Colony Survival News

All changes mentioned in this blog concern the internal dev build. Nothing has been released publicly yet.

This month, work on the Oddity Press has continued. It works like the Mill: specific items will be produced there, over time, without a colonist present. But the Oddity Press will be unlocked later in the game, and it mainly produces decorative items.

The Press is a moving object. The wheel rotates and the press itself goes up and down. All of that is currently functional in the dev build. And the actual production of decorative items is already happening as well!


One of the new items is going to be a new, more decorated bed. This being a Dutch game, our colonists are tall. Current beds fit neatly within two voxels, but the colonists are squeezed into them, feet clipping through the bed frame.

The new bed fixes this. It requires three voxels in length. The bed itself is significantly longer than two voxels, and the rest of the third voxel is taken up by a chest. This allows for more decoration on the bed, and a cozy fit for the colonist.

We're planning to make the paint feature compatible with these beds. Painting them should result in different variants of the same type of bed.

This “fancy bed” will be an extra option, and it does not replace the old, simple bed.


We’re also working on a very functional new bed type: bunk beds! Place one item and two colonists can sleep there. These should be very useful for people who want to make optimal use of space.


The first decorative furniture and “item-piles” have been added to the dev build. We added an empty desk and a little table. Both of these are exactly one voxel tall.


The “item-piles” are groups of small objects with different themes. They can be laid down upon voxels, but they can also be put on top of the new furniture.

The desk is two voxels wide, and has two separate spots for these item-piles. But it’s not merely item-piles that can go on there! You can also stack furniture on top of other furniture, or build on them with regular voxels.


All of this should help give players a lot more options to make their colonies and blueprints look much more alive and organic!

Bedankt voor het lezen :D

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Culling frozen right in front of Lagoon's castle - invisible terrain does not get rendered

Colony Survival was a Daily Deal last Sunday. For an entire week, the game is 50% off! This is the moment to purchase the game for yourself, to recommend it to your friends - or to gift it to them!

Until this update, the game rendered everything the camera pointed at. But of course, visually rendering things that are not visible is a waste of computing power and energy.

So, if you can determine what is invisible to the player and skip that in the rendering process, you get serious optimization benefits. Except… that you kinda have to render the world to determine what is visible and what’s invisible.

But, this “test render” doesn’t have to be as detailed as the render output you actually see as a player. You can skip textures and lighting, you can do it in a lower resolution, and you can even combine individual voxels into larger blocks in the distance,

So this is what Zun has been working on these past few weeks. A quick “test render” determines what is invisible and excludes that from the “final render”, which is rendered in full resolution and detail. This process is called “culling”.

Correctly implementing this without glitching was quite difficult. There are a lot of edge cases. What if a hill isn’t visible - but the shadow it casts is? Solutions had to be found for all these problems.

And Zun succeeded in that! Culling seems to work in all situations. If you’re standing in an open field without player-built structures, it doesn’t have a very significant performance impact. But where fields of crops are hidden behind walls, castles or hills, or when you're inside underground colonies, or when walking through dense cities with twisty streets, there is a very serious performance improvement!

The "Culling Texture" right in front of Lagoon's towers

Optimization is always good, but this new feature is a necessary prerequisite before we can work on two other things we’d like to add in the future:

1. Cave generation. They cost performance compared to the flat, “2D” terrain we currently have, but now culling will make exploring and settling them actually less performance intensive than walking outdoors.
   
2. More meshes for wild plants and flowers, to make the world and terrain generation more interesting and diverse. They cost performance too, but if they’re culled when not visible, their impact is greatly reduced.
   

These will not arrive in 0.15.2 though. That update, which will be released in a couple of weeks, will focus on the “Oddity Press”, which gives access to a lot of decorative content, and some UI enhancements.

If you want to experiment with the details of culling, we have some tools available for that. Go to Gameplay Settings and enable developer buttons. Press F5 to display a performance graph. Press F6 to show dev features. There, you can enable and disable culling, show the “Culling Texture”, and freeze culling.

