Colony Survival News

Some new meshes

Zun has been extensively testing the internal 0.9.0 dev build. He too is very happy with the new features and overhauled tech tree! At its core, 0.9.0 is much improved compared to the public 0.8 version. But, before we open up the dev build to a wider audience, we’re going to need a bunch of refinement.

One of the sore spots is the UI. New features often received ugly, bare-bones, rudimentary UIs. They’re useful for testing, but not intuitive and clear. Some older features, like distributing luxury meals, have been scrapped, but their UI is still lingering around and making things confusing. We’re working on fixing that up.

We’ve continued to convert “UI-jobs” into “item-jobs”. What that means, is that instead of using the command tool to place a glowy outline which attracts a worker, you’ve actually got to produce a ‘physical’ item which summons a worker to perform its job. We’ve had ‘cube-blocks’, 1x1x1 cubes which attract a worker to work next to the item, but we’ve now got jobs where the mesh is actually standing on the same block as the worker. For example, the water gatherer is now summoned by physically placing a special bucket-like item on a block, and the water gatherer will then work on top of that block, standing next to the visible buckets.

[Note: we've actually had "colonists working in the same 1x1 area as the mesh" before! The 2015 Greenlight build had it for both miners and guards, and 0.1.0 still had it for archers. That changed later in 2017]



There are a lot of small adjustments we want to make to the tech tree due to Zun’s test. Some examples. Zun quickly recruited a lot of colonists without advancing much in the tech tree. He hit the 100-colonist-limit, and needs 250 ColonyCoins (WIP-name) to increase that limit. Problem: the default ColonyCoin limit is 100, and has to be expanded by building and placing lockboxes.

They can only be built by the engineer, which required some more tech tree unlocking by Zun, but that was hard to do while unable to recruit new colonists. Zun managed to solve the problem by rearranging existing workers, but relatively new players shouldn’t be expected to solve a complex issue like that at the start. We’re planning to fix it by adding the lockbox recipe to the blacksmith at his anvil, which is unlocked significantly earlier than the engineer. We might also make the first colonist-limit-upgrade cheaper than the ColonyCoins-limit.



0.9.0 focuses a lot on the Stone > Copper > Bronze > Iron transition, with each material being more efficient, with Bronze being very expensive but also very powerful and durable, while Iron is cheaper, less amazing but more cost-efficient. Bronze initially requires the purchase of tin, which is very costly.

I wanted to make bronze “continuously important”, so it’s used in expendable items: ammo and tools. But this can become very confusing for players who don’t know exactly how all the mechanics and production streams work. They want to craft something important and permanent from bronze, like a jobblock, but all the rare and expensive bronze ingots they’ve got immediately get turned into bronze tools or bronze bolts, which are instantly distributed or fired away. It also means that guards which rely on bronze ammo are unreliable: if you don't buy tin, they become useless. We’re considering removing expendable bronze items entirely, but are still weighing alternatives.

At first, traps were unlocked in the Iron Age. We wanted to introduce this feature earlier, so you can now build dropper traps in the Copper Age. They have to be built above monsters, which is hard to do at scale without building narrow mazes. As a replacement for disposable bronze ammo for guards, Zun suggested bronze traps that shoot to the side. That makes it a lot easier to hit monsters, and doesn’t require players to continuously purchase tin: the ammo wouldn’t need bronze.

We’re working on dozens of small and medium-sized issues like this, and we’ll believe they’ll make 0.9.0 much more intuitive. When that’s done, we’ll start expanding the beta.

An example of a small portion of all the things-to-fix we encountered

Before the full, public release, there are some content/feature things we’d still to add. The Mission System and an improved Notification System should help a lot to introduce players to 0.9.0 and the game in general, and to better manage their much larger colonies and outposts. We’d also like to expand the Iron Age and add some extra ages to make full use of the outpost system and to have a serious challenge for advanced players. With all main features already introduced and functional, adding more content shouldn’t be too hard.

Bedankt voor het lezen :D

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This week, I’ve been test-playing the latest internal dev-build. Zun has just completed his newest feature: outposts! Back in November, we came up with that idea and the reaction from players was overwhelmingly positive.

I’ve now been able to try it out, and I don't want to exaggerate, but it truly is a lot of fun! This is what 0.7.0 should have been like. It’s way more fun to build a path towards a mountaintop and start a local mine there, than to have to fly for multiple kilometres towards a colony that is unconnected in all dimensions.

