Colony Survival News

Since the release of 0.7.0, we've been doing a lot of thinking. How is 0.7.0 received? What works, and what doesn't? What are the best improvements we could add to the game in the next one to two years? Our ideas are steadily getting clearer and we'd love to share them. We'd love to have your feedback!
Disclaimer: the exact order and content of the updates is not set in stone: it is prone to change


In two weeks, Zun is leaving for holiday. If we'd release a big change now, we might run into problems requiring patches while Zun is gone, and we don't want to risk that. So in the next two weeks, we'll only release minor updates, followed by four weeks of no changes.


This will probably be the update that adds Steam Workshop support. That'll make it a lot easier to share, find and add mods. In the same update, we'd like to add support for individual mods per world. Instead of mods altering the entire game, you could download multiple mods simultaneously and have multiple worlds with their own configuration: a world without any mods, a world with one specific mod, a world with multiple mods combined, etcetera.


Here, we'll enhance the interface, making it a lot easier to understand and manage your colony. The changes would include:

• Enhancing the happiness menu to be clearer
  
• A menu that keeps track of how many of each job you've got
  
• A menu that allows you to set the "priority" of empty jobs: when you've got 25 empty jobs and you recruit a new colonist, should he be a guard, farmer or crafter?
  
• A statistics menu that keeps track of your production stats per day, and your stockpile stats over time
  
• Integrating these statistics into the science menu: for example, kill 250 monsters with bronze arrows before you can unlock the crossbow, or harvest 1000 olives to boost the productivity of olive farmers

With the new features and added complexity of 0.7.0, we've been receiving more complaints about the game being hard to get into. To counter this, we'd like to add a "Mission System". Imagine missions like:

• Place a banner
  
• Place three beds
  
• Recruit three colonists
  
• Place a berry farmer
  
• Place a night slinger
  
• Place a copper miner
  
• Unlock bread production
  
• Distribute 10 candles to colonists
  
• Unlock the crossbow
  
• Unlock the glider
  
• Start a colony in the Far East

When you click on a mission, you'd get a pop-up that explains how to accomplish this task. The mission system won't be in the way of experienced players, they can chose to ignore them completely. But we believe they'd be very useful for new players.


We described the benefits of this perspective in last week's blog. Instead of using the mouse to move the camera and physically navigate your character, players can use it to hover over UI elements to get tooltips, and to easily expand and close certain menus.

But it has more benefits than merely making the game clearer and easier to play. We've been thinking of a couple of features for a long while now, and think they're very hard to accomplish smoothly in a first person perspective. These features are:

• Blueprint builders
  
• Multi-block jobs
  
• Secondary banners to expand the safe zone

Properly alligning the safe zone of your "extension-banner" with your first banner will be extremely difficult from a first person view. You'll either have a gap where monsters spawn, or you'll have overlapping areas that waste some of the safe zone from the second banner. Both are not ideal. But this task will be easy to accomplish from a top-down view. The same holds true for blueprint builders and multi-block jobs.

Of course, the first person view still stays an important part of the game! The top-down perspective is an optional tool, we're not suddenly dropping the first person gameplay.

Mod content by Pandaros and Xweert



Here we'd like to add a transition to a new time period with new resources, jobs and items. Imagine extracting resources like oil and rubber from the tropical biome and using them to make new happiness items like primitive radios and televisions.

Instead of making this new era work exactly like the old one, with simple 1x1x1 blocks requiring merely a colonist and some ingredients to craft anything, we'd like to add some new gameplay mechanics here. Imagine more complex job-blocks like:

• a job that requires electricity
  
• a steam engine that is multiple blocks tall and wide and that requires a pipe with filled with steam and 4 working colonists to generate electricity
  
• a boiler that requires a pipe filled with water and fuel to generate steam

At the end of the industrial era (and thus pretty much the end of the game) there could be unlocks like a jetpack that makes creating tall buildings a lot easier, or teleporters that at the cost of high amounts of electricity allow you to instantly travel to a distant colony.

We'd love to know what you think about these ideas! Leave a comment here or share your feedback on Discord.

Heath in the Netherlands, pic by Pipliz



0.7.0 generated a lot of new attention for Colony Survival. We're very happy about that! Lots of new people joined our Discord, and this also lead to some spam attacks. To deal with this, Zun set up ZunBot, a mechanized version of Zun's moderating talents. Instead of running ZunBot on our own PCs, we decided to rent a cloud server and run him there.

