Colony Survival News

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The beta has been live for two months now. In the first month, we focused on polishing, fixing and streamlining the existing content of the beta. In the past month, we’ve worked hard to add a bunch of extra content. 0.9.0 is feeling a lot more complete now!

The most exciting new content, in my opinion, is gunpowder related. Gunpowder is now made at the alchemist, and requires sulfur, saltpeter and charcoal. Sulfur is mined in heaths and saltpeter can be made in composting bins. The first weapon that can be crafted with gunpowder is an explosive trap. It adds a new feature: area-of-effect damage. It’s triggered when a monster walks on top of it, and will hit all monsters who are within 2 blocks of distance. To make the explosion look more convincing, we decided to add force to the ragdolls of dying monsters. Other traps and guards now also apply force when they kill monsters, making the combat look more satisfying.

After Zun added support for area-of-effect weapons, he applied this effect to caltrop-traps as well. Further research leads to handcannons. These are primitive, handheld gunpowder weapons that do a lot of damage, but they can only hit monsters at a short range.



We’ve added another way to protect yourself from the monsters. It’s a “failsafe”. It has to be slowly charged over many days, and can then be used once to take out a lot of monsters simultaneously. It will also reduce the monster threat for the next night. It’s very useful as a way to save your colony when you make a mistake and monsters breach your defences.

The failsafe consumes “Sacred Points”, which are earned by distributing “Sacred Meals” to your colonists. These meals are made sacred when a colonist adds a candle to them at an altar. There are multiple tiers of meals, and we’ve reintroduced chickens and cabbages as a way to make advanced meals which earn more Sacred Points.

Another new item is the Astrolabe. Historically, it’s an astronomical instrument with many functions, one of which is determining your location. In Colony Survival, selecting an Astrolabe in your hotbar will display the location of nearby ‘unique biomes’: heaths, swamps and mountaintops with special ores. This makes it a lot easier to find and travel between them.



We’ve also introduced “alarm bells”. You can place them on any block, and if a monster steps on top of it, a loud bell starts ringing, indicating the presence of monsters in a location determined by you. They make it a lot easier to notice problems in your defences before they become a big problem - and they give you some time to run to the failsafe and trigger it, if necessary.

This new beta content patch also contains a glassblower, which requires silica sand found in the heath, and potash for the composting bin. Glass can be used to make eyeglasses, which can be used by researchers, writers and scribes to speed up their work. It can also be used to craft a monocular. Select it in your hotbar to use it!

That summarises the biggest changes, but the patch contains a lot of other tweaks. Science which adds threat to the colony is a lot more noticeable now. The furnace and splitting stump have lost their texture-designs and are now 3D vertex colored meshes. Tin and gold appear deeper in the world. There are new jobs that make Science Chests and advanced job blocks. We’ve added a lot of new audio effects to jobs and traps. The compass now requires science and can only be crafted by colonists.

We’ve done some internal testing for the new content, and just today it was finished enough for the testers to try it. So this Friday Blog is simultaneously an announcement for the beta testers: your beta should receive an automatic update adding all of the content above right now! We’d love to know how unlocking and using the new content and features goes for you, so keep us updated in the #test-channels on Discord. Thanks for all of your effort, help and encouragement!

Bedankt voor het lezen :D

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Three weeks ago, in the last Friday Blog, we were at 0.9.0.6v2. We’re still delivering frequent updates, and we made it all the way to 0.9.0.13! An example of the fixes contained in these updates is pictured below. The testers are finding numerous small problems and rough spots, and we’re dedicated to polishing 0.9.0 to a high standard. If you want to test 0.9.0 in a less polished state, feel free to join the beta following the instructions here.



Most of these updates contain a bunch of small tweaks and fixes, but no major changes to the content of the game. But last week, we released 0.9.0.10, which contained a lot of new building blocks.