Is this causing visual glitches or performance issues for you? Running into other problems? Please let us know in the comments or on Discord.

Veel plezier met 0.15.1!

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Colony Survival is currently 25% off until 5 January!

Welcome to the last blog of 2025! We want to start out with a heartfelt thank you to all our readers. To everybody who bought the game and has made it possible for us to be dedicated to this project full-time. To everybody who left feedback, wrote a Steam Review, recommended the game to friends, shared a blueprint, uploaded a world, created a mod. We literally could not have done this without you! We wish you all a very Merry Christmas and an amazing 2026.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S9mLnbCWU18
2025 saw a lot of work on polish, quality-of-life, accessibility and scaffolding that we can continue to build on for years to come. The year opened with a new collaboration with Allcorrect, which helped us translate the entire game into a bunch of major languages. We released 0.13, which added explosives and rubble that's visible every time you remove a block. 0.14 made paths relevant: blocks now affect the movement speed and pathfinding of colonists. It also gave colonists and monsters the ability to move diagonally.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QgYrI0gWX3g
The biggest update of the year was released less than a month ago: 0.15. It added the top-down view and blueprints. We have many plans to expand on this in the future!


We’ve already started working on 0.15.1. The main gameplay addition will be the “Oddity Press”. It will work in a similar way as the windmill: it can craft items without a colonist being present. But where the windmill is aimed at producing functional blocks for the early game, the Oddity Press is aimed at totally non-functional items. It will produce tables, chairs, desks, decorative items and furniture without any clear gameplay advantage, but that will be crucial to anyone trying to build a lively, immersive world.

The most popular mods are focused on delivering such items to players, and it’s still a very common request by players. With the new blueprint systems, it has become a lot easier to spread such decorations throughout the world.

We’re planning to organize another builder’s contest, focused on blueprints. But we will wait until the Oddity Press is finished and available to all!


Zun’s working on occlusion culling. Currently, all objects in the direction the camera aims at are rendered. But a bunch of these are often not actually visible to the player, like farms hidden behind buildings or hills. If you can figure out which of these are invisible before the scene is rendered, then you can just skip these objects completely. This has large performance benefits - especially for underground colonies.

Such techniques are essential if you want to render large, complex cave systems. Currently, the world generation doesn't render caves - but we’re definitely hoping to add them later!

Sadly, caves won’t be a 2026 Q1 thing. But the Oddity Press and new builder’s contest are definitely planned for that :D

Hele Fijne Kerstdagen en een Gelukkig Nieuwjaar!

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https://youtu.be/QgYrI0gWX3g
For a quick and clear overview of all new features, read Blog 261

Ladies and gentlemen - welcome to a new era.

After more than a decade of development, this first-person strategy game finally acquired an (optional!) new perspective, the traditional view for strategy games: top-down.

This changes everything.

Think about real life. What jobs match strategy games the best? Architects and generals. But their main design work doesn’t happen on the frontline or in the middle of a construction site. It happens at a headquarters or office, standing next to a big table filled with maps, or a desk full of blueprints. This helps them to get an overview and see the whole picture, to make adjustments in a dozen different spots without physically travelling to a dozen different spots.


Colony Survival faced a bottleneck. We couldn’t make the game much more complex without making it too annoying and frustrating to deal with for a lot of players. But with the top-down view, we’re giving maps to generals and clear blueprints to architects. Things become easier to comprehend and to manage - which gives us new room for added complexity.


To start using the top-down view, complete the brand-new option in the tech tree: the Overseer’s Desk. It’s a desk full of maps and blueprints that can be used to activate the top-down view.

The buttons on the right allow you to adjust the view. The house icon activates X-Ray Vision, which filters out all blocks above a certain height. When it’s on, the blue arrows can be used to adjust that height. The lightbulb toggles the lamp on your cursor on and off. The icon with the monster allows you to see the area where monsters spawn.


The buttons at the bottom give you access to the command tool, the banner tool, and the tools related to blueprints. The one on the left is the “Scanner Tool” - it allows you to select a building in your world and turn it into a blueprint that can be used again and again.