The outposts share their tech tree and their stockpile with the main colony. This makes it a lot less cumbersome to ‘restart’. You don’t have to start over from scratch, you don’t have to use tedious UI to send over some beds and food and ammo, you can just continue with your resources from the main colony.



In all previous versions of Colony Survival, only the area within your green safe zone was useful and productive. You could ignore most of the world as irrelevant. It was merely scenery. But with the outpost-feature, you start to look at the world very differently. That flat stretch of land on the other side of the river could be a great farming outpost. The forest on the other side of your colony could become a source of logs, planks and firewood. Etcetera, etcetera.

We’re going to enhance the world generation to take advantage of this new feature. What areas, what resources, can we add in the main temperate ‘spawn biome’, that will incentivize players to build all kinds of diverse outposts? We’re still working that out.

Zun and Vobbert have not played the 0.9.0 dev build yet. We’re getting very close to the moment where the dev build is sufficiently playable for a genuinely enjoyable long-term playthrough, without using cheats or commands to fix work-in-progress problems. I hope we’ll get there next week or the week after that. That version will still have quite a lot of work-in-progress-UI that is not ready for release. We're trying to streamline gameplay first, and when that's all working as intended we can design the final UI.

Then Zun and Vobbert will playtest it, fully aware of all the things that are still unfinished, and they’ll probably find some serious problems that need to be fixed ASAP. When that’s done, we hope to open up the beta to the first batch of testers. There are still multiple features and changes that we want to implement before 0.9.0 can become the main public branch of CS, and development on that will happen simultaneously to the first beta tests. But it’s always good to get feedback from beta testers relatively early!



Bedankt voor het lezen :D

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It’s the last day and the last blog of 2021! We want to start out by thanking all of you for your support and your patience. We’ve released zero public updates to Colony Survival this year, and despite that, there’s still plenty of activity in the comments, on the Discord and in the surveys. That’s very motivating! Thanks to everyone who purchased Colony Survival: we’re very grateful that we can be dedicated to its development full-time. And thanks to the modders, the server hosts, the translators and all others who are helping us improve CS!

Despite the lack of updates to CS in 2021, a lot has changed behind the scenes. Our current dev build has new core mechanics, major changes to the gameplay, and lots of new jobs and items. It has been a productive year. We would’ve loved to release a steady stream of small updates instead of one mega-big-update, but sadly, we cannot. If 0.8.0 is a decent, finished, regular car, the current 0.9.0 dev build is a streamlined sports car with a race engine, three tires, no brakes, no radio and no air-conditioning. We believe the end result will exceed 0.8.0 in all dimensions, the current work-in-progress has some impressive new features, but it’s also such a massive overhaul that it’s currently just significantly less complete than 0.8.0.

We couldn’t have planned it otherwise. Everything is so interrelated: the jobs & and the tech tree, the jobs & the world generation, the tech tree & monsters & traps, all the new changes & the interface… When you change one thing, all the related things have to be adapted as well. We don’t treat Colony Survival as a sandbox game with wildly disconnected features: it ought to be one coherent experience where you follow the tech tree from the Stone Age to the Industrial Revolution.

[h2]Animal Husbandry[/h2]

This feature was proposed way back in 2017, but we never actually implemented it. Due to the longer crafting times, 0.9.0 was getting quite heavily dependent on ‘regular jobblocks’, which means a lot of colonists standing next to randomly placed cubes. We were looking for a way to add some more ‘non-jobblock’ production to balance things out. Instead of just putting more emphasis on regular miners/farmers/fishers, we were looking for something completely new.

After a while, we came back to the animal husbandry idea. You’d have colonists actually caring for cows and/or sheep and/or goats. We’re unsure about the precise implementation, and it’s highly related to the dilemma above: should we delay 0.9.0 even further and add animal husbandry to it as well? Should we release 0.9.0 with an animal-husbandry-sized gap and add it in 0.9.1? Should we release 0.9.0 without that gap and then try to squeeze it in in a later update anyway? We’d love to have your opinion on that! Let us know in the comments or on Discord.