0.9.0 was rebuilt from pretty much zero, and at first we were completely focused on testing new gameplay features. Tools; outposts; traps; the “glider-launcher”; elevators; currency & the merchant; the new world generation. All of the colonies we built were highly functional and not ‘decorative’. The testers rightfully complained that 0.9.0 lacked a varied selection of building materials.

So, I’ve spent some time developing a bunch of new textures and building blocks. Some are completely new, some are new textures for old blocks. Some of the textures we replaced were quickly made 5+ years ago, and we believe the new textures have a significantly higher quality.





After releasing 0.9.0.10, I did a full playthrough of the beta, in preparation for adding the last new content before publicly releasing 0.9.0. I really enjoyed myself, and one thing really stood out to me. It’s now guiding my plans for the final batch of content, and I’d like to share it with you.

For my main colony, I had chosen a spot right in between a tall mountain, a swamp and a heath. I later started outposts in all these areas. My network of little towns was growing smoothly, but I was consuming quite a lot of food. I had of course regularly expanded my food supply, but it seems I needed a big expansion - and I didn’t have a lot of convenient space for that.

Standing on top of my 100-block-tall gliderlauncher-tower, I surveyed the surroundings. I quickly noticed a large, flat spot of fertile land nearby. I filled my inventory with building materials, bought an Outpost Banner and glided to the new area. My other outposts were relatively small, but I wanted to build this one big. I started building an extensive castle with complex defenses, specifically designed to conveniently incorporate traps, and spaces for colonists to reload those traps. It was a lot stronger than necessary for the small number of farmers living there, but I used Threat Statues to lure more monsters that way.



The entire project of building my Farming Outpost felt engaging and rewarding. But it didn’t directly access any new content. Indirectly, it did support the expansion of my network of colonies, which was working towards new parts of the tech tree.

When did I quit my test? When I reached the end of the tech tree. I was still enjoying the process of growing my network of towns, but there was nothing left to grow for. And when that happens, the game quickly comes to an end.

And these were the forces I was wrestling with. How do we…
1.) Extend the tech tree in a way that keeps players engaged as long as possible
2.) Do that in a way which doesn’t feel like repetitive padding, as uninspired busywork
3.) Develop that relatively quickly, without extending the beta for many months

That’s quite hard to optimize for! Adding a late-game tech that requires players to recruit 10.000 new colonists is easy but no fun. Thinking of amazing features that would be loads of fun to explore, but that require many, many months of development time is easy as well. Finding a solution that combines the best of both worlds without the drawbacks is hard - but I think we did it.

So the last couple of days, I’ve started working on the last batch of 0.9.0 content. It will introduce new content and features, like a failsafe machine that gives you one last chance if your colony is overwhelmed by monsters. Handcannons and explosive traps. A glider launched with gunpowder, so it doesn’t need a 100 block tall tower. A “people mover” (the horizontal elevator from here).

We'll also reintroduce some old content, like beekeepers, chicken and cabbage farmers, and musket guards.



But unlocking these endgame techs will require you to scale up. To extend your main colony and to found new outposts. To coordinate many hundreds of colonists. 0.9.0 currently doesn’t have “science bags”, but I’m working on an updated version of that idea.

0.9.0 currently has a separate menu for “points upgrades”. This menu contains upgrades that can be boosted again and again, like the colonist cap and the banner range. We’ve got an idea to quickly convert that to full “repetitive science” - upgrades that cost more than mere currency, but that could also consume for example the enhanced science bags.

We’re planning to subtly and smoothly integrate these systems. At the start of the game, when you’ve got a very small colony, unlocking things in the tech tree is cheap and only requires a few relevant items. In the midgame, these costs expand and add requirements like medium amounts of colony points/currency. That’s roughly where the current content ends.

Unlocking tech in the endgame gradually becomes more and more expensive. It’ll require large amounts of currency and “science chests”. There’ll be multiple kinds of science chests, filled with more and more costly items. These same costs can also be used for the “repetitive science”, to purchase “perpetual upgrades” for your colony.

