Colony Survival News

This Monday, we released 0.7.3! Things seem to have gone quite well. There were some minor problems but they were fixed in a small patch on Wednesday. Check #small-patch-changelog on Discord or the in-game changelog for full details.

In the past weeks, both Zun and I have done extensive playthroughs without using any cheats, and our last time doing that was around the release of 0.7.0. Back then, we felt like the amount of content was pretty good, but a lot of the interface around it was rather rushed together. That’s why we’ve been working on UI updates like statistics, and we’ll continue improving the UI for multiple months.

But these recent playthroughs gave us quite some new insights. Here are some of our observations, and let us know whether you agree or disagree with them:

• The UI still has some very rough spots. Some features, like the amount of calories in the diet of your colonists, are in sore need of better explanation. Improving these rough spots is very worthwhile.
  
• One of the most fun parts of the game is reorganizing the landscape to suit your needs. Building useful structures and efficient infrastructure between them, building defenses, digging tunnels. Making it so that workers and guards can get where they need to be without monsters easily getting to them. New jobs, new science, new challenges are fun not because these features are so awesome by themselves, but because they encourage the gameplay described above.
  
• At the start, science and happiness accomplish these goals very well. They require you to mine, grow and craft new resources, which requires you to grow your colony larger and build more structures.
  
• Not all paths of the tech tree are equally fun and rewarding, some are convoluted and/or feel like dead ends
  
• It’s quite easily possible to unlock matchlock guns with only 100-150 colonists and without any shortage of happiness items. After this, the rest of the tech tree is dedicated to exploration and finding new happiness items, which is nice “optional fun”, but not necessary if you’re not facing a shortage of happiness items. Further expansion could be done for fun, but isn’t really “required” or rewarded by the game mechanics - unlike the growth at the beginning that’s fundamentally necessary to make progress in the tech tree.

Every problem mentioned above is something we’re striving to improve. The gameplay should keep being rewarding after you’ve unlocked matchlock guns. We’ve talked about industrial content before and we’re still convinced that that could be a lot of fun. But we don’t want industrial content to just be retextured old jobs with some new “copy-pasted” items, like an “industrial meal” that offers even more happiness and calories. It also shouldn’t feel like you’re constantly forced to switch to a new random collection of messy items. Currently, the cook is a bit like that, with a huge list of required items (honey, cabbages, chicken meat, olive oil, etc, etc). So we need to make things concise and a bit “predictable” without the game becoming repetitive. That’s why we think the Industrial Update should rest on two main pillars.


That’s the first pillar. Currently, the tech tree contains both “fundamental unlocks” like the wheat farmer, and “repeating progress” like the health upgrades, the banner range, and the increasing size of the digger zone. We think it’s wise to split these up. The scientist with his science bags and specific ingredients will focus completely on the fundamental unlocks.

But there should be a new job, for now called the “Repeating Scientist”. He should have a list of “researches” that can be improved incrementally. This could include the things mentioned above divided up in more steps, but also new ones like “+1 Permanent Happiness”, or “-1 Monster per Night”, “-1% Reload Time / +1 % Damage for Guard Type X/Y/Z”, “+1% Productivity for Miners/Farmers/Crafters”.

Instead of requiring new resources every new level, the Repeating Scientist should use something more consistent. For now, we’ll call it “Data”. Every level requires data, but the quantity should grow exponentially. So the first +1 Permanent Happiness could cost 100 Data, but the second one 200, the third one 400, then 800, then 1600, then 3200, and so on.

So players will have to grow their colony and scale up their Data Production to keep up with the demands of the Repeating Scientist. Luckily, this is also something we have done and are doing IRL. From clay tablets, to wax tablets, to handwritten books, to the printing press, to punch cards, to vacuum tubes, to modern computers: our capacity to store and transmit data has grown enormously. Allowing people to repeat this process in-game and to continuously choose their own rewards for it sounds like a good idea.

Data production could require lots of colonists. Just look at the images of “human computers”. And even the “data centers” of the 1960s are still crewed by a lot of workers - and then we aren’t even talking about all the invisible infrastructure in manufacturing these machines and providing them with electricity.


