Colony Survival News

After nearly a year of work, we've finally got a relatively playable version of the dev branch! Here's a list of some of the new features and content:

• Happiness mechanic - As your colony grows from a quiet farming village to a bustling city, their demands increase. Feed them well and give them luxury items to keep them happy. Or don't, and watch your science speed & productivity plummet while recruitment costs dramatically rise.
  
• Co-op - It's now possible to share a colony with friends!
  
• Dozens and dozens of new items and jobs - fishermen, cooks, diamonds, tea, coffee, silk, and last but not least, potatoes!
  
• Entirely new world generation - It uses a combination of temperature and "rainfall" (not visible, but a lush forest obviously has more rainfall than a desert) to determine what the area should look like.

• Three exotic regions - There's now a Far East, Tropics and New World, each with their own unique science, jobs and research!
  
• Multiple colonies mechanic - Craft a Colony Starter Kit and start new colonies.
  
• Glider - Research and craft a glider and take to the skies for rapid exploration and travel!
  
• Trading - Set up traders to sent items and science from one colony to another, or to other players in multiplayer.
  
• New Unity Version - Includes a multitude of updates which solve common problems
  
• Dramatic optimization - Terrain should load a lot quicker, and you ought to be able to have a lot of extra colonists!
  
• New save system - Savegames are 10 times smaller, making saving and loading 10 times as quick. They're also 10 times less likely to corrupt! It's also prepared to deal with the Steam Workshop.
  
• Easy co-op hosting - It's no longer necessary to browse through the installation folder and find a separate server. Set up a multiplayer server with friends right from the main menu!
  
• LAN support - By popular demand.
  
• Plenty of other small optimizations - You can now recruit as many colonists as you've got unfilled jobs or beds in one click, or enter a custom number. A lot of old and ugly hand drawn icons have been replaced with rendered icons. Some job blocks have been replaced as well.
  

This is the most dramatic overhaul Colony Survival has ever had. 0.6.3 was highly polished and balanced - 0.7.0 is not like that. You should be able to have many hours of fun with the beta, but you will run into errors, missing content, highly unbalanced recipes and unfinished elements.

But if you understand that and are still looking forward to testing 0.7.0 and sharing your experiences with us, we'd love to have you on board! We're planning to keep the Open Beta live until the definitive release of 0.7.0. Make yourself invaluable by sharing good and detailed feedback, and you'll be invited to future internal testing as well.

Join the open beta by going to #introductions in our Discord and typing something like the following sentence with the appropriate info:

"@Developer @Admin I'm from [continent], I'm [rough description of age] and have played CS for [amount of hours played according to Steam Library] and I'd like to help!"

So it would look something like:

"@Developer @Admin I'm from Australia, I'm in my 20s and have played CS for 32 hours and I'd like to help!"

"@Developer @Admin I'm from Europe, I'm 19 and have played CS for 12 hours and I'd like to help!"

We'll check #introductions often and grant the Open Beta Tester role to anyone who posts the sentence there correctly. With the OB Tester role, you've got access to the Perpetual Testing Initiative category on Discord. Read #test-announcements to read how to get access to the 0.7.0-branch. You need to own the game on Steam to unlock it! We're all based in Europe, so there might be a gap in verifications somewhere between midnight and 9AM CET.

We hope you'll try all the new features and report back about your experience. Screenshots and videos are welcome. You're allowed to share videos outside of the Discord, but we'd appreciate it if you make clear that it's a highly unfinished beta.

Good luck testing and bedankt voor het lezen!

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The blog concerns changed to the 0.7.0 dev branch, which is not publicly released yet

A couple of blogs ago, we mentioned one of the last glaring holes in 0.7.0. Starting new colonies was possible, but it was pretty "cheaty" and there was no proper way to do it through normal gameplay. That has largely been fixed this week!

Players now need a "Colony Starter Kit" to start a second colony. There's currently only one in-game, but the UI has a drop-down menu that can be used to select a different one. Eventually, there will be multiple Colony Starter Kits, ranging from small to huge. Larger starter kits are more difficult to create, but they'll provide starting colonies with a larger amount of items.



