Colony Survival News

Zun had a brilliant idea this week. We need some kind of transport between colonies and their outposts. It’s a lot shorter than the distance between main colonies and the distant biomes in 0.7.0 / 0.8.0, but some alternative to walking would still be nice. And it would be great if it actually involves some building.

We’ve got the glider, but there are quite some complaints about the controls of it. And it doesn’t really make sense that the glider actually has an invisible engine, and can take off vertically and then just accelerate.

But we also don’t want to spend weeks and weeks working on a complex transport mechanic, postponing the release even further.

A demonstration of what using elevators currently looks like:
https://youtu.be/N-UaudIhhaM
So he suggested elevators. They don’t actually move in-game, for now. Nor do colonists use them. But if you build a connected elevator shaft with two “entrances”, you can “teleport” between the entrances. This has all kinds of purposes, but Zun simultaneously suggested removing the “engine” from the glider. In 0.9.0, it should only… glide, as its name suggests. That means you’ve got to build a tower to launch it from, and that tower can be climbed quickly with the new elevator mechanic!

Of course, stone age societies don’t suddenly build a functioning elevator out of wood and rock. It’s unlocked later in the tech tree, and producing a piece of elevator shaft is pretty expensive. It should be a significant goal.



The basics of the feature only took a day to develop. We’re planning to add an even more expensive horizontal variant as well. It won’t be able to twist and turn, so you’ll have to build it in a straight line from A to B. So building a “horizontal elevator” should take quite some effort, especially if you want it to look a bit nice, with bridges and tunnels. But the end result would basically be a local, specific ‘teleporter’.

We had an idea for 0.7.0, the update from 2019. We wanted to let you expand throughout the world and give purpose to some exploration. We wanted to make travelling relevant. But it didn’t turn out exactly as we liked. Lots of 0.7.0 features worked quite well, but the distant colonies were really distant, hard to set up and quite irrelevant to the core of the game.

We’re now correcting our mistakes. The original vision is still appealing, but it needs to be better. Outposts are a lot easier to set up, due to them sharing both the stockpile and science with the main colony. They will be useful to the main colony without having to be very distant. Travelling between them shouldn’t be tedious, and there should be interesting and challenging ways to build infrastructure between them. We think we're close to achieving that, and that should make the system function a lot better than it did in 0.7/0.8.

Combined with all the other changes in 0.9.0, we’re highly excited about the “new” Colony Survival. We hope to be able to open up the beta to a broad group of testers in the Spring, and we’re planning for a full release of 0.9.0 in the Summer. We hope we don’t have to postpone that release date - that would cost us our holiday ;)



Two weeks ago, we shared the news of the death of our cat Lizzy, the source of the “Liz” part in Pipliz. We received an enormous amount of supportive reactions. We couldn’t respond to all of them personally, but I do read them all. We’re deeply touched and grateful for your support.

Bedankt voor het lezen!

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The new mudbricks-block, and new textures for the old planks-block
Two weeks ago, we wrote about Zun’s extensive beta-testing. It resulted in a long list of issues, some bigger, some smaller, and we’ve been working hard to fix these issues.

New logs texture

A general issue was the lack of building material. I had focused my own tests mainly on new content and new features: tools, traps, the overhauled tech tree. I built simple colonies with walls of planks and beds in the open air. Zun has a more sophisticated approach, but that made him quite bothered by the lack of available building materials other than endless planks.

A new dirt texture that is actually distinct from logs!

I had added ‘mudbricks’ as a new cheap building material, suitable for the early ages (stone age, copper age, bronze age). While it was available in the tech tree and it could be crafted by colonists, I hadn’t bothered to add an actual texture… I hadn’t actually made new textures for ‘full’ blocks, with normal maps and height maps etcetera, in years. New jobblocks always use a mesh, and they don’t require traditional 1x1x1 textures. I was a bit worried that I would have a hard time getting back into my old workflow, and had postponed the problem.

An experiment that will probably not be in the final release, and the old planks texture

When actually trying to make the new mudbricks texture, it quickly turned out things were a lot better than I had feared! Texturing went pretty well, and I noticed that I might actually be able to significantly improve on the older textures. I regularly shared my results in #general on Discord, resulting in interesting discussions that helped to improve the final result. Thanks Boneidle, Bog, PatateNouille, Ardandal and all the others who shared their feedback and suggestions!



Lizzy was born in 2006 and quickly adopted by our family. She was smart, careful, graceful and a bit anxious. She was present during a large part of our lives. She has given us enormous amounts of joy, and we hope to have done the same for her.

Last year, she started developing some medical problems. We cared for her as best as we could, but her condition slowly deteriorated. Yesterday evening, she started to have major difficulty breathing. We took her to the veterinarian. She decided that euthanasia was the least bad remaining option. Lizzy was put to sleep and she quickly passed.

Today, we buried Lizzy.

We have one other cat: Pip. Our company is named after both cats: Pipliz. It will remain so eternally.