Manufacturing and using these modern machines shouldn’t be a reskin of older jobs. It should introduce new challenges - and we’d prefer challenges in building to challenges in “navigating the UI to balance lots of items”. We’re thinking about pipes that can transmit fluids from storage tanks to machines and vice versa (sorry, no awesome “freeform” fluid dynamics planned, this’ll be more like the pipes in Factorio), and these could be fluids like water (hopefully with a modifiable temperature), oil and perhaps even things like acids for special processes.

Imagine a large, multi-block machine that requires you to connect pipes with oil and water to generate electricity, and then building a cable from that machine to your data center to operate lots of primitive, clunky computers that are being operated to produce data for your Repeating Scientist. We think that could be a very interesting challenge that is both fun for the player ánd provides a good reason to recruit many hundreds of extra colonists (which is a challenge itself that can be made a bit easier with the Repeating Scientist).

Pipes and trains in mods by Pandaros


Now of course, the Industrial Update shouldn’t solely be this. We want to integrate it nicely with the rest of the game - there should also be guards with “industrial weapons” and you should be able to produce and distribute “industrial happiness items”. Eventually, there should also be “industrial monsters” and “industrial transport”. And the transition from the current content to industrial content should be smooth instead of sudden.

Assuming we succeed in doing that - do you think this would be a good course for future development? Do you agree with our observations at the start of the blog? Or has working on this game for 7 years made us blind to the experience and demands of regular players? Let us know, here or on Discord!

Bedankt voor het lezen :D

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The new update is available for everybody right now! It’s 100% compatible with older savegames. The biggest change is the addition of the statistics menu. It displays a wide variety of data:

• Stockpile. It shows how many of each item have been present in your stockpile. It’s a useful tool to figure out how much you’re structurally under- or overproducing.
  
• Happiness. A history of all happiness effects. The effects of individual items are tracked, just like the effects of crowdedness, rationing and “misc causes”.
  
• Food Intake. Data on the diet of the average colonist. How much calories does he consume, and which food items contribute to that?
  
• Total Calories. Displays the total amount of calories you've had stored in the stockpile over time. There's a line for the true total, and individual trackers for each food item.
  
• Idle Job Time. When your workers lack ingredients, or when they’ve reached the specified limits, they stop working and start idling. The graph shows how much time has been spent idling in every job category. This way, you can easily figure out which jobs have been the most unproductive.
  
• Colony. Shows the history of the data in the top-left corner: total amount of colonists, beds and unemployed colonists.
  
• Inbound & Outbound Trade. This should give a much clearer view of how your trade between colonies is going.

A category like stockpile contains a long, long list of items. To help you find exactly what you want, we’ve added a search bar to the statistics menu. But instead of merely using it to find items with a name that matches your search term, we wanted to give players some extra tools to find exactly what they want. That’s why it’s now possible to enter commands into the search bar.

You can use “>#” and “10 into the search bar will filter all items that number 9 or less out of the list.

The command “cat:” can be used to display items from a certain category. Typing cat:food will result in a list of all items related to food production. All of these commands can be combined. So cat:food >10 is a valid command that will result in a list of all food-related items with an item count between 10 and 100. For the categories “food” and “luxury” there is an alternative command, “is:”. While cat:food returns all food-related items, is:food returns only edible items.

Here’s a list of all categories: seed - decorative - leaves - essential - grass - planks - job - bees - bricks - carpet - cobblestone - iron - lantern - stairs - colonykits - flower - ingredient - edible - luxury - weapon - combat - ammo - bronze - fuel - tropics - raw - copper - cotton - new world - transport - gold - linen - far east - sciencebag - silver - steel



These commands can be used in both search bars: the one in the stockpile, and the one in the statistics menu. To notify new users about their existence, we’ve added a couple of buttons to the stockpile where important categories can be selected by clicking a button. Clicking the “food” button will automatically enter “cat:food” into the search bar.

We’ve also thought about mods. Mod items function identically to vanilla items, so they should automatically appear in the statistics menu. It’s also possible for modders to add completely new categories of statistics!

Last and probably least, there’s a list of minor changes to the game. A visible one is a change to the “job squares” of guards; the job squares of night guards are slightly darker now. For a complete overview of all changes, check the in-game changelog!

