Colony Survival News

In the past month, Zun has put a lot of effort into adding proper controller support to Colony Survival. For a longer time, it has been possible to access basic gameplay functionality with the Steam Controller or the Steam Deck, but it wasn’t up to standard. And playing the game with a regular Xbox/Playstation/Switch controller was pretty much impossible.

So we’ve been working to improve that situation. Rebinding jumping from space to “A” on your controller, or moving around from WASD to a thumbstick, is not that complicated. What is complicated, is replacing the mouse in the UI.

With a mouse, you just move the cursor to whatever place you need it to be and click to select it in one step. With a controller, you’ve got one button selected, and then you move that selection to another button right next to it. If there’s 10 buttons between the selected button and the intended button, you’ll need to repeat that 10 times.

Connections between buttons in the UI editor

Our interface wasn’t designed with that in mind. In some places, you have to move through dozens of other buttons to get where you want to be. For example, moving your selection through all of your savegames to get to the “play” button. That’s not very practical.

In some cases, Zun improved this situation by refactoring the layout of the UI into a more controller-friendly design. In other cases, this situation can be improved by adding button shortcuts. Instead of having to press the “Play” button in the UI, it could be enough to select a savegame and press for example “X” on the controller.



We’ll have to make those shortcuts visible in the UI, otherwise people don’t know they exist. That means we need support to display all the buttons on most controllers. And the ability to rebind all these buttons in the controls settings menu. By default, Unity doesn’t properly support that, but we’ve found a very useful asset that has helped us integrate all of that.

Good controller support is now roughly 70% finished and will be publicly released in the next update.



One of the unexpected results of the survey was a majority preference for us to focus on better building instead of better combat. So I’ve done a lot of investigating and experimenting to see how we could integrate that into the game.

We’ve looked at “building” from a bunch of angles. Better automated construction workers. Blueprints that allow you to copy and paste designs. New requirements for bed and jobs, to prevent massive caves filled with endless rows of beds and jobblocks, devoid of all light and privacy.

Finding the perfect solution has been difficult though. Take those extra requirements for beds and jobs. If they’re simple, players will find them easy to ‘minmax’, and the new solution will be a repetitive chore as well. If they’re very complex, it becomes a completely different game with much more complicated colonists. Let us know if you’re interested in that!

We’re converging at a different solution: allowing players to build more beautiful colonies. How do we make that possible? How do we encourage that? I have to admit, this is not one of my strengths. I find it hard to build truly beautiful things, both in Colony Survival and in other games.

These are complex questions. It involves the very nature of beauty, in a way that transcends current fashion and localised preferences, and asks us to translate that to the constraints of our voxel game.

Wernigerode, Germany

Beauty in architecture is a subject I’ve long been interested in. Scott Alexander wrote a fascinating article about it that raises difficult questions. Last year, before the survey, I had already starting delving into the works of Christopher Alexander (not related to Scott), which strives to provide an answer to those questions.

Christopher Alexander writes a lot about dealing with constraints. Buildings face a lot of them. Take for example a home. It has to provide a place to cook, a place to sleep, a place to face the public world and meet strangers, a more intimate place to relax, a proper transition to the garden. It has to let in light without losing too much warmth. It has to deal with rain, with snow, with gravity.

Dealing with all these challenges properly in a consistent style while using natural materials seems to result in rather cosy places that humans like. But… our colonists are very simple. You don’t have to deal with rainwater, rotting wood, or gravity. Which results in the endless factory-caves being optimal.

So there doesn’t seem to be a perfect solution that automatically helps players build the beautiful towns of the past. But we’re working on the next best solution: give players more tools to achieve a semblance of that look, if they choose to do so.

Currently, players can pretty much only use 1x1x1 cubes. Build a wall of them and each block is identical to the next one. We want to add more detailed meshes that are more interactive. Think of pillars which automatically add a decorative top and bottom. Think of fences which connect to each other. Think of doors and window frames.

An experiment with pillars

These automatic connections between meshes are perhaps a good stepping stone towards more complicated mechanics and infrastructure in future updates: think of pipelines and electric grids.