The goal is to offer a smooth transition into the “postgame”. At a certain moment, you’ll have unlocked the entire tech tree, and you’ve received access to all jobs, items and weapons. Currently, the only goal left at that moment is earning currency for the points upgrades. In the intended postgame, your entire colony will still be useful. All your copper miners, hemp farmers, writers, researchers, chicken farmers and blacksmiths should be necessary to produce massive amounts of science chests, and throughout the endgame you should’ve been subtly encouraged to focus on that kind of production. Expansion is still rewarding, encouraging you to actually produce and use the technology at the end of the tech tree, at scale.



We’ve noticed a minor problem in the beta where people don’t actually use the tech at the end of the tech tree. They unlock elevators and gliders, but then the tech tree ends so they stop scaling up and don’t actually use those things. We think we’ve now got clear plans which can be developed relatively easily and that should fix this problem.

We’ll continue working on the endgame/postgame content and hope to be able to show and test a lot of it in a few weeks. When it’s tested and polished, 0.9.0 is ready for a full release!

In Dutch, we’ve got a saying de laatste loodjes wegen het zwaarst. It literally means “the last pieces of lead weigh the heaviest”, and apparently, English has a similar saying in “the last mile is the longest one”. It’s completely true, and we understand that some players are getting tired of waiting for the update. We’d like to remind them that they can join the beta, and we hope all of you will enjoy 0.9.0 when it’s completely done. We really believe it’s by far the best version of CS!

Bedankt voor het lezen :D

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Over the past two weeks, we’ve selected 122 people from the #beta-applications channel on Discord and gave them access to the beta branch of the game. On top of that, we also added the Testers-group which were selected in a similar process for the 0.7.0-test a while ago. We’ve received enormous amounts of feedback, from one-sentence descriptions notifying us of tiny errors in item descriptions, to long posts with deep analyses of what works and what doesn’t. Thanks a lot to everybody who applies, tests and shares feedback! It is very valuable.



This has already led to six (technically seven) new versions being released, ranging from 0.9.0.0 to 0.9.0.6v2. In the image above is a small sample of the improvements in these builds.

I was a bit scared that the beta would lead to quite a lot of negative responses. For example, people not liking certain changes, and people being confused by new mechanics. But in general, the response has been very positive! Most testers seem to like the changes and believe they are improvements.

Of course we are very happy with this - but, it has introduced a new problem. 0.7.0 and 0.8.0 both had the endgame including the distant biomes that require loads of travelling and complicated trading rules. Lots of players skipped this content because it wasn’t rewarding enough. 0.9.0 solves this problem, but it does mean loads of people now actually finish the game, or at least reach the end of the tech tree. And now these people are clamouring for more content!

The current 0.9.0 beta doesn’t contain matchlock guns or printing presses, and we would love to reintroduce these items. We already had rough plans on how to do that, but hadn’t implemented them yet. We’re calibrating our plans based on the beta feedback, and we’ll re-implement that content and other era-appropriate items. We hope this will result in a satisfying endgame for 0.9.0!

The beta will become more open once that content is finished. If you can’t wait, feel free to apply to the beta via the instructions in the previous blog! If your application is more than three days old and you haven’t been selected, and you very much want to participate, you’re allowed to send in a new application. Please check whether you followed the instructions carefully.



Two blogs ago, we revealed the very first pictures of the new terrain. One blog ago, we started the beta. In between, we made a lot of changes to the terrain generation, and we haven't shared that yet! So here is a overview of some of the major new features in the terrain.



Firstly, Zun got rivers to work, so the world will be crisscrossed by them. They allow players to build a colony next to water, but without being bound to the sea and certain lakes. They also make it much easier to explore the terrain without getting lost.



Randomly throughout the world, heaths will spawn. Technically, these are inspired by the anthropogenic heaths that are quite common in the Netherlands and nearby countries. These heaths offer access to unique resources. You’ll either have to purchase them manually using the new currency at the merchant, or gather them by building an outpost in a heath.