There was another problem for later colonies. You had to unlock every technology all over again. That's very boring and annoying. We tested it by using cheats to complete all science, but that's not how 0.7.0 ought to be played. We had to add a system to transfer science from one colony to another.

Instead of using this system merely to unlock old science at the start of a new colony, Zun made this system in a way that allows players to "trade science"! When player A has unlocked something, he can send it to player B.

0.7.0 has also received a bunch of new rendered icons this week. We wanted to replace the old, pretty ugly, hand drawn crown icon that's used for the command tool.

I tried to make some kind of "Imperial Orb" (first image of the blog), but with some help of the people on our Discord server we decided it wasn't clear enough. If someone has a good idea for the icon for the command tool, we'd love to hear it!

Progress is going well. We still hope to release the open beta next week, and we feel like we're on track for a full release in June/July.

Interfaces are work-in-progress



[End of the professional game-related blog, start of a more personal part]

Last week's blog was a weird one. It was very short and barely contained any information.

I was distracted by horrific news. Thursday night I heard that a high school classmate of mine was murdered. It happened in broad daylight, in the city where I live, next to the University where I studied. Nobody saw this coming and we were shocked.

Friday Blog 100 was supposed to be a festive milestone. I was planning to write a happy, upbeat blog. Obviously, after the news I was in a very different mood.

We pondered what to do. Do we explain what happened? Is that professional and appropriate? Do we act like there's nothing wrong? Do we skip the blog entirely?

We're still not 100% sure what to do. It feels irreverent to talk about murder in a blog about a game, but it also feels irreverent to act like nothing happened. In the end, we believe it's best to be open about what has happened.

We're all human and mortal. Take care.

Bedankt voor het lezen!

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The next update, 0.7.0, is still on schedule for release during the end of June or July. We hope to release an open beta before the end of the month!

Thanks to Pantouflee for letting us use his world

Hartelijk bedankt voor het lezen van de honderdste Friday Blog!

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One year ago, we wrote a blog called Stitching Up Colony Survival, in regards to update 0.6.0. It contains this paragraph:

"We feel like in the past two months, we removed and replaced multiple major organs. Last week, we celebrated successfully inserting the last organ. But the patient still lies on the operating table, with the body cut half open. This week, we've been working on stitching everything back together. Updating interfaces, cleaning things up and fixing the last problems."

That's pretty much how we feel today, but instead of the 'surgery' lasting two months, it lasted a year. With airships / gliders now being present and functional, the last big new feature of 0.7.0 is done.

That doesn't mean everything is ready for release. Plenty of things are okay for internal testing, but lack the polish required for public release. One example is the way to start multiple colonies.

In the current testbuild, you can just walk up to any spot and click on it to place another banner which automatically contains a new "initial stockpile". That's too simple, and easy to exploit.

What we're currently working on is a new item, which we'll name something like the "Colony Starter Package". This item has to be unlocked with the science system, and it's place in the tech tree will be behind matchlock guns. Once you've unlocked it, your colonists will have to craft a new Colony Starter Package. This will require at least all the resources that will appear in the stockpile at the start of the new colony.

The Colony Starter Package will contain more items than merely the ones present in the stockpile of the very first colony. The first colony contains relatively few items, forcing players to learn about the new jobs and items step by step. That's useful for the first colony, but boring to repeat over and over again. That's why the Colony Starter Package will include quite a lot of basic materials, to quickly get later colonies up to speed.

Our current goal is one Colony Starter Package. But we're pretty sure we'll add more variants later one. Perhaps even custom ones, designed by players themselves! Zun is keeping this in mind while programming the current system, trying to keep things future-proof.



Moderation in an Age of Censorship

Yesterday was the birthday of our moderator, Vobbert! He's 27 years old now. Apart from nearly single-handedly managing Colony Survival's Discord and its over two thousands members, he has been a lifelong friend who has offered invaluable advice to me and Zun. If Zun and I disagree, which we do regularly, Vobbert is the one to cut the Gordian knot.