To prevent red stone pillar / green stone pillar / blue wooden pillar / white wooden pillar from cluttering your stockpile, we’re considering a “paint feature”. Equip the red-paint-item to paint pillars/doors/fences red, and certain blocks as well.

Let us know how you feel about this! Which detailed decorations would you like to have? What features do you need to make more beautiful colonies? How would you feel about more complex colonists with more realistic needs - perhaps in a totally separate mode?

Bedankt voor het lezen :D

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Colony Survival is currently on sale! It's 20% off until 23 March. We also just released the first major update to 0.9: 0.9.1.

The major change in 0.9.1 concerns pathfinding and siege mode. In short: siege mode is properly functional again, and pathfinding should be better and faster. On to the long explanation!

The Old Situation Before 0.9.0

Paths for colonists and monsters are calculated in a special “Navigation World”. This world is made up out of Chunks that are 16 blocks wide, 16 blocks deep and 16 blocks tall. Many of these Chunks are underground and hold no space for NPCs to physically stand. When there are places for NPCs to be, these are designated and connected with each other in a special Navigation Mesh.

When a monster spawns far outside of a colony and has to find a path to the banner, he has to connect Navigation Meshes in many different Chunks. Sometimes, the path through a Chunk is a straight line through an empty field. Sometimes, the path through a Chunk is a complex maze with gates, barriers, stairs, bridges, tunnels and multiple different levels of height. NPCs only had access to a rough estimate of the time it would take to traverse a Chunk. This lack of information regularly caused them to make silly choices.

Before 0.9.0, monsters spawned from 8PM to 1AM. The monster spawning algorithm picked a random location outside of the safe zone and tried to find a path from there to the banner. If it succeeds, a monster is spawned there. If it fails, it does another attempt, and another, and another. After twenty attempts, the algorithm gives up and activates Siege Mode, which lasts until the end of the spawn period, 1AM.

In that period, food consumption would increase eightfold, but only in that period, leading to an increase of your daily food consumption by 160%.

"View of the world as seen by NPCs - just showing positions they can stand at. Color is approximated distance away from the banner.

The Situation in 0.9.0

In the recent big update, monsters only spawn between 8PM and 9PM. Siege mode lasts equally long, which means your daily food consumption only goes up by 32%.

We planned to have a proper Notification Menu, and in preparation for that, we removed the text message that informs you about the activation of Siege Mode. The audio effect could only be heard in the specific outpost/colony where Siege Mode was active. This made it very easy for players to be completely unaware that Siege Mode was even a thing. The effect on food was barely noticeable too.

0.9.1 Improvements

Each Navigation Mesh now contains a Signpost pointing in the direction of the banner. This makes it a lot easier for monsters to calculate the right path, which significantly improves performance when you’re dealing with large amounts of monsters. Without Signposts, pathfinding would “give up” when mazes became too long and complicated. With Signposts, 0.9.1 should support mazes that are functionally infinite.

The Signposts are recalculated every 20 to 30 seconds. Monsters only spawn in Chunks with Signposts outside the safe zone. If these are not available, there is no path to the banner, no monsters will be spawned and Siege Mode is activated. This can now happen 24/7! Closing your gates in the middle of the day will result in Siege Mode.

It will last until Signposts are available outside the safe zone again. As long as Siege Mode is active, 1 meal will be lost from the stockpile per hour for every 5 Threat related to that outpost or colony. The text message for Siege Mode has returned, and the audio signal is now ‘global’ and can be heard everywhere. Siege Mode should be a lot more obvious now, both the warning and the consequences.

NPCs now also know how long it will take to traverse a Chunk, instead of relying on a rough estimate. This should make their pathfinding choices more sensible.

Top-down view of the Sign Posts. The white blocks are a path around a colony wall to the banner.

Miscellaneous

The horizontal and vertical elevators were very slow. Their speed has been boosted to make them more relevant. The vertical elevator has been upgraded from 18km/h to 54km/h, and the horizontal version increased from 22km/h to 90km/h (that last number is the speed limit of the glider).

Colonists spawned with an empty stomach and immediately tried to collect a meal. They now arrive fully satiated.

Trade rules could not be removed. Now, that’s possible.

Clay is available at the builder.

32-bit Windows is causing issues, so support for it has ended from 0.9.1 onwards. Those on 32-bit systems can continue to play 0.9.0 via the beta branches.

