your pre-existing 0.9/0.10/0.11 worlds.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1zdFjAWNUDw Watch the release trailer here!

Update 0.12.0 has a strong focus on the early game. From the very beginning, a mill is available to the player. The mill does not need colonists and can craft items 24/7. It can produce some fundamental early game items like beds and torches, and a handful of building blocks and roofs. It changes the start of the game quite significantly. There’s more to do for the player. Personally cutting down trees is more rewarding now. Players can also generate meals by removing naturally occurring berry bushes and putting the results into the mill.


The mill does need time to do its crafting, and results are not automatically deposited in the stockpile. Players have to walk to the mill and choose whether to deposit the results in their personal hotbar or in the communal stockpile. Mills are limited to only one per colony or outpost. These drawbacks make the mill fairly balanced. It’s a great boost at the start, but as your colony grows it becomes more convenient to let colonists produce these recipes.


From a technical perspective, the mill is quite revolutionary for Colony Survival. It is currently the biggest object in the game, and it has actual moving parts. We had to develop some new systems to accommodate this, and we hope to use those systems for future additions. To make placing the mill more predictable for players, a greenish variant of the mill is shown where the player is aiming with the mill equipped. This new system is reused for a bunch of other objects too.


A small change with big consequences concerns the roofs. They were added a couple of updates ago and many people have used them, but they had a problem. When you place a diagonal roof on the front of a building, the roof-block becomes part of the facade of the building. But it does not adapt to the specific type of blocks in that facade. We chose some default cobblestone and planks textures for these facade-roofs, but in many builds, that didn’t match what people were actually using. It looked pretty wonky.
Zun has built a new system that allows roof blocks in facades to automatically adapt to the block they’re resting on. It makes roofs look a lot better! The existing tiled roofs were only available when you had progressed quite a bit into the tech tree. We made new roof types that can be made with the mill at the start of the game: wooden roofs and straw roofs. Of course, they also use the auto-adaptation system.

Roof awkwardly connecting to blocks in 0.11

Straw roof smoothly connecting to blocks in 0.12

For a long time, we’ve had quarter blocks in the game. Players could use these to build stairs. They were available in multiple colors, but they were untextured, and we have gotten quite some complaints about that. Zun could easily apply the auto-adaptation system to these quarter blocks, so we’ve added a new type of them: dynamic quarter blocks. They are automatically textured in the style of the block they’re resting on. And to make them even more dynamic, they can also be placed vertically! They also reuse a system from the crown moulding. Wherever two quarterblocks meet in a corner, they actually connect to form a unique shape. It opens up a lot of decorative possibilities.


In 0.11, farms could not have too big of a height difference between the highest and lowest part of the field. This has changed pretty radically. Farms on steep hills are now a possibility!


Last but not least: by popular request, we’ve reintroduced coated planks!

Heel veel plezier met de update :D

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Everything shown and described in this blog is not available publicly yet, it will be in the next update.

Work on the projects detailed in the previous blog continued this month. We finished the mesh for the auto-crafter. To distinguish it from regular jobblocks, and to signal that it can do productive things without human input, it’s powered by wind - it’s a mill.


We’re trying something new here. It’s not just a voxel-sized workbench, or a single large mesh like the banner. The mill is actually a combination of many smaller parts, most of which fit neatly within the 1x1x1 voxels of the game.

Yet you won’t build it part-by-part. It will assemble automatically. The in-game bed already does the same. Technically, it’s two parts that both place at the same moment when you click once.

But a structure with so many parts - we’ve never done that. Zun is working on some new systems to properly integrate this. I’m excited - we might add more structures like this in the future! Hopefully, we can actually get the blades of the mill moving while it’s active.


Most of the UI is functional. You can see it in the image below. On the left, there’s a list of possible recipes, currently only containing two test-items. You can select them and see some information about them, and then you can add them to the production queue. When items are done, they’re added to the box on the right. Players have to walk back to the mill to collect these items physically, either by assigning them to the hotbar or by sending them straight to the stockpile.


The new auto-textured quarterblocks look pretty great, and it made us want to use them more in our builds. Which quickly led to another desire: being able to use them vertically too. So Zun actually added that ability to the new dynamic quarterblocks! They can now be placed on the side of blocks too, instead of merely on top. This allows for a whole new range of decorative options.


Talking about decorative options - many people demanded the return of coated planks, the darker and more reflective variant of planks. A couple of updates ago, we replaced the old planks texture with a new one, but we didn’t add a “coated” variant. I’ve now made one for the new planks texture!


Bedankt voor het lezen :D

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The two most dramatic overhauls of the game were update 0.7 and 0.9. With 0.7, we wanted to make the game more challenging and complex. That’s why we introduced features like the happiness system.

Later on, we realized there was a problem with some of these features. They punished growth and recruiting more colonists. That was never the intention. We reworked the happiness system into the current Colony Points system.

With 0.9, we wanted to make expanding and hiring more colonists more rewarding. One of the ways we tried to do this was by strictly limiting the player-crafting. If players can create hundreds of building blocks with the click of a button, letting colonists do this work is a bit wasteful and inefficient.

We stand by this decision, but it has made the early game slower and less exciting. We want to fix this by letting players make early-game building blocks and other essentials without relying on colonists. But for the sake of balance, this should not be possible with just one click and zero other costs. We’re strongly considering to introduce the “auto-crafter”, a mill-like building that processes inputs into certain building blocks. But the auto-crafter takes some time to finish its production, and players need to be physically present at the auto-crafter to deliver and gather materials. It’ll empower the player in the early game, without being totally unbalanced.