She is loved tremendously.

22-03-2006 - 03-03-2022

[h3]2014[/h3]



[h3]Pip and Lizzy together[/h3]





[h3]2019[/h3]

Some new meshes

Zun has been extensively testing the internal 0.9.0 dev build. He too is very happy with the new features and overhauled tech tree! At its core, 0.9.0 is much improved compared to the public 0.8 version. But, before we open up the dev build to a wider audience, we’re going to need a bunch of refinement.

One of the sore spots is the UI. New features often received ugly, bare-bones, rudimentary UIs. They’re useful for testing, but not intuitive and clear. Some older features, like distributing luxury meals, have been scrapped, but their UI is still lingering around and making things confusing. We’re working on fixing that up.

We’ve continued to convert “UI-jobs” into “item-jobs”. What that means, is that instead of using the command tool to place a glowy outline which attracts a worker, you’ve actually got to produce a ‘physical’ item which summons a worker to perform its job. We’ve had ‘cube-blocks’, 1x1x1 cubes which attract a worker to work next to the item, but we’ve now got jobs where the mesh is actually standing on the same block as the worker. For example, the water gatherer is now summoned by physically placing a special bucket-like item on a block, and the water gatherer will then work on top of that block, standing next to the visible buckets.

[Note: we've actually had "colonists working in the same 1x1 area as the mesh" before! The 2015 Greenlight build had it for both miners and guards, and 0.1.0 still had it for archers. That changed later in 2017]



There are a lot of small adjustments we want to make to the tech tree due to Zun’s test. Some examples. Zun quickly recruited a lot of colonists without advancing much in the tech tree. He hit the 100-colonist-limit, and needs 250 ColonyCoins (WIP-name) to increase that limit. Problem: the default ColonyCoin limit is 100, and has to be expanded by building and placing lockboxes.

They can only be built by the engineer, which required some more tech tree unlocking by Zun, but that was hard to do while unable to recruit new colonists. Zun managed to solve the problem by rearranging existing workers, but relatively new players shouldn’t be expected to solve a complex issue like that at the start. We’re planning to fix it by adding the lockbox recipe to the blacksmith at his anvil, which is unlocked significantly earlier than the engineer. We might also make the first colonist-limit-upgrade cheaper than the ColonyCoins-limit.



0.9.0 focuses a lot on the Stone > Copper > Bronze > Iron transition, with each material being more efficient, with Bronze being very expensive but also very powerful and durable, while Iron is cheaper, less amazing but more cost-efficient. Bronze initially requires the purchase of tin, which is very costly.

I wanted to make bronze “continuously important”, so it’s used in expendable items: ammo and tools. But this can become very confusing for players who don’t know exactly how all the mechanics and production streams work. They want to craft something important and permanent from bronze, like a jobblock, but all the rare and expensive bronze ingots they’ve got immediately get turned into bronze tools or bronze bolts, which are instantly distributed or fired away. It also means that guards which rely on bronze ammo are unreliable: if you don't buy tin, they become useless. We’re considering removing expendable bronze items entirely, but are still weighing alternatives.

At first, traps were unlocked in the Iron Age. We wanted to introduce this feature earlier, so you can now build dropper traps in the Copper Age. They have to be built above monsters, which is hard to do at scale without building narrow mazes. As a replacement for disposable bronze ammo for guards, Zun suggested bronze traps that shoot to the side. That makes it a lot easier to hit monsters, and doesn’t require players to continuously purchase tin: the ammo wouldn’t need bronze.

We’re working on dozens of small and medium-sized issues like this, and we’ll believe they’ll make 0.9.0 much more intuitive. When that’s done, we’ll start expanding the beta.

An example of a small portion of all the things-to-fix we encountered

Before the full, public release, there are some content/feature things we’d still to add. The Mission System and an improved Notification System should help a lot to introduce players to 0.9.0 and the game in general, and to better manage their much larger colonies and outposts. We’d also like to expand the Iron Age and add some extra ages to make full use of the outpost system and to have a serious challenge for advanced players. With all main features already introduced and functional, adding more content shouldn’t be too hard.

Bedankt voor het lezen :D

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This week, I’ve been test-playing the latest internal dev-build. Zun has just completed his newest feature: outposts! Back in November, we came up with that idea and the reaction from players was overwhelmingly positive.

I’ve now been able to try it out, and I don't want to exaggerate, but it truly is a lot of fun! This is what 0.7.0 should have been like. It’s way more fun to build a path towards a mountaintop and start a local mine there, than to have to fly for multiple kilometres towards a colony that is unconnected in all dimensions.

The outposts share their tech tree and their stockpile with the main colony. This makes it a lot less cumbersome to ‘restart’. You don’t have to start over from scratch, you don’t have to use tedious UI to send over some beds and food and ammo, you can just continue with your resources from the main colony.