Another unique “mini-biome” scattered throughout the world are marshes. These wet areas offer access to unique resources in the same way as heaths.



Tall mountains topped with snow indicate the presence of ores like tin and gold, which can only be found in those locations - or again, at the merchant. Thus, gathering all of the jobs and items in 0.9.0 requires a main colony and three outposts. As explained in a previous blog, the outposts work quite different from the multiple-colonies-system added in 0.7.0. You don’t need to travel many kilometers of empty terrain to get to the unique biomes in 0.9.0, and the exchange of resources goes automatically, without requiring players to set up tedious trading rules in a primitive UI. This makes managing multiple colonies (/outposts) a much more intuitive and rewarding task.



Last but not least, the world now contains some rare mammoth trees! They help a lot, functioning as beacons that make it easier to orient yourself.

Bedankt voor het lezen :D

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Finally, the day we've been looking forward to for so long has arrived! We’re starting the 0.9.0 Beta Program today.

The Beta is going to be a process with multiple stages. We’re constantly adding new content and tweaks, and we want to continuously add “fresh” testers to see how the game is functioning for a first-time player at that moment.

The current beta version is still work-in-progress, and not everything is properly explained or polished. The first testers need to be experienced enough to handle that. For that first group, we’re going to be quite selective. We’re looking for people who are serious and who are great communicators.

As the Beta Program continues and the beta version gets updated and improved, we’re going to add larger and larger groups of testers. Eventually, every application that meets the minimum requirements will be approved.



Here is how to apply:

A.) Join our Discord server
B.) Go to the #beta-applications channel in the “Welcome” category
C.) Post a message that answers the questions below. Remember, we care a lot more about honesty and communication skills than “high numbers”! The goal of the Beta is finding ”useful criticism”, not flattery ;)

Since what moment (year or update), roughly, have you played Colony Survival? Since release, since update 0.4.0, since 2019?
How many hours of play time do you have on Steam?
Roughly how many colonists does your biggest colony have?
Name one of your favourite gameplay mechanics in a game that is not Colony Survival, and explain why you like it.
Name a big frustration you’ve encountered in any video game, and explain why it bothers you.
Which skills/experiences/personality traits of yours make you especially suited to be a beta tester for 0.9.0?

D.) Wait until you’re granted the 090 Tester role
E.) Once you’ve received it, you’ll be able to see #test-instructions in the Perpetual Testing Initiative category. That channel contains all the information you need to download the beta branch and start testing!

Thanks a lot, and good luck :D



RIP Queen Elizabeth II

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Work-in-progress terrain rendered with the new system

In the past month, Zun has made major progress on the new terrain generation! It uses a fundamentally new design philosophy.

In 2017, we released CS with arctic areas in the north and tropical areas in the south. We wanted to give players the opportunity to settle themselves in a different looking area. We did want to give players a large temperate area to find the ideal spot for their colony, so the distance you’ve got to travel before finding another biome is pretty huge.

In 2019, we wanted to make these distant biomes useful for gameplay. We added the multiple colonies feature, and unique resources per biome. We liked the idea, but it was disappointing in practice. Travelling and trading between colonies is very tedious, and the rewards aren’t worth it.

0.9.0 fixes that core problem by adding outposts, which are like new colonies, except that their stockpile is merged with the main colony. This makes it a lot easier to set them up and to benefit from their unique products.

More from the new terrain generator

Instead of demanding that players travel huge distances to distant biomes, we’re now reworking the world to have more variety in the spawn biome. Instead of having random patches of arctic and tropic intermingling, the spawn biome is now intended to be mostly temperate, interspersed by fens and heaths. These fens and heaths contain unique and valuable resources. Some ores are only available at mountain tops.

It’s basically the same ideas as 0.7.0, but the barriers are a lot lower, and the rewards aren’t just some relatively useless endgame items - the rewards are now a core part of the tech tree.