[h2]The Covid Situation[/h2]

Everybody is probably tired of thinking about this, but this seems like the right place to mention it for a bit. The past two years have been weird. We've had multiple periods of shops/events/gatherings/schools being limited, hospitals nearing capacity etc. There were some times where we had to digest quite some new information to properly grasp the situation, which took some time and effort. Earlier on this all slowed down development a bit, but over time it's mostly back on pace as the situation has become more known, vaccines & treatments have become available, and generally we got more used to it. Hopefully 2022 will be calmer (knocking on wood!).

[h2]2022[/h2]

Though we expect 2022 to be calmer in terms of COVID, we expect it to be a lot more exciting in terms of Colony Survival! We’re really looking forward to releasing 0.9.0. It’s going to be the biggest update CS has ever seen. It should both improve core mechanics and extend the gameplay with a lot of new content. The Yogscast often worked on the goal of recruiting 1000 colonists, but this was a stretch goal way beyond ‘regular gameplay’. We hope to make reaching 1000 colonists a sensible and expected part of completing the tech tree!

Thanks for being a part of the CS community, and we want to wish all of you a very Happy New Year :D

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Gelukkig Nieuwjaar!

While testing my colony in the 0.9.0 dev build, I noticed that I had a hard time producing bronze and iron. To construct the kilns and bloomeries needed to expand iron production, some bronze is needed. Instead of the bronze ending up in the new jobblocks, it was quickly converted into bronze tools, which were soon taken by colonists. I did want some bronze tools in my inventory, for science unlocks and as ingredients in certain crafting recipes, so I did not want to reduce my bronze tool production to 0. I wanted to tell my colonists not to use the bronze tools as tools.

But I couldn’t. Zun and I had discussed this issue earlier, and we couldn’t come to a satisfying conclusion. I was imagining an interface where you could adjust the tool-priorities of your workers, and where you could change these preferences per job category. For example, gunsmiths should take the best tool available, while berry farmers should only take bronze/iron tools if copper/stone tools are not available.

We had a hard time converting this idea into a proper UI that is actually intuitive to use. After renewed efforts we settled on a different idea. A simple interface that determines a global limit for all colonists. The limit determines the amount of tools, per type of tool, that colonists will leave untouched in your stockpile (except when they need them as ingredients in a crafting recipe). By default this is something like 3, while the default production limit is higher, resulting in a continuous flow of tool production and tool use. But if you want to save your bronze/iron/steel, you can adjust these limits and force colonists to use other tools.

Where to put this menu? We could’ve put it into the colony menu, among a lot of other interfaces. But we found a solution: a “tool distribution table”. An actual in-game item that has to be placed in the world, and where colonists physically go to collect new tools. Walk up to it and click on it to activate its menu, and that’s where you can adjust the tool limits. We think this is more immersive and fun than one big colony menu with dozens of different functions hidden behind all kinds of buttons and links.

Before this new item, colonists automatically received new tools. This made the entire process very opaque. When they go to the tool distribution table, you’ll actually see an icon of the tool they’re grabbing. This makes it a lot easier to see what’s happening. We’re planning to do the same with the ‘grocery store’, the table where colonists collect their meals. 0.8.0 just shows a generic icon, we’re planning to display the actual meal that’s being grabbed there.



We decided to do the same with the statistics menu. We added a new in-game item, the Statistics Board, which can be placed in the world and can be clicked on to access the statistics UI. It’s still accessible in the traditional way, but we’re considering removing that entirely. Decluttering the UI will probably help to make the game more accessible to newcomers. We’d love to have your opinion. Is it good to connect UI elements to ‘physical’ in-game items wherever that makes sense, allowing you to build some kind of in-game HQ, or should the entire interface be collected and accessible in one abstract UI-space?

We made another change to make things more “real” and less UI-based. Colony Survival 0.1.0 released with quiver-items that needed to be placed in the world to recruit archers. With the addition of new guard types in 0.4.0, that was changed to abstract colored squares. We’ve got plans to add new guard types, but didn’t want a massive spreadsheet-menu, so we’ve converted that back to the old actual-item-gameplay. Here’s the metal rack that crossbow guards use to store their bolts:



We’ve heard some players ask for a more ‘living’ world, instead of a mechanical colony of robot-slaves. It doesn’t seem viable for us to develop super realistic human-like models with complex, unique animations for all their actions, nor are we able to add deep conversations with colonists, but we hope that a lot of relatively small changes like the ones above help to make the game feel more immersive.