We're now also using that cloud server for automatic back-ups and other things. This week, Zun spent quite some time optimizing the process of building and backing up new updates for Colony Survival. Things should go faster now, while being more secure.

And that's not the only optimization he worked one. Some parts of the game, like terrain generation, depend on pretty complex code and require quite a lot of computational power. This code was standard C#. Zun rewrote it in the programming language Rust and compiled it to a native DLL. This should significantly increase performance. The biggest problem is making it work on Mac and Linux as well so Zun's working on that.

Two weeks ago, I announced that I was going to take a holiday in German forests or Austrian Alps. Sadly, the weather forecasts changed from "sunny and comfortable" to "uncomfortably hot and/or thunderstorms", so I decided not to travel abroad. But relaxation is possible in the Netherlands too - see the picture above.

Bedankt voor het lezen!

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Lots of you have participated in last week's survey and we'd like to thank you for that! We've received over 300 responses, giving us a good insight in what people think of the update, the future of the game and the Friday Blog. We'd like to discuss the results in detail.

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In general, most changes receive five or four stars, and we're very happy with that. But it's good to take a look at the weaker parts of the update. The happiness system and the glider are the least popular. As far as we understand, those who are critical of the happiness system think it's complex, complicated and tedious. The glider has also generated some confusion about how it functions, and we've heard complaints about both specifically the glider being slow and travel in general being a hassle. We think these are the main issues we've got to adress. More about specific solutions later in the blog!

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When we first released Colony Survival, everybody was demanding more content. Over time, it mostly disappeared as a vocal criticism, but people kept asking for more content in surveys. This seems to be the first time that has changed. Improvements to for example the UI are now more popular than actual new content. That's good to know - we have shifted our priorities as well!



The people have spoken. The blog will continue during Zun's holiday (mid-September to mid-October) !

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The most chosen answer for every subject is "perfectly balanced", with "more" being the second most popular option. That's pretty much the best result we could have hoped for! We'll aim for a bit more explanations, mod-highlights and surveys :)

At the end, there was the option to share your own message, and many of you used that opportunity to give us some feedback or compliments. A lot were positive, but some also contained polite but harsh criticism. Here's an example:



We're of course not going to revert back all changes of the past year - happiness will stay part of the game. But we do agree that in some aspects, the game has become more complicated and perhaps more tedious. We're going to try to improve this by adding more systems that give players insight into for example their colony's economy, and other systems that reward growing colonies.

A new system that could help to improve clarity is a top-down view. One of the big drawbacks of a first-person strategy game is that the mouse is used solely to move the camera and navigate your character. You can only use the mouse for other tasks when you've opened a menu that blocks the center of your screen.

Imagine playing Colony Survival from a top-down perspective, with for example the command tool being a bar in the bottom of your screen, and a slider on the side that allows you to make blocks above a certain heigt invisible to help visualize interiors of buildings and underground mines. There could be some shortcuts on the edge of the screen that quickly allow you to check statistics and colony mangement menus. And of course, you can seamlessly transition back to a first person view.

We'd like to add "blueprint-builders" - colonists that can build a specific structure, first made by the player or downloaded from the Steam Workshop. We're also thinking of adding larger machines that are significantly bigger than 1 block, like a steam engine or nuclear reactor that's at least 6x6x8 blocks large and employs multiple colonists. Deploying such structures from a first person perspective will be hard and awkward, but we think we can make it work decently from a top-down view.

This new perspective could make playing the game a lot more streamlined and intuitive, something that is desparetely needed because of all the new content from 0.7.0. We've got other ideas to accomplish this as well and will explain more about them in future blogs. For now, we'd like to know how you feel about an optional top-down perspective. Is it exciting, are you neutral about it, or is it a waste of development time? Let us know in the comments or on Discord!



In the past week, we've released two new updates. 0.7.0.136 adds more options to trading. You can now limit trading based on the inventory of the target colony, and you can limit the total amount of items that will be traded.

0.7.0.137 reworks a significant part of the client scene management. This is important because we received reports from people who encountered multiple menus overlaying eachother. That issue should be fixed now. There are a couple of other minor changes in the update. To see the full changelog, visit #070-changelogs on our Discord or GitHub.

Bedankt voor het lezen!

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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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