This week, we had a serious discussion about moderating the Discord. We've got an amazing community that provides great insights and help in the development of Colony Survival, that in general needs little moderation. Most of the work consists out of giving people the "verified" rank, and sometimes pointing people to the appropriate channel.

But there was a growing problem. The off-topic channel #not-so-serious received a large daily influx of memes. Some of them were absolutely hilarious, some of them were highly offensive and others were questionable. We often had to have a discussion whether a certain meme was acceptable or not.

In general, we're strongly in favor of free speech. We've never removed criticism of Colony Survival anywhere, unless it contained explicit insults like "retard". We try to moderate our Discord, not by outright removing content, but by sending it to the right location. For example, we've got off-topic channels, and when users engage in off-topic chat in the #general channel we'll point them there.

There has been an intense discussion about free speech outside of Colony Survival as well, this week. Facebook/Instagram banned "dangerous individuals" this week. Facebook said something about banning people who promote or engage in violence or hate. Hate is hard to pin down - should we ban people who hate nazis and homophobes? Recognizing calls to violence is a lot easier, and I'm pretty sure that Paul Joseph Watson and Milo Yiannopoulos did not encourage their fanbase to engage in violence.

We're very skeptical about large companies removing individuals from their platforms for vague reasons. As Lord Acton said:
"Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority, still more when you superadd the tendency or the certainty of corruption by authority."

So we had some pretty ironical discussions. On one hand, we were worried about the threat of large companies being able to remove anyone from online platforms just because they have an opinion that is disliked. On the other hand, we were thinking of the best way to remove offensive content from our Discord.

In the end, we decided on this solution. We made a new off-topic channel called #memes. #Not-so-serious was renamed to #less-serious-no-memes, to clarify the change of rules. Slowmode is enabled in #memes, meaning users can only post one message or image per minute. This prevents spam and encourages players to post only their best content.

We'll finetune these rules in the next few weeks. Slowmode can easily be set to a shorter or longer amount of time. We have to see how it works out.

What scares us most about censorship is vagueness. Having unclear rules and sneakily removing content without properly stating the reasons for it just feels wrong. We're trying to do the opposite by writing about it in this blog. We'd like to have your input. What is it that annoys you the most online? Harmless opinions being removed by powerhungry corporations? Or tasteless trolls ruining the signal-to-noise ratio? Where's the line between a controversial opinion and hatespeech? Is "punch a nazi" a bannable call to violence? Is "punch a communist", "punch a socialist", "punch a liberal"? It might seem unrelated to Colony Survival, but these are the decisions we have to make when judging content on the Discord.

Bedankt voor het lezen!

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The flight mechanic is not available in a public build yet and will be released with the rest of 0.7.0 - hopefully during the end of June / July

The flight mechanic has improved a lot in the past week! We made another video to demonstrate the changes:

https://youtu.be/MLqoJrafuII
We were planning to add some kind of mini-zeppelin. It would just gently float from one place to another. But the first prototype was less stable - and more exciting! We thought we could make the 'airship' better by turning it into some kind of glider that can actually be aimed up and down. The technical term is angle of attack.

While writing last week's Friday Blog, I already had the idea, but I didn't expect us to be able to actually add it to the game, so I did not mention it. I'm very excited to be able to say that it's in-game and functional right now :D Aim the glider up and you'll gain altitude. But the higher you aim, the more speed you lose. Aim down to rapidly gain speed!

You steer the plane by aiming with your mouse. While the old prototype always followed your mouse, the new one only does so when you're using your 'motor'. This allows players to look in all directions while flying forward in a straight line.

Obviously, the prototype_flying_box has received a new model in the past week. Most of our week was focused on issues related to it, like making sure player models are attached to the vehicle properly when viewing them third person. All of these efforts can be easily reused when adding other vehicles in the future!

What's your opinion? Does the flying mechanic look like fun? Do you like the model? Would you change things?

Bedankt voor het lezen!

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