Colony Survival News

New update, new survey! Let us know what you think of 0.7.0, and what you'd like to see in the future!

Last week, we were at 0.7.0.127. We're currently at 0.7.0.135. That's more than one new version per day. Most changes were fixes to technical issues. The glider should be less glitchy and the void issue from for example this Yogscast stream should be fixed. There's a new shortcut to open the colony tab: "C". But the biggest and most noticeable thing is a new menu.



You're now able to remotely select colonies. This allows you to manage some simple things, and to find your way back to them.



It's not the prettiest interface, but it should prove itself useful!

We've also spent some time reworking the storepage, describing the new features of 0.7.0. It isn't fully done yet, but we intend to make the changes public before I leave on holiday. That's the other news: I'm planning a short holiday starting next week.

I intend to leave around Wednesday next week and am planning to return between Wednesday and Friday the week after. I'll write a Friday Blog about the poll results before I leave, and Zun will publish it at the appropriate moment, perhaps adding some words as well. When it's time for the subsequent Friday Blog, I should be back. If I'm not, you should look for me in Germany's forests or somewhere in the Alps!

Bedankt voor het lezen en vergeet de enquête niet :)

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During last week's Friday Blog, version 0.7.0.123 was the most recent version of the game. Currently, the main branch is at 0.7.0.127!

Firstly, the new broken achievements are fixed. You should be able to unlock all achievements related to 0.7.0 now.

Secondly, we've patched some older achievements. The bloomery and the kiln were merged in the tech tree, just like the health improvements. This broke the achievements related to them. Everything should work as intended now!

In last week's blog, we discussed issues regarding beds and the way colonists selected them. A fair share of players complained that colonists chose distant beds for unclear reasons.

We explained the semi-broken way bed selection works (straight line through walls instead of actual path) and hoped this could help players solve their bed problems. But it turns out that is not the entire story. The bed selection in 0.7.0 was worse compared to 0.6.3. It was caused by a simplification that could easily lead to weird choices.

So, that has been fixed. Bed selection still isn't perfect, but it shouldn't be incomprehensibly bad either. For those who had "bed problems": please let us know if you notice a difference!



When we released Colony Survival, wheat and flax were probably the only crops. It made sense that they required wheat seeds and flax seeds.

In the past two years, we added plenty of other plants. Especially 0.7.0 adds a huge amount of crops: cabbages, barley, rice, sugar cane, tomatoes, potatoes and many more.

In 0.1.0, wheat seeds were an important part of your economy. But we didn't think it would be fun to have to worry about dozens of different seeds in 0.7.0. So, we decided to remove the necessity for seeds entirely. You're still able to purchase them from the shop, but for example unlocking bread production doesn't grant 400 wheat seeds anymore, as it did in the past.

This had one important negative side effect that we didn't think about: players are no longer able to revive a colony that lost its food supply by growing and harvesting their own wheat. We received some serious complaints about that, and decided to release a simple patch: the first five colonists are free. Set them to work as berry gatherers and you'll be able to restart a fallen colony! It's not a major change to the game, but it should be very useful in specific situations.

Apart from these noticeable changes, there's a longer list of smaller improvements that might not affect gameplay directly but are still important. Some changes help with debugging, others improve networking. The full changelog can be found on Discord or GitHub.



In the middle of September, Zun is going to embark on his first big holiday since the release of Colony Survival more than two years ago. He'll be going to Japan for a month. While he's gone, it'll be very hard to release updates.

We're planning to release some useful new features before Zun's holiday. One feature that we expect to be finished in time is a "Job Priority Menu". Currently, if you've got multiple unfilled jobs, it's impossible to determine which one will be picked by a newly recruited colonists.

That's pretty unhandy in general, but can be dramatic in certain situations, especially when your colony is struggling, you've lost a bunch of colonists and you desperately need more guards or farmers. The Job Priority Menu will by default prioritize these jobs above for example scientists, and allow players to tweak it.

Another thing we'd love to add is decent statistics, so players can better understand and predict what they need. We're planning to combine these statistics with the science menu, requiring for example 1000 bronze arrows to be fired before you can unlock the crossbow. We're unsure if this can be finished before Zun leaves though, so it might not be added until after he's back!

Bedankt voor het lezen :)

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It has been a week since 0.7.0 was released! It feels like a much longer period. We've received lots of feedback, and nearly everybody had a positive view of the update. There have been some issues though.

Twenty minutes before the release of the update, Zun uploaded a new build with optimized networking. Sadly, it introduced major problems when trying to load a world. So shortly after releasing 0.7.0, we had to release a hotfix that reverted back the networking.

A problem that hasn't been fixed yet is broken achievements. The achievements for colonizing new biomes and the 100+ happiness achievement cannot be unlocked. This should obviously be resolved.