In all previous versions of Colony Survival, only the area within your green safe zone was useful and productive. You could ignore most of the world as irrelevant. It was merely scenery. But with the outpost-feature, you start to look at the world very differently. That flat stretch of land on the other side of the river could be a great farming outpost. The forest on the other side of your colony could become a source of logs, planks and firewood. Etcetera, etcetera.

We’re going to enhance the world generation to take advantage of this new feature. What areas, what resources, can we add in the main temperate ‘spawn biome’, that will incentivize players to build all kinds of diverse outposts? We’re still working that out.

Zun and Vobbert have not played the 0.9.0 dev build yet. We’re getting very close to the moment where the dev build is sufficiently playable for a genuinely enjoyable long-term playthrough, without using cheats or commands to fix work-in-progress problems. I hope we’ll get there next week or the week after that. That version will still have quite a lot of work-in-progress-UI that is not ready for release. We're trying to streamline gameplay first, and when that's all working as intended we can design the final UI.

Then Zun and Vobbert will playtest it, fully aware of all the things that are still unfinished, and they’ll probably find some serious problems that need to be fixed ASAP. When that’s done, we hope to open up the beta to the first batch of testers. There are still multiple features and changes that we want to implement before 0.9.0 can become the main public branch of CS, and development on that will happen simultaneously to the first beta tests. But it’s always good to get feedback from beta testers relatively early!



Bedankt voor het lezen :D

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It’s the last day and the last blog of 2021! We want to start out by thanking all of you for your support and your patience. We’ve released zero public updates to Colony Survival this year, and despite that, there’s still plenty of activity in the comments, on the Discord and in the surveys. That’s very motivating! Thanks to everyone who purchased Colony Survival: we’re very grateful that we can be dedicated to its development full-time. And thanks to the modders, the server hosts, the translators and all others who are helping us improve CS!

Despite the lack of updates to CS in 2021, a lot has changed behind the scenes. Our current dev build has new core mechanics, major changes to the gameplay, and lots of new jobs and items. It has been a productive year. We would’ve loved to release a steady stream of small updates instead of one mega-big-update, but sadly, we cannot. If 0.8.0 is a decent, finished, regular car, the current 0.9.0 dev build is a streamlined sports car with a race engine, three tires, no brakes, no radio and no air-conditioning. We believe the end result will exceed 0.8.0 in all dimensions, the current work-in-progress has some impressive new features, but it’s also such a massive overhaul that it’s currently just significantly less complete than 0.8.0.

We couldn’t have planned it otherwise. Everything is so interrelated: the jobs & and the tech tree, the jobs & the world generation, the tech tree & monsters & traps, all the new changes & the interface… When you change one thing, all the related things have to be adapted as well. We don’t treat Colony Survival as a sandbox game with wildly disconnected features: it ought to be one coherent experience where you follow the tech tree from the Stone Age to the Industrial Revolution.

[h2]Animal Husbandry[/h2]

This feature was proposed way back in 2017, but we never actually implemented it. Due to the longer crafting times, 0.9.0 was getting quite heavily dependent on ‘regular jobblocks’, which means a lot of colonists standing next to randomly placed cubes. We were looking for a way to add some more ‘non-jobblock’ production to balance things out. Instead of just putting more emphasis on regular miners/farmers/fishers, we were looking for something completely new.

After a while, we came back to the animal husbandry idea. You’d have colonists actually caring for cows and/or sheep and/or goats. We’re unsure about the precise implementation, and it’s highly related to the dilemma above: should we delay 0.9.0 even further and add animal husbandry to it as well? Should we release 0.9.0 with an animal-husbandry-sized gap and add it in 0.9.1? Should we release 0.9.0 without that gap and then try to squeeze it in in a later update anyway? We’d love to have your opinion on that! Let us know in the comments or on Discord.



[h2]The Covid Situation[/h2]

Everybody is probably tired of thinking about this, but this seems like the right place to mention it for a bit. The past two years have been weird. We've had multiple periods of shops/events/gatherings/schools being limited, hospitals nearing capacity etc. There were some times where we had to digest quite some new information to properly grasp the situation, which took some time and effort. Earlier on this all slowed down development a bit, but over time it's mostly back on pace as the situation has become more known, vaccines & treatments have become available, and generally we got more used to it. Hopefully 2022 will be calmer (knocking on wood!).

[h2]2022[/h2]

Though we expect 2022 to be calmer in terms of COVID, we expect it to be a lot more exciting in terms of Colony Survival! We’re really looking forward to releasing 0.9.0. It’s going to be the biggest update CS has ever seen. It should both improve core mechanics and extend the gameplay with a lot of new content. The Yogscast often worked on the goal of recruiting 1000 colonists, but this was a stretch goal way beyond ‘regular gameplay’. We hope to make reaching 1000 colonists a sensible and expected part of completing the tech tree!

Thanks for being a part of the CS community, and we want to wish all of you a very Happy New Year :D

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Gelukkig Nieuwjaar!