And some other minor fixes and optimisations, available in the in-game changelog!

EDIT 23:18 Amsterdam time: The update has been reverted until further notice. The monsterspawning algorithm spawns monsters in safe zones in a significant amount of worlds. We're trying to find and fix the issue. EDIT 00:04 : Update 0.9.1 is live again! The problem above should be fixed now.

Bedankt voor het lezen :D

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Two weeks ago, we've asked you to participate in our survey. Over 600 people did so! Thanks a lot for your effort, it's very helpful. We promised to share the results, so here they are!

We hope to learn something from this survey that would help us improve the game for both existing and future players. We think we can do that, but of course, there is a selection bias. Survey respondents are mostly people who already own the game and follow these blogs because they like the game. That's not a perfectly representative sample of either existing or future potential players, so these answers do require some interpretation.



Those who participated in the survey started playing the game at moments quite evenly distributed along the CS timeline. It's great to see so many people still with us from the original release date!

Many of these people have played the game for over 100 hours, which we are quite impressed by. The options for 0-30 hours are barely used. Nearly three-quarters of the surveyed players have played for over 50 hours.



The "achievement decline" is quite gradual, which is good in my opinion. There is a "gap" between starting outposts and using the glider launcher though. I think it wasn't that pronounced when only the first 30-80 people had answered the survey. Do we need a more accessible form of transport before glider launchers?

1 in 5 players has written a Steam Review. One third will never do so. Nearly half says they will do so in the future. Steam Reviews are much appreciated :)

Important sentences that were cut off: "I have participated in the 0.9.0 Beta" / "Videos on YouTube" / "Streams on Twitch"

It's interesting to notice that the most popular thing in this list is watching Colony Survival on YouTube. More than half of you have played CS in co-op with a friend, while less than 1 in 5 have joined a public multiplayer server. Nearly half of the surveyed players have used the Steam Workshop to download a mod, texture or world, which is a lot more popular than I expected!

Nearly half of you have joined our Discord, but less than half of that group is verified, which means the majority has never left a message on that Discord server. Another noticeable thing is the fact that less than 1 in 5 have participated in the beta - at a certain moment I was convinced that anybody semi-interested in 0.9.0 had joined it!



According to your judgement, 0.9.0 raised the game from a 7.3 to a 8.6. We're very happy with these numbers :)



Staying in Early Access for another couple of years is clearly the most popular option, but "5" is the third most popular option - indicating quite a lot of "neutrality". The option to leave Early Access a lot sooner is met with that same neutrality - "5" is the most popular option here.

1 = Complete disagreement, 5 = Complete agreement

Apparently, one of your main causes for enjoying Early Access is more and better updates. Influencing development is less important.

The majority of you doesn't think we necessarily need to stay in Early Access any longer because CS is not yet ready to be a "full release title". But a not insignificant group of 44.2% does advice us to improve the game more before leaving EA, and we'll definitely attempt that.

1 = Complete disagreement, 5 = Complete agreement

87.1% of our players doesn't believe we've been in Early Access for too long. I feel we can interpret these results as a vote of confidence. We don't have to stay in EA much longer, it's fine if we leave it, but it's also fine to stay there for a longer period.

Most of you don't view EA as a bad excuse to have low quality elements in games.

1 = Complete disagreement, 5 = Complete agreement

You've all got quite positive impressions of Early Access! You're not that worried about savegames breaking, and only 1 in 5 believes the label is unpopular and limits the growth and popularity of Colony Survival.

Of course, there's some bias in this answer. People who do have very negative opinions about Early Access, don't purchase and follow Early Access games! Now the question is, how many Steam users agree with you? If 4 out of 5 Steam users do dislike Early Access, that's a lot of players we're missing.

Insert Thanos-perfectly-balanced meme

The current price seems to be perfectly "in the middle". Nearly equally sized groups think the price is a bit cheap / a bit expensive.

Raising the price to €25 is still seen as perfectly reasonable or even cheap by a majority of surveyed players. 1 in 3 players does believe it's a bit much though. It's a tough dilemma: losing significant amounts of revenue because we're pricing the game too cheap is suboptimal, but losing revenue and potential players because the game is too expensive might be even worse.

