Colony Survival News

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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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[This block of text was written last Sunday. The roadmap was written even earlier. I should've been spending the past five days on holiday. I might get back home and polish this up Friday evening, but if you're reading this, that probably didn't happen :) ][Edit: Zun was here]



Game development is unpredictable. When working on a feature, we regularly discover it’s a lot harder or a lot easier to develop than we expected. Sometimes, good ideas get supplanted by better ideas. At other times unexpected problems or new opportunities get on our path. So our plans are not set in stone. We cannot give you a 100% guarantee that these things will unfold exactly as written here, but at least you can distill the rough outlines of what we're going for.



The current tools for managing your colony are relatively primitive. A lot of things have to be arranged “in-game” - you can only remove/disable jobs by “physically” walking to the right job-block. You receive some text notifications when things go wrong, but there’s no nice interface which summarizes these problems. We’re working to change this. This should simultaneously help new players understand the game quicker, and help more experienced players to manage their large colonies. It’s currently our highest priority.



Currently, we don’t have something that could truly be called a “tutorial”. The game starts out with a pop-up that contains core information, and there’s a link to a PDF manual that explains the details necessary to set up a self-sustaining colony. It works, but it could be better. That’s why we’re planning to add a “Mission System”. The missions will start out simple enough: plant a banner, recruit a berry farmer, let an NPC kill a monster. Ultimately, they will “pull you” through most of the game, with missions like “recruit 1000 colonists” and “build a steam engine”. Experienced players will complete these missions automatically, without being hindered by them. Newcomers can find in-game instructions on how to fulfill the requirements.



Back in 2018, we added both builders and diggers to the game. You can select an area, and these colonists will either remove all blocks there or fill the area with a selected block. They’re very useful, but are hard to use for generating complex, detailed structures. There are some mods that have added primitive ‘Blueprint Builders’, a new job that allows colonists to automatically build predefined houses, cathedrals and castles. It seems like a very useful feature, but making it work properly in-game is pretty hard. You’d also need a tool that defines blueprints, and there are other tough problems like rotation: how do we intuitively clarify to players in which direction the blueprint is facing? We hope we’ll be able to figure this out. We’ve played around with adding a top-down view to help solve this issue, but we’re highly unsure about that last plan at the moment.



Over the years, we’ve noticed different problems and tried different solutions to fix those. The main “path” of the game has become a bit of a patchwork because of this. We’d like to redo a large part of the tech tree with a new design philosophy that can scale from tiny colonies to huge megacolonies. The full process of growing your colony from the former to the latter should be a smooth and steady progression, with new goals and rewards continuously appearing at a steady interval.

To accomplish this, we want to add a new resource: Data. Progressing your colony will require ever larger amounts of Data. Historically, this has scaled really well with the development of civilization: starting from handwritten manuscripts to the printing press, and eventually moving from punched cards to the computers and the internet. Players will be able to use Data to improve the fundamentals of their colony: more output for farmers, more damage for guards, more efficient crafters, more productive miners, etcetera.

We’re also considering two other new resources: VAT and XP. VAT is earned by handing out valuable items as happiness goods to your colonists. XP is earned by letting your guards slay monsters. We will try to integrate them with the fundamentals of the progression of the gameplay.



The Happiness Mechanic that we added in 0.7.0 is pretty complicated, and the UI that should explain it is imperfect and confusing. We’re planning to improve the UI, but we’re also considering to overhaul how Happiness works fundamentally. Expect major changes here!



When we released Colony Survival back in 2017, we were thinking of a Viking-theme, roughly 800-900AD. 0.4.0 added crossbows and matchlock guns, and 0.7.0 further extended the timeline with a printing press. We’re hoping to extend the tech tree into the Industrial Revolution. Steam engines, oil, electricity - these could offer plenty of interesting gameplay opportunities, and a reason for mega colonies.

These new technologies should also impact your guards. We'd like to add new types that use more complex weapons and ammo to deal more damage. Perhaps we'll even add new "weapon styles" like weapons that do area-of-effect damage, weapons that slow down monsters and weapons that do damage over time. Of course, to keep things balanced, these more powerful guards will also have to face new types of powerful monsters!



AI Colonies have been a common suggestion, that we’ve often dismissed. We thought we couldn’t make it work. After a lot of discussion, we’ve thought of a potential solution. Perhaps we’ll add enemy colonies that can be attacked in the same “tower defense” way that monsters attack your colonies. You’ll only be able to select which troops attack the enemy colony, and where you’ll spawn them. There won’t be any complex siege-gameplay, just that. If that’s something a majority of you is interested in, and we have finished all the other things on this list, we might add something like that! But consider it the least likely thing that you’ve read here.

Bedankt voor het lezen!

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