The most pressing issues that Colony Survival still had in 0.6.3 are resolved in 0.7.0. FaceIt doesn't break the game anymore and savegames are way less likely to corrupt. But there are still some wonky behaviors that can cause issues.

One of them is pathfinding. Colonists look for the closest bed, crate and grocery store in a straight line, right through the ground, walls and floors. They do not care about the actual path they have to take.

Generally, in large colonies where jobs, beds and crates are spread out evenly, this doesn't cause any issues. But it can create lots of confusion in specific scenarios.



Let's take a look at the example above. There's a house with beds for guards and farmers, and there's a mine with a couple of colonists. Inside of the mine, there's an underground room with beds where the miners can sleep.



When nighttime arrives, the miners leave their jobs and walk towards the underground room with beds.



...and they walk straight past it to claim the beds in the house. They even go past the beds on the ground floor and go to the basement. They deliberately search out the farthest beds possible.

But actually, they're the closest beds! They're right above them when they're working. So these are the beds they claim, and then they calculate a path towards them, not caring about available beds along the way.

These issues can compound and cause further issues. There might be colonists working right next to the house who lose their beds. If other nearby beds are also claimed already, they might have to walk a long distance towards beds on the other side of the colony.

It's pretty easy to prevent these problems:

1. Place beds abundantly. When you've got eight guards, build barracks with ten beds.
   
2. Don't make very complex paths with beds hidden behind difficult mazes.

Follow one or both rules and you'll probably be fine. But if you're building complex structures with difficult entrances and exits, and you're placing a limited amount of beds for specific groups of colonists, you'll run into problems.

We could of course change it so that colonists don't merely look for the closest bed in a straight line, but let them compare beds while keeping in mind the distance they are forced to travel. But this would dramatically increase the required computing power. Imagine hundreds or thousands of colonists, each calculating paths to multiple beds every night. It would be way less optimized, for something that is only a problem in a relatively small minority of worlds.

Still, it's a problem that we can work on. There is probably a middle ground between the current way of selecting beds and fully realistic, detailed pathfinding every night. We've also thought about other solutions, like special beds for certain jobs. Green beds for farmers, black beds for miners, grey beds for guards. If that's something that appeals to you, please let us know!



In general, we had a pretty relaxed week. We listened to feedback and watched pretty much all new Colony Survival videos on YouTube. We've discussed plans for future updates, but we haven't actually worked on the game a lot. For more than a year, we lived with the idea that we'd release 0.7.0 in a couple of months. The release really did feel like a burden was lifted of our shoulders. We're recuperating for a bit and are looking forward to the next updates!

Bedankt voor het lezen :)

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https://youtu.be/HMOwl5YMWYw --------------------------------

After more than a year of work, update 0.7.0 is now live! It's by far the largest update in the history of Colony Survival. It's a fundamental overhaul of many systems, and adds lots of new content, features and quality-of-life improvements.

We barely ever ask you to share/subscribe/like, but we're making an exception here. Tell a friend, share the trailer, write a review, subscribe to our YouTube channel - it truly helps us!



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LMaFZ8I2Xg8



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2t07K9_QuBs



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MLqoJrafuII



The trailer mentions most of the big new additions. Co-op, multiple colonies, trading, happiness, exploration, the glider. But 0.7.0 is much, much more than that. We'd like to highlight a small portion of the other improvements here!



We made big strides here. For example, the options for recruitment are a lot more advanced now.

• You can still recruit a single colonist
  
• You can enter a number and recruit a specific amount of colonists in one click
  
• You can fill the amount of empty beds
  
• You can fill the amount of empty jobs
  
• You can toggle auto-recruitment, which automatically recruits a colonist when the colony is happy, there is enough food left, and there's an empty bed & job.

With all of the new items and jobs, the economy is a lot more complex now. We're going to add better visualization and management tools in the future, but for now, one of the changes we've made is coloring the sliders. When you browse through all of the recipes of a crafting block, the color of the slider indicates whether the item is sufficiently produced (green) or severely lacking (red).

Starting servers is also a lot easier! No need to browse the game folders, you can now host servers with just the in-game interface by using the "Host Co-op" button in the main menu.

We've finally got a decent splash screen! Instead of immediately entering the main menu, launching the game will first present two screens with our logo and some important information.



The savegames were large and would sometimes get corrupted. Zun has redone them entirely and they're both dramatically smaller ánd way more resistant against corruption! They're also prepared for a planned update in the near future which adds saving on the Steam Cloud and Steam Workshop support.

Mod content by Pandaros & Xweert



While working on 0.7.0, we kept in close contact with modders and listened to their requests. As a result, mod support is a lot more extensive in the new update! Modders have had access to 0.7.0 as long as we've been working on it, and there are already awesome mods ready at this very moment.



Colony Survival was made in Unity. For the sake of stability, we didn't update from a version of Unity that was released in 2017. Update 0.7.0 utilizes a stable Unity version from 2019 that contains many upgrades.