Colony Survival 0.1.0 was released with a big temperate biome in the middle - the place where you spawn and where pretty much all players built their colonies. Far to the north was an arctic biome, and the tropics were in the south. They had zero impact on gameplay.

0.7.0 changed that. It added a New World in the west and a Far East in an obvious location, and it gave players the possibility to start a second, separate colony in these distant biomes, with new tech trees and new resources.



We loved the idea, but we were a bit disappointed in practice. It’s an interesting challenge for some, but the physical distance and the complete separation of colonies, only remedied by a trader with a cumbersome UI, makes it quite unappealing to many. Completing the tech tree in the original temperate biome is, in practice, the end of the game for most players. The content in the distant biomes is also quite artificial: things like potato farms and rice farms are only possible once you’ve crossed an arbitrary, invisible straight line on the world map.

The outposts-idea hopefully fixes these issues. Both their stockpile and their tech tree should be merged with the main colony, and they should be buildable relatively close to the main colony as well.

Currently, everything in a biome is possible in every location in that biome. All ores spawn everywhere, all farms can be built in one place. But we’re looking to change that up. Gold ore spawns everywhere in 0.8.0, but can only be purchased at the new Colony-Currency-trader in 0.9.0. What if it only spawns high in the mountains? Your main colony will be near water in a fertile valley, but building a mining outpost on top of a mountain, the only place to mine gold, sounds like an interesting challenge. Of course, the gold ore (and other fundamental but rare resources) will stay available at the 'currency-trader'.

So we want to make the temperate spawn-biome more diverse and interesting. That could happen with for example unique ores in the mountains, fens where coal can be mined or heathlands as the only place to gather silica sand for glass blowing. That will probably also result in a way bigger temperate biome.

This might result in a disappearance of the tropics, the far east and the new world, at least in the way they’re currently structured. Would you mind the loss of this content, in return for more content in the temperate biome and an earlier release of 0.9.0? Or should we put effort into maintaining the ‘distant content’? Let us know in the comments or on Discord!

Bedankt voor het lezen :D

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The jobblock maker in the internal 0.9.0 dev branch. We're considering to allow an increased heigth for jobblocks.

Progress in the past week has been fairly steady and predictable. The refactoring of NPC movement has been completed, and caltrop traps actually slow down enemies now. The final items without icons or meshes have received the attention they needed. Instead of boring you with all the technical details, we’d like to bore you with philosophical details!

We’ll start with a story about Formula 1. Zun, Vobbert and I watch most races, certainly now that a Dutchman is leading the championship. When I was young, in the Schumacher-era, I thought Formula 1 was a competition between the fastest cars we could build.

Michael Schumacher at the 2004 United States Grand Prix, all F1 images from Wikipedia

When I grew older, I learned F1 has an enormous rulebook. There are all kinds of technical specifications the carmakers have to follow. The car must fit very specific dimensions, it has to be a certain weight, it has to use a specific kind of engine, they can’t exceed a certain fuel use, the aerodynamics are limited, assists like traction control are outlawed.

This means Formula 1 cars aren’t the fastest cars in the world. They’re not optimized for speed, nor are they optimized for beating the competition. They’re limited by all kinds of constraints, and could quite easily be much faster without them.

When I learned about that, I was quite disappointed. Formula 1 is exciting because the cars are so extremely fast and the technology is so advanced! Why would you limit that? Architects, musicians and writers don’t deliberately reduce the quality of their output by 30% because of arbitrary rules. Why does F1?!

A Mercedez-Benz W196, participated in the 1954 and 1955 F1 seasons

Nowadays, the F1 rulebook might actually be one of the things I appreciate the most about the sport. I wish the ‘real world’ was regulated that well! It turns out that although “a competition about designing and driving the fastest possible cars” does result in “exciting competitions to watch” to a degree, the correlation is far from 100%. Back in the 1950s, the rulebook might have been quite thin, resulting in a competition that largely did concern the fastest cars they could build.

But as technology advanced, speed and cost went up. This has all kinds of detrimental effects if you want a competition that is actually fun to watch. You don’t want crashes to regularly severely harm or kill drivers. You want to watch humans drive, not all kinds of onboard electronics. You don’t want one super-wealthy team to make a car that extremely outperforms all others which just wins championship after championship without competition.

A BRM P133 in 1968

The difference between #1 and #2 in a F1 race is regularly only a fraction of a second. Being able to lose 100 grams of weight can thus make or break your race, because the lower weight will give you increased speed. Without strict rules, this would mean starved drivers and no safety features.