We're strongly considering a 0.9.1 update which contains some new content and that finally raises the price to €/$25.



There is a jetpack mod by Kenovis on the Workshop that allows players to re-activate personal flight without breaking achievements, at a significant in-game resource cost. We really like the idea, but it "just" uses the "flight cheat", it doesn't feel like a true jetpack.

We thought the jetpack would be popular because many people miss the personal-flying-without-breaking-achievements feature. It is popular, the majority rates it quite highly, but there's also a lot of voters rating it 1-5. It's the least popular idea in this part of the survey.

Boats in general score a lot better, but one specific young British man decided to artificially add 1000 fake votes, to indicate his disagreement with boats. To deter future tampering with surveys, his country has been ejected from the EU.



Blueprint builders are very popular. Portals/dimensions less so, but 10/10 is still the most popular options.



Inbetween those two options in terms of popularity are pipes/cables/conveyor belts. We're thinking about how to implement those!



One of the biggest problems I experienced during my own playthroughs of 0.9.0 was the invisible slow destruction of distant outposts. I expected the outposts-UI option to be more popular than the other options, but the reverse happened. The differences are small though.

1 = Content, 5 = Polish

A majority wants us to focus on polish this Winter, and on new content the rest of the year. That makes sense!

1 = Combat, 5 = Building 1 = More complexity, 5 = Quantity

You clearly voted to be more interested in better building than better combat! I hadn't expected that and since noticing these results I've been thinking a lot about how to accomplish that. That subject deserves at least a full Friday Blog!

More complex and detailed colonists were also less popular than I expected. But that's good - adding more detail there would be hard to do in Colony Survival I!

1 = Tutorials, 5 = Content 1 = 100% focus on singleplayer, 5 = Put some effort in the experience on public servers

A large majority would like to see us focus on content instead of tutorials. I do understand this, but we've got to keep in mind that surveyed players already own and play the game. Perhaps potential new players are hesitant because of the lack of proper tutorials, and solving that issue would be very worthwhile?

Only a small minority wants us to put some effort in improving the experience on public servers. I think we can conclude this mustn't receive a very high priority on our to-do-list :)

So, these were all the answers to all the questions in the survey. Were their any answers that surprised you? Are there things you'd like to add or explain? Let us know in the comments or on Discord!

Bedankt voor het lezen :D

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Enter the Survey here!

Until Monday, we’re participating in the Steam Base Builder Fest. Get the game now for -25%. This will be the lowest price for a long time!

After the sale, we’ll certainly adjust the price in some relatively minor currencies like the Argentine peso. Some nations have suffered major inflation, and we have not adjusted to that since 2017. This causes the price of the game to be totally out of sync with the €/$ 20 price tag.

We’re still planning to raise that €/$ price tag as well. We’ll probably combine that raise with the release of 0.9.1.



Colony Survival has been in Early Access for 5.5 years now. In that time, we’ve released a large amount of updates, adding loads of new content and features. It’s a completely different game now, compared to 0.1 in June 2017.

To us, Early Access basically means “Work In Progress”. Which is slightly annoying to players because it causes minor inconveniences, but it is simultaneously beneficial: it means the game is getting bigger and better. We’ve personally purchased a bunch of Early Access games, and we've never really longed for that Early Access phase to conclude. The end of Early Access often means the end of (major / free) development. As long as the devs can and want to work on their game, Early Access is fine with us.

The release of update 0.9.0 broke old worlds. This was fundamentally unavoidable: there was no way you were going to practically continue your old colony with the new tech tree and changed mechanics, even if we’d put effort in technically enabling that. Choosing to break old worlds allowed us to overhaul the game in better and more significant ways.

We would not dare do something like that if we were not in Early Access. After the full release, an overhaul like 0.9.0 would be impossible. It would limit future potential.

But, Early Access has a different meaning to different people. “Open world survival crafting indie game in Early Access” is quite the meme. To some people, Early Access means “shoddy, bug-filled game that hasn’t reached its goals and the quality of a full release game”. Seen in that light, we don’t think the Early Access label does justice to Colony Survival.

Leaving Early Access would probably allow us to reach new audiences. It would also be a good moment to look at things like console ports.