The statistics menu is a large, complex feature and we’d love to know how it’s working for you. Is it intuitive? Are there bugs? Are you missing certain functionalities? Let us know! We’re on standby, and we’ll be reading all comments; here on Steam, on Discord, on Reddit and Twitter. If something needs fixing, we’ll try to accomplish it as soon as possible.

Veel plezier in 0.7.3! :D

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This was a week of testing and finishing touches. Names were changed for cosmetic reasons and clarity. Performance was increased and network usage reduced. Mod support was expanded: modders now have the ability to collect and display custom statistics! Zun is still working on adding a new category of data: total stored calories, including a true total and totals per food type. It shouldn’t take long, so the Monday release date is pretty definitive!

I must admit, it had been a while since my last playthrough of Colony Survival, without cheats. To test the new statistics, I mostly loaded up pre-existing worlds. This time, I planted my banner in a self-made hole in the side of a cliff. It’s a challenging location which results in all kinds of weird paths to make sure workers and guards can get where they need to be without monsters getting to the banner. I had a lot of fun!

In the months since my last legitimate, serious playthrough, I’ve played quite some other games and done a lot of thinking about UI design. Playing CS with this fresh perspective resulted in a large amount of new insights. There are a lot of things that can be changed or tweaked to make the game more intuitive and streamlined.



Next week, we’ll be listening to your experiences with and comments on 0.7.3, and hotfixes will be deployed when necessary. Afterwards, we’ll start working on new changes to the UI, and implementing those new insights.

0.7.4 is will be mainly cosmetic. A lot of the new 0.7.0 UI features are pretty barebones, like the colony tab and the trading menu. They really need a “coat of paint”. Lots of places could use a tooltip to become a bit clearer. We need to make the UI look more professional while simultaneously being more intuitive to use.

When the current UI looks decent, we want to add some new menus. They will be split among multiple updates (0.7.5, 0.7.6, 0.7.7). For example, there should be a Job Management Menu which indicates how many job slots of each type are empty. It should also be possible to prioritize certain jobs, to make sure they get manned when there’s a shortage of workers.

Another new menu that I’m really looking forward to is a decent Message System. Currently, important messages and warnings are sent straight to the chatbox, where they appear as a simple, single line of text. We’re thinking of something that’s a bit of a cross between the pop-ups in the traditional Total War games and Gmail. Different icons should appear in the corner of the screen to indicate different messages: lack of workers to fill a job, science completed, colonists killed by monsters. You should be able to click on them or find them in a list of messages to get more info. New players can use this info to learn the game quicker; expert players can use it to pinpoint problems more precisely.

When the Message System is in-game, we can also add new kinds of messages that are currently impossible. The one I’m really excited for is the “Daily Report”. Imagine, every day at sunrise, a streamlined report that clearly conveys information like this:

• Congratulations, your colony survived day #!
  
• In the past night, your guard type A/B/C killed # monster of type X/Y/Z
  
• In the past 24 hours, you gained/lost # colonists and added/removed # jobs
  
• # amount of happiness item A/B/C were distributed to your colony, resulting in # happiness

All these improvements to the UI should make the content that's currently in-game a lot more accessible. We feel like 0.7.0 was a bit of an unstable house of cards, and 0.7.6 should be a stable platform before we can once again start adding new jobs, features and items!

Bedankt voor het lezen :D

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Wil's colony

We decided on a release date for the next update! It’s Monday May 10. This gives us one big week to perfect the last couple of details.

This week, we added the last big new category to the statistics menu: info on idling colonists. When you’ve got a lack of workers with a certain job, your production chain will break down because of shortages. But the reverse can also happen: too many workers in one job, resulting in a lack of items to craft, or a lack of ingredients to craft those items.

Unlike in real life, idling workers don’t have any benefits in Colony Survival. It doesn’t cause them to relax and become happier; it doesn’t make them ponder about their work methods resulting in boosted efficiency. It’s a costly waste: these colonists don’t produce anything but they keep consuming food and happiness items, and their mere presence attracts extra monsters every night.

But determining which workers are truly superfluous is pretty hard. Periods of idling come and go. Many colonies start the day furiously compensating for ammo lost during the day, but these tasks are often finished long before the day is over. Other shortages in the supply chain can cause idling to appear and disappear randomly throughout the day.