The teams are continuously trying to find loopholes in the rules. If they can find a semi-legal way to improve their lap times even a tiny bit, they’ll do so. If you follow F1 for a while, you’ll be confronted with all kinds of discussions about flexible wings, novel steering methods and other weird rule-bending technology. At a certain moment McLaren introduced the F-Duct system, where the driver had to close off holes in the body of the car to change the aerodynamics - an unexpected way to circumvent the ban on movable aerodynamic devices.

To summarize:

• The Formula 1 organization wants to organize safe, exciting and relatively affordable races
  
• The teams and drivers are focused on winning those races, and they’re constantly in a very intense competition with others who try to achieve the same thing
  
• These goals are quite at odds with each other and this results in a continuous cat-and-mouse game between the organization and the teams, which throughout the decades has produced a rather massive rulebook. This is quite inevitable.

Fictional Red Bull X1 prototype: a racing car unconstrained by rules and regulations

This cat-and-mouse game can be observed in a lot of places. Big companies can profit by disregarding the environment, the government implements rules to prevent this, companies find a loophole, etcetera.

Here in the Netherlands, the government tried to reduce COVID infections by closing down pubs and restaurants. To circumvent these bans, people just started socializing with others at home. To prevent this, the government implemented a curfew: you weren’t allowed to walk the streets after 9PM. This ‘problem’ was also solved quickly: many just started hosting sleepovers.

We’re noticing the same pattern in Colony Survival over and over again. We want to generate interesting challenges for players. A pressure to improve their defenses, or their food production, or their mining operation. Players want to overcome these challenges, but that means that we as developers have pretty much completely opposed incentives, compared to players. Players often want powerful melee guards that can stab to death monsters with spears - we don’t want to add strong guards that don’t consume ammo, because that would make so many other guards useless.

Many players, myself included, build colonies with “bed-seas”. Rooms fully covered with beds, from wall to wall. We’ve regularly been asked to introduce measures to prevent or at least disincentivize this. But how do we do that in a way that’s intuitive for players, that doesn’t result in an infinite cat-and-mouse game, and that is not too costly too program? We could demand that players leave one block of free space between beds, but that would result in similar “bed warehouses”, just with a slightly less optimal pattern. There’s no easy way to add constraints that would result in ‘realistic’, cosy, good-looking bedrooms.

Another example. It’s currently quite easy to “guide” the monsters to a certain entrance - often a big maze. Players mention they would like to see monsters that can break or scale your walls. We do see the appeal, but widely distributing such an ability would quickly lead to a new dominant strategy: just place guards along your entire wall, because you need to be able to defend from all angles. That seems more boring to me than fighting ‘dumb’ monsters that can be guided along certain paths.

Trapmaker and goldsmith, internal 0.9.0 dev build

Last example: we want to offer better items to advanced colonies. Your reward for expansion and progress in the tech tree should be stronger weapons, better foods, and more valuable luxury items. But if they’re superior in all dimensions, players are pushed to replace the production chains of previous items, and it gets boring and annoying to continuously place and replace production chains. That’s why we’re striving to keep older items relevant later in the game, to make sure the optimal strategy isn’t frustrating. But finding ways to offer continuous improvement without outdating earlier items is very hard!

It feels a bit like we’re trying to stop water from flowing downhill. Every time we put a barrier in its path, it just finds the easiest way to flow around it. This is a persistent issue that returns again and again, both in Colony Survival and outside of it. Problems seem like they have an easy solution, but each solution has its own side-effects, often convincing us to choose to just tolerate the original problem.

We hope this helps you understand that we do recognize quite a lot of problems and potential solutions, and why we chose not to implement certain apparently ‘easy’ solutions. Things are complex, puzzle-designers and puzzle-solvers have quite conflicting goals, and we’d like to prevent infinite cat-and-mouse games.

We don’t want to discourage offering suggestions! They’ve been very valuable in the past, and even if we can’t directly implement them, they at least tell us where the bottlenecks are. Please keep doing so. And if the suggestions help deal with the dynamics above, they are extra useful.

If you find these concepts interesting, you might want to read Why the tails come apart
and Meditations on Moloch. If you're still interested after these walls of texts, jump into #serious on our Discord!

Bedankt voor het lezen :D

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