Colony Survival News

0.7.5 is available on Steam right now! The update contains a bunch of much requested features and improvements:

• Major pathfinding improvements. Previously, colonists looking for a destination (a job, a bed, a crate, etc.) chose the closest object in a straight line - completely ignoring terrain, walls, floors and stairs. In small and easy-to-navigate colonies, this didn't matter much. But for complex colonies, with large underground sections and big buildings with many rooms and floors, this could lead to some really bad decisions that resulted in unnecessarily long paths for colonists. Often, this caused cascading problems, with beds intended for one group of colonists being claimed by the "wrong" colonists, resulting in problems for both groups. The colonists are making their decisions a lot more intelligently now!
  
• A compass. The compass will display the location of colony banners, making it a lot easier to explore, travel and find back your colonies, and the colonies you share with friends in multiplayer.
  
• "Limit groups" for crafting jobs. Previously, changing the production limits of a job at a job block changed the limits for all job blocks of that type. Change the amount of bronze arrows produced at one anvil, and the crafting limits of all other anvils will change as well. That's still the default functionality, but you're now able to create custom "limit groups" and you're free to change which limit group is used by every single job block. For example, you can now have one anvil set to produce bronze arrows, while another only crafts crossbow bolts.
  
• Pausing. The game now pauses when you press escape. The new system that allows us to adjust the "simulation speed" of all the game's systems to 0, also allows us to change the simulation speed to other numbers - both slow-motion and fast-forwarding. You can experiment with this by enabling developer buttons in the settings menu and then using the numpad-buttons. Alternatively, with developer buttons and cheats enabled, use "/debug setsimspeed #", with # being less than 1 for slow-motion and more than 1 for fast-forwarding.

As always, the update might contain hidden bugs. If new problems appear, please let us know and we'll try to fix them as soon as possible! Have fun with 0.7.5 :)



Previous blog explaining some biases present in survey data

Last week, we asked you to participate in a survey. More than 500 of you did so! Thanks a lot, the results are very useful, and we'll discuss the most prominent ones here. First of all - how are you doing?



A vast majority of you are doing well, which is great to hear! We hope that those of you who didn't feel well feel a lot better this week.

Next up: what things have you done surrounding Colony Survival?



A large majority has played more than 50 hours, which is pretty amazing! Despite that, a smaller proportion has reached the glider and the colonization of distant areas. Only a small minority has left a Steam Review or a comment here or on the other channels. Which makes sense - I've completed plenty of surveys on places where I've never left a comment myself. Thanks, silent majority :) (Lots of thanks to the reviewers and commenters as well, of course!)

Next question: what's a fair price for Colony Survival?



$20 is seen as reasonable by the majority but is skewed a bit to "cheap" - $25 is seen as reasonable as well but is skewed towards "expensive". $22.50 seems to be "precisely reasonable". After over three years of updates and inflation, we're seriously considering to slightly increase the price of the game. If we're reading these results correctly, a majority of you would consider that to be pretty reasonable.



"High price, frequent discount" is a common strategy for lots of games, but it doesn't seem to have a lot of support among consumers. That doesn't mean you hate all discounts though, there seems to be quite a lot of support for a discount now and then. Our last discount was back in the middle of 2018. Since then, we've added a lot of new features and done a lot of polishing, and with the next couple of updates, the game should be even more fun and intuitive for new and old players alike. We might try to get a boost of new players by holding a bit more frequent discounts in the future.

To get a sense of the biggest problem in CS, the area where improvement is the most beneficial, we divided up potentil development in five areas. To explain what these areas roughly are, we wrote a metaphor about a racing game. Here's that metaphor:



The results to that question were very clear and interesting!



It seems very clear that the "hook" question is the area that deserves the most attention. The next update should contain a major change in that area. In last week's blog, we talked about a plan to fundamentally overhaul the happiness system. That plan has gotten a lot more serious and will probably be implemented! It's not set in stone yet, so this is a great moment to voice your considerations :)

Veel plezier in 0.7.5!

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Participate in the Survey by clicking here!

Update 0.7.5 will be released next week. If everything goes according to plan, the update will be live on Wednesday. In case of unexpected issues, the release will be delayed one or more days. The release will be announced on all the usual channels.

Major new changes in 0.7.5 are:

• The ability to pause the game
  
• Crafting limit groups
  
• Improved "goal finding" - colonists should choose more sensible beds/crates/occupations
  
• A compass to find your way to colonies

With the release of 0.7.5 being very close, we've started pondering about our next plans again. We'd love to have your input, so we've organized another Survey, and we'd really appreciate it if you'd participate :)

We're thinking about fundamentally restructuring two core systems: science/the tech tree, and the happiness system. We're unsure about the precise solution and are debating many solutions.

The current happiness system gives a fixed reward for giving the (varying!) amount of colonists a certain amount of each happiness item. E.g., 20 happiness for providing each colonist with a candle per day. As you recruit more colonists, unhappiness due to overpopulation rises, while the amount of candles consumed per day grows. The reward, 20 happiness, doesn't change though. This requires players to continuously seek for new, better happiness items and to discard old ones.

In practice, this is a complex system that's not very intuitive or realistic. The continuously shifting balances and cost/reward-ratios aren't very clear. We could work very hard to make the Happiness-interface clearer, but another option is to make the mechanic itself more sensible and easier to understand.