Accurately assessing this while physically strolling through your colony is pretty difficult, and the statistics menu makes it a lot easier. It counts the total amount of milliseconds spend idling per second, per job category. When lots of workers in a job category start idling, they generate a massive peak that is easy to identify. When you compare these peaks to the trend in earlier days, it becomes very easy to notice structural issues in your job allocation.



We’ve made more progress this week. A couple of weeks ago, we added a new system allowing players to use commands in the search bar. These commands can be used to search for specific categories, or to filter out items based on other parameters. To make players familiar with this new system, we’ve added buttons to the stockpile. In the previously empty space next to the search bar, there are a couple of buttons that put helpful “default commands” into the search bar. In the screenshot below, you can see how this works with the “combat” button.



We also spend this week doing seemingly unimportant optimizations that are required to get the update up to release quality. One example is localization, another can be seen in the screenshot below. As you can see, some texts are rendered sharper than others. That has been fixed, but they’re the kind of unpredictable small problems that make the difference between “functional” and “ready for release”.



There are still a couple of similar problems waiting to be addressed. Right now, Zun is testing performance on worlds with lots of colonies with lots of colonists - like servers with many players. We’ve also still got to look at the way this update impacts mods. And today, we’re starting a closed beta test that might result in unforeseen problems. But we’re pretty convinced that we’ll be able to release update 0.7.3 in 9 days, on Monday May 10!

Bedankt voor het lezen :D

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All screenshots in today's Friday Blog are made in Wil's colony!

[All changes concern the internal dev build which will hopefully be released to the public in 1-2 weeks]

Lots of new features got added to the statistics screen this week. Happiness data is now separated into individual happiness items. This makes it a lot easier to figure out problems with unhappy colonists by analysing historical trends. The same has happened to the calories data: you can track the individual components of the diet your average colonist eats. Two other categories track inbound and outbound trade. It’s a lot easier to keep track of trade relationships between colonies now.

Last week, Comrade Matt left a comment with a good suggestion: Honestly features like statistics, if they work without particularly bad bugs should just be released as they develop. On first sight, I agreed - why are we waiting so long to release this feature? So, I asked Zun. The answer is twofold. Firstly, as always, updates often generate a lot of work for mod developers and server hosts. But lots of people don’t use these features, so they don’t really care about that. For these people, a relevant part two: the statistics menu is pretty sensitive. After only a minor change, it needs to reload all data. Pretty much every Friday for the past weeks, I start the day by idling a colony for an hour to get new data in the most recent build.

To get data for the full 24 days, the max time range you can see on the graph, you’ve got to play for five hours! We’re pretty sure that people will be disappointed when we release the stats screen and we erase all their hard-earned data one or two weeks after the update. So we’re making sure that all the important data is in there, and that bugs and problems are fixed as good as we possibly can before releasing.



There’s one big category left that we want to include: % job idling. When a certain type of job has reached the limit of every item they produce, or if they lack the ingredients to produce a single in-demand item, all colonists with that job will be idling. Sometimes, this happens pretty randomly because you’re messing with supply chains. But in a lot of situations, there are clear patterns to recognize: for example, colonists start by crafting lots of ammo and reach the recipe limit around 2PM - resulting in these colonists idling for most of the afternoon. We think the statistics graph can help immensely to make this clearer.



When job idling has been added to the graph, the update needs a couple of finishing touches. We need to check the impact of big colonies on performance - bigger & more colonies = more data. Currently, all the data is gathered in one frame, and it might be useful to smooth that out over a couple of frames. We must allow proper localization of the new menu, and we’ve got to see how it works with mods. 0.7.1 added a lot more advanced mod support. 0.7.2 changed the lighting, but barely had an impact on mods. This could be the first time we’re going to break mods with the new mod support system, so we might have to add some UI for outdated mods. Last but not least, we want to add some buttons in the empty space next to the search bar of the stockpile to explain the new system with options like searching for categories by adding “cat:”. We hope all of this can be done in 1-2 weeks, but there’s always a risk of unforeseen problems.

Bedankt voor het lezen :D

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