So we were thinking about the topic of proper early-game building blocks, and thought that we should add some new ones. The special roof blocks have been quite popular, but they appear pretty late in the tech tree. So an extra early-game roof block sounded good to us.


And what is a sensible primitive roof? A thatched roof made of straw of course! So we’ve been making all roof variants necessary to generate proper thatched roofs in all possible shapes. We’re very happy with the end result!

While working on the roofs, we discussed another common issue. The sides of the roof are “their own thing”, but wherever they meet the front of a building, they have to match the blocks. The roofs that are currently in the game use some default textures for that front side - planks and stone bricks. If you were using those to build that structure, perfect, it’ll look great. But if you were using any other building materials, you get this weird stairs-like pattern where your chosen blocks meet the default texture of the roofs.


So, Zun decided to fix that! In the current unreleased dev-build, the front of roofs will actually match the block they’re standing on. It looks much better!

And with that feature developed, Zun applied that a bit further. Why shouldn’t quarterblocks also match the texture of the block they’re standing on? So we’ve been playing around with the “dynamic quarterblock” now, which does exactly that.


All of these should become available in the next update, which hopefully makes the early game a lot more interesting!

Bedankt voor het lezen :D

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The lightmapping made visible

A massive update to the lighting system is available right now! It’s compatible with pre-existing savegames. If Steam doesn’t update automatically, try verifying the integrity of the game cache.

In the previous versions of the game, the world was either directly lit or indirectly lit. Direct lighting occurs when the sun hits an area, all the rest is shadow. There was just one value for each. Whether the shadow was behind a little bush in an open field, or deep into a cave, didn’t matter. All indirectly lit areas received the same brightness.

Old

We did add a system that checked the position of the player. It measured how exposed the player was to the skybox. If the player was in an open field, the indirect lighting would be boosted. Deep in a cave, the indirect lighting would be dimmed.

But this too treated all shadows in the same way. If you were standing in a tunnel in the middle of a mountain with a view onto bushes in the middle of a field, the shadows in the tunnel would be just as dark as the shadows caused by the bushes!

Of course, this is not how lighting works in real life. Real light bounces around. When something is not directly in the sun, but sunlight is reflected towards it from the sky, the ground and other nearby surfaces, it still appears bright to us. But when you close your curtains, move into the basement or walk into a cave, the reflected light gets weaker and weaker until it is fully dark.

New

It’s very performance intensive to continuously simulate this on your PC. But as a voxel game where the world is made out of big cubes, there are some useful approximations. In the new update, we calculate lightmaps for all those cubes. The brightest value is for every 1x1x1 area that can directly see the sky above it. Every block that can’t see the sky like that, but that is directly adjacent to the first category, is a bit darker. This chain is calculated 16 blocks deep.

Shaded areas in forests and the interiors of buildings with big windows will be a lot brighter compared to the previous update. But on the opposite side - deep tunnels will be actually dark now! There’s a more realistic contrast in general. The wonky system where all the indirect lighting would become brighter or darker based on the position of the player, has been removed.

Old

Instead of trying to trace complicated paths to the sun, there are some simpler rules you can apply. Crevices and hidden corners will always be darker than openly exposed surfaces. Ambient Occlusion exploits this to add some realism. We had been using a standard AO that applied this effect, but it only looked at smaller details - it had a range of about five centimeters. We added a new one that uses the voxel system to analyze the local environment. Instead of five centimeters, it adds appropriate shading based on a range of about two meters.

Last but not least, while polishing the lighting and its consequences, we took a look at the tone mapping. Tone mapping is a form of image processing that tries to turn the raw outputs of the game engine into something your monitor can render well. The old tone mapping was pretty standard, but it did increase contrast and change colors in ways we weren’t completely happy with. We changed it to more neutral tone mapping.

The new lighting system is more complex than the old one, and that will decrease performance a bit. But at the same time, you should need less torches and other player-made lighting in this new version, and that actually helps performance again. Another thing that should help with performance on very low-end hardware, is a a way to toggle the sun off. With the new light mapping, the game actually looks fairly okay in that state.

New

If you’re playing 0.11.1 and you run into any glitches or bugs, please let us know! If you don’t like the changes in general, if you want things to be darker, brighter, with more contrast, more saturated, less saturated - share that too. The previous version, 0.11.0, will still be available in the beta branches tab. We’ll definitely read feedback on our Discord, in the comments of this blog and on our Steam Forums!

Heel veel plezier met de update :D

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In the previous blog, we talked about an improved lighting system. We’re close to releasing it publicly, but we love to do a test first! We’re curious about the results in different worlds, the performance on different hardware and your opinion about it.

The differences aren’t extremely obvious when just roaming the outside world, but it does really affect interiors, and it’s especially noticeable in underground conditions. Tunnels that are far from sunlight are actually dark.

If you want to try the beta, go to your Steam Library, right-click Colony Survival and go to “properties”. In the “betas” tab, enter the access code sendfeedbackplease. This will unlock the beta-light branch. Enable it and your game will be automatically updated with the new lighting! It should not pose a risk to old savegames. You might encounter some buggy edge cases though.

As the access code suggests: please send feedback! Join our Discord and share your feedback in #general or put your screenshot in #screenshots. Feel free to leave a comment on this blog too.

Veel plezier met de beta!

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