On the right is the “Placer Tool”. It opens your list of blueprints, and allows you to select them and put them into your world. The “Import Blueprint” button is greyed out by default, but lights up when you’ve copied a string of characters that works as a blueprint.


To generate these blueprint-codes yourself, just press the “share” button. We’ve already got a channel on our Discord called Blueprints Collection, which is full of codes generated by beta testers. Feel free to share your best blueprints there, with some screenshots! Or grab the ones that others have produced. If you'd really like to avoid Discord, there's also a Steam Forum with the same purpose.

Blueprints work just like other construction areas. Place job spots around the area, and construction workers will come to build the blueprint block by block.


We'll highlight two specific blueprints. The first one is Darkwind Gatehouse by Acapla. It can be seen in the image above. It's part of a set of blueprints related to walls, and they all fit together. The blueprint-code is:

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

In contrast to the traditional and rustic Darkwind Gatehouse is the Piedmeutian Style Low-Income Housing Unit. Do you need a convenient rectangle to house your colonists or shelter your jobblocks? Build one of these - or a dozen! Credits go to the designer, Fenn.

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

Apart from the top-down view and blueprints, 0.15 has also replaced the old meshes for the merchant hub, grocery store, tool shop and sacred failsafe with new ones. The new ones are a lot more detailed, and larger too.

Wherever you’ve placed them already in your world, the old ones will remain. But as soon as you remove them and add them to your inventory, they will be converted to the new mesh!

Some other items, like wheat and berry bushes, have also received a fresh coat of paint.

Talking about painting - the paint system has been expanded! Fences, pillars and architraves are now paintable. Painted planks have also received an upgrade.

Last but certainly not least - plaster is back in the game!

Enjoy 0.15, and let us know how you feel about these changes :D We'll read all the comments here and we're monitoring Discord actively. Thank you beta testers!

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Update 0.15 is available for a public test right now! The core new feature is the top-down perspective. Unlock the Overseer’s Desk in the tech tree, place it in your colony, and click on it to switch to this perspective.

From the top-down view, you get access to the new Blueprints feature. There is a “Scanner” which allows you to select and save parts of your world. Right next to it is a “Placer” that opens a list of all saved blueprints that you can place back into your colony. A placed blueprint will start a construction project, and you need to assign construction workers to build the project.

Blueprints can also be exported to codes, or imported from them. This allows you to easily share buildings between worlds, with friends or with strangers.

To help navigate indoor and underground spaces from this new perspective, we’ve also added X-Ray vision as a toggleable option. When activated, it will make everything above the height of the Overseer’s Desk invisible. But it also comes with buttons that allow you to increase or decrease the height of this “slice”.


Like the mill we added last year, the Overseer’s Desk is a lot larger than one voxel. We like the consequences of that size, both visually and in terms of gameplay. So we’ve redesigned a bunch of meshes with this new philosophy. The merchant hub, grocery store, tool shop and sacred failsafe were all tiny and bland. They are now much larger and more lively and unique. This will not affect these blocks when they are pre-existing in your world, but each one placed while playing 0.15 will have the new shape.

That’s not the only visual change! The paint system has been expanded. Pillars, architraves, fences and planks are now all paintable. The berry bush switched from a textured voxel to a 3D mesh. Wheat and barley have new meshes. And last but not least: plaster has made it back into the game!


All these features should be working. The main things that are lacking are translations and controller support. But of course, we can’t test the blueprints and the X-Ray vision in all circumstances. And that’s why we need you! Have fun trying out all the new features of 0.15, and if you notice anything weird, let us know. We’ll be monitoring all channels, but Discord and the comments under this blog get checked most frequently. And apart from bug reports, general feedback about the update is also appreciated!

To get access to the beta:
- Right-click Colony Survival in your Steam Library, choose “Properties”
- Go the “Betas” tab, enter the code pleaseshareyourfeedback
- Select the 0.15.0 branch

The game will show the version number in the bottom-right corner in the main menu.

Have fun, and pleaseshareyourfeedback :D

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