A potential option is removing unhappiness, and giving players a fixed reward for each distributed happiness item. E.g., one candle distributed to a colonist = +1 "HAP". As you boost your production and recruit more colonists, the amount of HAPs received grows rapidly. HAPs could be integrated into many parts of the gameplay: recruiting colonists could cost HAPs, just like unlocking new tech or crafting a Colony Starter Kit. Perhaps there's even a mechanic that allows you to kill large amounts of monsters in an emergency which would cost large amount of HAPs. I believe this would be more intuitive and more rewarding than the current system, but we'd love to have your opinion!

Bedankt voor het lezen en het meedoen aan het onderzoek :)

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Fifty-nine blogs ago we warned players about a significant pathfinding problem. Actually, it’s more of a goal-choosing problem. When choosing the closest bed/crate/grocery store/job/anything, they do not actually compare the paths they would need to take there. They compare the straight distance between their current location and their goal - ignoring walls, floors, terrain, anything that blocks their path.

This is visualized in the image above. The miners will need a bed during the night. They search for the closest bed, ignoring terrain, and find the beds in the house above them. Within that circle, there are no closer beds. Then they calculate a path, which is a pretty long one. That path takes them through another underground room filled with beds. They’ll ignore those and go to the “closest” beds.



As you can see in the image above, when night falls, the colonists will go to the “closest” beds that actually require the longest path. This is how it has always been in CS. We’ve received a moderate amount of complaints about wonky pathfinding and very weird bed use by colonists. We’re pretty sure a large portion of these issues are caused by the problem described above. Well - in the internal dev build, this problem is now fixed :D



This is what our scenario looks like in dev build 0.7.5 - the miners are all in the sensible, closest beds! This won’t make a massive difference in small, simple colonies, but it will probably have a major impact on large, complex colonies with twisting mines and multi-level buildings with limited stairs and entrances. We’re planning to release 0.7.5 in 1-2 weeks and then we’d love to hear how this changes things! Hopefully, a large amount of issues are fixed at once.

Bedankt voor het lezen :)

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JoeMan’s Underground Colony / Unterirdische Kolonie

The pathfinding has seen major improvements this week! In "debug-world", the closest crate or unused bed can now be found taking into account an approximation of the actual distance to get there instead of just the straight line distance. Now we’ve got to work to implement the improved code from the debug-world into the actual Colony-Survival-colonists. We hope to be able to show some impressive results in the next few weeks! For a detailed explanation of the pathfinding-problem in CS, please read this blog.

One of CS's most active modders, Pandaros, has made some patches to expand the modding functionality of the game. One of these functionalities is to have the client show markers in the world when holding some type in the inventory. These patches have been integrated into the next update and are used for a new tool: the compass. Whenever you wield it, you'll see icons located at the banner of colonies you own. This functionality can be seen in the screenshot below:



To complete the pathfinding-trilogy, I’ve also been working on a pathfinding-related programming experiment this week. My C# / Unity skills aren’t quite good enough to work on Colony Survival yet, but my learning-projects are getting more and more advanced. This week, I worked on and finished a maze-solver that allows people to generate a grid of a dynamic size, and to create a maze in it. That maze will be explored and solved dynamically. Here’s a GIF of the project :)

Bedankt voor het lezen!

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Bog’s Starter Colony

All changes mentioned in this blog concern the internal dev build, no update has been published to the public branch yet

Our current task is improving the pathfinding. The code has been optimized, resulting in better performance. In some situations, the colonists do make better choices in regards to their paths. They’re better at avoiding winding paths - which means they’ll also avoid unnecessarily climbing blocks and stairs.

There still is the problem where they choose their targets (beds, crates, etc) based on the straight line between the colonist and the target, totally ignoring the actual path they need to take there. Zun is thinking about this problem right now, and he’s considering some options that might fix this.

Zun’s considered solution will probably be implemented within a couple of weeks, which means we can hopefully release 0.7.5 before the end of September. 0.7.5 will include the new individual crafting limits feature, the ability to pause the game, the (hidden in cheats/dev options) capability to adjust the simulation speed and the pathfinding improvements.

Afterwards, we’ll focus on better colony management tools, like the ability to remotely assign/disable jobs. They should be released in 0.7.6 :)



Last week, I had a little holiday (which was great!), and instead of a regular blog we released a roadmap. This resulted in a very enthusiastic response, which is always awesome. There were also some questions which would be useful to answer publicly.

Carrot_shark - i wonder if they could give us a timeline for the updates

Sorry - no :(. 0.7.5 would have been the colony-management-tools-update, but Zun got some brilliant ideas for pathfinding/simulation speed so we ended up here. Plans and priorities shift all the time, sneaky problems and hidden opportunities appear frequently, and this makes all precise long term planning pretty much useless.

Gary - So we will only be able to attack these AI Colonies? Would it be possible to friend them for trading resources?

AI Colonies are the most distant and uncertain feature, so it’s hard to guarantee specifics. I doubt we’re getting a complex diplomacy thing but you never know!

Growlingpie - What about something simple like assigning certain jobs to certain beds. I love the game but when my miners have to walk all the way up and across my base to their beds is just a waste of time.

Hopefully, the pathfinding update solves this problem entirely! If not, we’ll consider other solutions, like job-specific beds (green beds for farmers, grey beds for guards, black beds for miners, etc).

Windvex21 - for the blueprints i would like if we can like go to like a 3D model type thing, build however we want the building to look like, then we can save and use it wherever we want

We would love that too!

Katyusha - I quite like the idea of the industrial era tech level, one thing I feel that could be a nice addition would be some fast mode of transport between colonies

Definitely agreed. Perhaps we’re getting transport modes like the glider but quicker, but we’ve also been thinking about adding teleporters with huge electricity costs as an end-game technology.

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Bedankt voor het lezen!

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