Fundamental changes to the world generation are pretty much always breaking old savegames. We can add new jobs, items, monsters and weapons to 0.9.1, but we can’t easily overhaul the terrain generation there. So this is something we’ve got to get right before the update releases. We’re not merely making some adjustments to change the terrain a bit, we’re reworking and optimizing the way the system works to the core.

That reworked system is now capable of rendering pretty nice terrains and the results can be seen in this blog! It’s very much work in progress though, it should look quite different in a couple of weeks.



In previous versions of CS, the amount of monsters that assaulted your colony every night was purely determined by the amount of colonists living in your colony. In 0.9.0, these colonists generate only a small amount of “threat”, and most “threat” is generated by unlocking certain important technologies in the tech tree. This makes it a lot easier and more rewarding to recruit large amounts of colonists.

When you start a new outpost, this threat is divided proportionally according to the amount of colonists living there. So imagine there is a total of 1000 threat. If the main colony has 200 colonists, and the outpost has 50 inhabitants, the main colony gets 4/5th = 800 of the threat, and the outpost gets 200 of the threat.

When you expand the outpost until it also has 200 inhabitants, the threat is equally divided: 500 for the main colony, 500 for the outpost. This means the amount of monsters appearing at the gates of the main colony actually decreases!

Work-in-progress "monster attraction statues"

Once I playtested this, I instantly noticed how 'relieving' my outpost was for my colony. It lost some threat, and its defenses were overwhelmed by monsters a lot less frequently. Which leads to the thought of pushing this further. What if I build a dedicated fortress, one that doesn't contain hundreds of colonists which all need to farm the fields surrounding the place, with only one heavily defended entrance, and lead the monsters there?

But that would require building a basement filled to the brim with colonists... Unless, you actually turn this into an item! We’ve added some kind of “statues” that attract monsters. Instead of having to recruit a bunch of colonists in your fortress to get the attention of monsters, you can place these objects to instantly shift a part of the total threat to that outpost. This opens up a lot of new possibilities!



While Zun is programming the new terrain generator, I'm working on new models for the NPCs. These aren't in-game yet; we're striving to release the beta first.

Most of the textured objects in Colony Survival are 1x1x1 blocks. That allows us to make square textures relatively easily. Currently, CS contains one way more complicated, textured 3D-object: “Harry”.

Harry is the internal name for our NPC model. Harry is used for colonists, monsters and players. Harry has a lot of small surfaces, and the way to transfer textures to all these surfaces is to use a “UV map”. A UV map is basically a relationship between specific areas on a 3D-model, and specific areas on a flat, square image.

Harry's colonist texture

That makes it a lot harder to make textures for Harry, than to make textures for square blocks. So for over five years, we basically ignored Harry - oops! We’ve added textures for new blocks, we added new 3D objects that were vertex painted, but we didn’t touch Harry. Harry became a scary, complicated mess of old texturing and animating techniques that we didn’t want to break, so we left it alone.

Until now. I’ve been working on making new, vertex-painted models for both colonists and monsters, and I’ve been animating them. Vertex-painting is the technique that we’ve used on for example the banner since 2017, and a bit later we started to use that technique to create non-block-shaped job spots.

A problem I noticed when test-playing the 0.9.0 devbuild, is the indistinguishability of different monster types. We introduced some new monsters with huge amounts of HP, and currently, the only way to recognize them is by eye colour. Which I have a hard time remembering, and which is difficult to notice in a glance from a distance!

Vertex-painted alternative

Giving them a new texture on the Harry model is also difficult. But with the new vertex-painted NPC models, it’s a lot easier! And instead of merely repainting them, I can also adjust the 3D model itself. This makes it a lot easier to add multiple monster types that are properly distinguishable, which also opens up more gameplay possibilities. We can’t add deeper variation in the combat if the variation isn’t clear to players.



Zun's making good progress on terrain generation, and when that’s finished, we can start opening the beta! We’re fairly certain that the next blog will contain instructions on how to join the beta and get access to the 0.9.0 dev build :D

Bedankt voor het lezen!

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