Colony Survival News

The last blog was quite controversial! We were very happy with the elevators, but they received quite some criticism. Two main points appeared:

1. The teleportation between stations is stupid, you need to actually be physically transported from A to B
   
2. Elevators aren’t historically accurate

The first problem has been solved! When you enter an elevator, you are attached to it (comparable to the glider) and together you travel towards your destination, completely removing the teleportation aspect.

The second problem needs some nuancing. Elevators are not meant for relatively small Bronze Age colonies that were started two hours ago. It’s more of an end goal, for large and advanced colonies that are nearing the Renaissance Age. It has an iron frame because producing it is intended to consume large amounts of iron.

With the elevator implemented, it was relatively easy to port this functionality to horizontal elevators. They are explicitly not trains: they can only travel in straight lines and they can’t go up or down or navigate corners. But combined with elevators and gliders, they should simultaneously present a rewarding goal for large colonies, and a practical means of navigating between outposts.

(For those who understandably haven’t read all blogs: we’ve implemented an Outpost Feature, allowing players to easily start nearby colonies that share the stockpile and science of the main colony. It’s a bit similar to the multiple colonies from 0.7.0, but without all the tedious problems of having to start from scratch / having to set up complex UI trading rules / having to travel excruciating distances by foot)

We’ve also overhauled the glider. Instead of being a VTOL motorised plane with difficult controls, it’s now a way more intuitive device which actually glides. Players will now place a permanent Glider Launcher, which is able to launch a glider everytime the player approaches it. Of course, the best place to do so is on top of a large tower or hill - which you’ll be able to scale quickly with the help of an elevator. Here’s a video of the full system in action:

https://youtu.be/K3i80CEm-Z0
This might seem like a feature that is not connected to the core of 0.9.0, but it is. Colony Survival is all about growing and expanding your colony, but it needs to have a purpose. And it needs to be something more unique, more ‘physical’, than merely repetitive new items with even higher numbers. The game isn’t fun if it’s an endless cycle of “Monster with 100,000 HP appeared, unlock your 100,000 damage weapon now! Oh no, a monster with 1,000,000 HP appeared!”.

The later ages need to unlock new features that change the way you play and the way you build your colony. And these things need to sensibly require advanced technology and lots of colonists. Simultaneously, we also need better ways to navigate between Outposts, which are a crucial part of 0.9.0 and a significantly cheaper way to access precious resources.

We think the Elevators and Glider Launchers fit these criteria perfectly. I’m working on filling in the rest of the tech tree and re-integrating content like the muskets and the printing press. We’re strongly looking forward to testing it and hopefully being able to open up the beta before Spring is over.

Bedankt voor het lezen!

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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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