One of the most notable improvements is (hopefully) a fix to the "getthreadcontext error" which happened often to people who had FaceIt/Avast installed. That was the most common game-breaking problem!





We've added some new tools to our toolbelt. When we released Colony Survival in 2017, nearly all icons were handdrawn. Mostly by me. And I'm not an experienced artist!

For the new update, most of the new icons were rendered in 3D. We believe it's a huge improvement, and have decided to redo some old icons as renders. Among the victims are the icons for the command tool and the banner tool.

We've also streamlined a way to add new 3D models to the game. Instead of using standard squares as job blocks, most of the new jobs use more complicated models, and we also redid some old ones in 3D. Let us know your opinion - should we replace more of the older job blocks?



It took longer than expected. We had hoped to release in 2018, and ended up fearing to miss Summer 2019. Mother Nature herself tried to delay the update by scorching the Netherlands with temperatures that are completely unprecedented in our national history. It was over 40°C (104°F) yesterday. At 10PM, it was still a windless 30°C (86°F) outside, which is also the current temperature inside. Most places don't have AC in the Netherlands!

But we pulled through! Even during these last days of development for 0.7.0, Zun added some awesome new features. The auto-recruitment toggle was asked for by the Yogscast in a recent video. Just this morning, Zun improved the bed choices of colonists, probably fixing a common complaint. We believe 0.7.0 to be an improvement in all aspects, but we love to have your opinion!

Veel plezier met 0.7.0!

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-------------IMPORTANT INFORMATION-------------
Here's how to join the beta
Official Release Date for 0.7.0:
Friday July 26, 10AM Amsterdam time / 4AM NYC / 1 AM LA / 5PM Tokyo
---------------------------------------------------------------

We've finally decided on an official release date! 0.7.0 will go live for everybody within a week. We can't wait to see how everyone will respond!

This week, we've done something that we should've done a long time ago. Zun wrote some simple scripts that calculate how much time it takes to create a specific object, keeping in mind the costs of all required ingredients. We found quite a lot of very unbalanced recipes, and we released a big update on Wednesday that overhauled a lot of them.


Old data from before the big balance patch
Fullscreen

In the 'Time/item" column, you can see how much seconds are needed to craft one item. As you can see, some items like the luxury meal and the perpetual stew take an enormous amount of time.

This is mostly compensated in the next column. It shows how many items colonists need to reach 100% distribution of that happiness type. Berries are easy to harvest but colonist need more than 4 of them, while they only need 0.03 luxury meal per day.

In the third column, these numbers are multiplied to show how much effort is required to provide all colonists with each happiness item. The next column shows how much happiness is provided to the colony when the happiness item is distributed sufficiently.

At the end is the most interesting column. It's a division of the two previous columns, effectively showing how much effort is required to produce 1 happiness.

This number is highest for berries. They're barely worth the effort, but that makes sense: they're a very primitive food source, not an effective happiness item. On the other hand: books are a very advanced happiness item, and they have a relatively low "happiness output" as well.

Happiness items that are unlocked later in the tech tree should be more effective. We've done a lot of rebalancing to make the numbers more sensible. But instead of merely looking at the output, we've also looked at the input. What jobs are necessary to produce all happiness items?


On the left the required jobs before the big balancing update; on the right the same but afterwards.
Fullscreen

Chicken meat and eggs require a lot of barley, and for example the luxury meal required three chicken meat and ten eggs. This made barley farming way too important. We've decreased both the required amount of barley, and the amount of eggs and chicken meat required as ingredients. We've changed some other recipes as well. This should make the distribution of jobs a lot more sensible, and make production a lot smoother.

Fullscreen

After some iterations, Zun decided to also count the food values. The higher the number in column H, the more effort is needed for one calorie. That number does not have to be identical: some food items are hard to unlock, other are primarly meant as happiness item. But especially the exotic food items were very unbalanced. Bread was nearly four times more effective than the rice meal. On the other hand, foofoo was even more effective than bread.

Fullscreen

In the end, we settled on this balance. The amount of effort to produce calories and happiness is a lot more consistent now, with better values for items further along the tech tree.



We're working on the final preparations for releasing the update now. We've got to redo the tutorial and manual. We're working on a splash screen with some important info and disclaimers. To make clear you're in a big new update (and that you didn't suddenly lose your savegames), we've changed the background of the main menu. Thanks PatateNouille for letting us use your creation!

We're perfectionists, and 0.7.0 isn't perfect yet. The new features and complexity increase the demand for other new features. Faster ways of transport, better tools for navigation, better ways to manage your colony, tools to remotely manage colonies, more purpose for large colonies. We'd love to add those things, but we can't justify postponing the update any longer. We do want to add these features in future updates!

We're going to film the new trailer next week, so this weekend is your last chance to submit your world to #trailer-worlds-only on Discord.

Bedankt voor het lezen :)

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