We’re a bit conflicted. Staying in Early Access has benefits and drawbacks; leaving Early Access has benefits and drawbacks. We would love to have your opinion! What do you think? Detailed responses are certainly welcome in the comments and Discord, but for added convenience, we’ve also created a survey which adds a bunch of other questions. Please participate in the survey here!





We’ve spent the past few weeks as a semi-holiday. On one hand, we’ve taken some time off and worked on some non-CS stuff. On the other hand, we did keep a close eye on all your feedback and bug reports. We did release some minor patches to fix some smaller problems. We made some improvements to the Thai, Spanish and Japanese localization. We tweaked the glider mechanics. Performance of guards has been optimized. For full changelogs, check the in-game info menu or #small-patch-changelogs on Discord.

Every Friday Blog contains a bunch of screenshots. The Steam Storepage is filled with screenshots, and we’re going to work on trailers reflecting the new content soon. We’d love to feature your worlds! If you’ve made something beautiful and want to help us, please put it on the Steam Workshop with some screenshots and a description! We regularly look for new worlds there.

We’re not just looking for massive statues and temples: “practical” worlds reflecting how players actually build and what is useful to complete the tech tree are very welcome too!

We'll share the results of the survey in a couple of weeks.

Bedankt voor het lezen :D

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Happy New Year, or as they say in the north of the Netherlands, veul hail en zeeg’n!

The release of 0.9.0 went very well. A bunch of existing players returned to the new update, and another group decided to purchase the game for the very first time. It’s great to see all this activity. We’ve received an enormous amount of feedback, screenshots, videos and mods and we try to see and read all of it.

Our primary goals of the update seem to have been accomplished. Outposts work. They are used much more frequently than the previous multiple-colonies system. Instead of complaints about how tedious they are, we’re now receiving complaints that outposts might be overpowered! We believe it’s good that outposts are slightly overpowered - we want to reward players for expanding, building and travelling.

Most players seem to agree that 0.9.0 has more content and is engaging for a significantly longer time than previous versions. We can follow your progress by looking at the achievement statistics, and that progress is steady. There doesn’t seem to be one specific unintuitive part of the tech tree that causes a sudden drop-off of players.





Of course, no big change is without drawbacks and issues. On the day of the release, the old achievements were removed and replaced with 50 new ones. Some people were very attached to their old achievements and did not like that. Sorry!

The new achievements didn’t work perfectly. A part of them didn’t unlock. This should be fixed by now, although you do have to open the statistics board and check the right pages to unlock the statistics achievements. We're working on a patch to make that easier.

The poison guard seemed to be broken at the moment of release. This has been fixed as well. In total, we released three patches with miscellaneous fixes and improvements - see #small-patch-changelogs in Discord or the in-game info-menu for a complete list.

Some people have criticised the cost of items, like building materials, in the early game, combined with the fact that you can’t make things like planks yourself anymore. We understand their reasons, but we ultimately believe this is for the best. It does make it more rewarding to grow and improve your colony.

There is another point of criticism though which is very valid, but also applies to previous versions of CS. There is a long article on the Steam Forums titled Building in the Colony is Pointless. It has started a deep debate there. I do believe Profugo Barbatus describes a significant issue here, but I find it hard to come up with good solutions. How do we make constructing interesting, complex, unique and beautiful buildings more rewarding? Feel free to leave your suggestions in that thread, here in the comments and/or on Discord!





Already, a bunch of mods for 0.9.0 have been released. I haven’t tested all of them yet, but I did test the chisel mod and it is amazing! It works a lot more intuitively than I had expected, and it really opens up a lot of building possibilities. I’ve seen talented people build truly beautiful architecture with it. Download it here!

Not everybody can develop mods, but everybody can build things, and it’s easy to share your world on the Steam Workshop. We’re planning to film a new trailer for CS, and shoot new promotional screenshots, in the next weeks and months. We’d love to use a bunch of different worlds for that. We’ve already seen loads of amazing screenshots made in 0.9.0, and we’d love to walk through these worlds for ourselves! So please, if you have an interesting world and want to share it with the rest of us, please put it on the Workshop!

Bedankt voor het lezen :D

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