We made good progress with the top-down view this month! This short video shows what it currently looks like in the internal development build. Watch it here:
https://youtu.be/OCcjfFNz_ZM It's all work-in-progress, so it will look different when it's publicly released. The interface is very basic. And when you place a blueprint of a building, it's constructed instantly. Of course, that's not the intention.

The video demonstrates the new features, currently called the "scanner" and "placer". The scanner allows you to select a part of the world and save it as a blueprint. The placer allows you to select a blueprint and place it in the world. The core of the feature is currently working, but there's still a lot to do before we can release it. For example, at the moment blueprints disappear when you return to the main menu and then reload the world.


The video mentions the orthographic perspective, but it's hard to explain without images. So here are two screenshots from Blender to illustrate the difference! First, a regular perspective, as used by your own eyes and current first-person Colony Survival:


Secondly, the orthographic perspective:


All the cubes are the same size. In a regular perspective, distant cubes appear smaller. In the orthographic perpsective, all cubes appear the exact same size.

Lots of top-down strategy games use this perspective, and we tried to make it work for Colony Survival as well. Our game engine, Unity, has a special option for it, but it changes so much in the way things are rendered that we ended up with a lot of visual glitches. Instead of trying to patch them all, we chose a very similar solution: use the equivalent of a telescope. A really powerful telescope has a visual result that is very close to an orthographic perspective!

The top-down perspective looks and feels visually distinct from regular gameplay, and I love how it’s turning out. We’ll keep working on it and hope to release it publicly later this year!

Bedankt voor het lezen :D


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Colony Survival is part of the Summer Sale and currently 30% off!

For years, players have been asking for a blueprint builder or “copy-paste builder”. A way to select an area of the world - a building, a palace, a tower - and to let your colonists build a copy of it in some other place of the world. One of the very first mods actually contained such functionality.

I totally understood the appeal, but I worried deeply about the implementation. Designing proper interfaces to intuitively handle complex RTS-functions from a first-person perspective is a hard task. How do you make sure to select exactly your structure, but nothing extra? And how do you place it in the world? How do you visualize to players that it’s rotated in the right direction? How do you align it to the ground, how do you determine the exact height? How do you deal with clipping through the terrain, how do you prevent the new structure from floating above the ground?

The first time we worried about such issues was nearly a decade ago. The game was in a much more barebones condition, and we lacked quality-of-life features like the green preview that we currently have. But even with those additions, a simple implementation of the copy-paste builder would quickly become very frustrating, glitching and janky, in my opinion.

There is an addition that I believe would help tremendously: a decent top-down view. The position itself, high up in the sky, should help with the selection and placement of large structures. But there’s something else.

While playing from a first-person perspective, the mouse moves the camera and it’s an essential way of moving through the world. But that also means you can’t separately move around a cursor. A cursor with which you could hover over elements in the world and interact with buttons and other UI elements on the screen. In traditional RTS’s, these are crucial ways of interacting with the world and managing your civilization.


We discussed it and agreed about this! So we’re currently working on building a top-down view for Colony Survival. It won’t be the new default way of playing the game. It’ll have to be entered by interacting with an in-world block while playing from the first-person perspective.

We believe this addition will unlock a whole lot of new potential for the game. In the top-down view, it’ll be a lot easier to communicate information towards the player, and interacting with the world will be a lot more intuitive. This makes it possible for us to add new more complex gameplay mechanics to the game without overwhelming players. We’re excited for those new possibilities!

Developing the new top-down view requires a lot of complicated coding without a lot of visual results. That’s why most screenshots in this blog showcase another thing we’re working on: more paint options! The paint mechanic allowed for items like doors and window frames to be painted, but objects like pillars were unpaintable. We’re fixing that!



This month, on the 16th of June, we celebrated the fact that the Steam release happened eight years ago, in 2017. This means that we’ve both been working on the game full-time for that period. We’re very grateful that your sustained support has been making that possible! A lot has changed in that period. The game has radically changed and grown, and our own personal lives also look completely different.

We’d love to discuss “Early Access” with you. It’s a conflicting label. We were born in an era where you still had to go to a shop to buy a physical disc. That meant that a game was fairly static: it was the data on the disc, it was a definitive release happening at a specific moment in time. Of course, developers often kept playing with the same formula, but that meant you had to buy a sequel one or two years later. Sequels that sometimes radically improved the formula, but that more often than not were simple reskins. The same gameplay mechanics, but with some new items and enemies.

With digital distribution, it’s possible to keep working on the same game after release. To enhance it, optimize it, add more features, more content. For years. Or decades. Some fairly successful games have pioneered this.


It’s what we are doing. It has been years since we broke savegame compatibility, but we can imagine that that happens again. Not with the next top-down view and blueprint builder update - much further in the future. But fully exploiting all the new possibilities of the top-down view might require a new style of world generation and a tech tree that is so fundamentally different that it is not compatible with old savegames.

That’s why we’re sticking with the Early Access label. Because we believe it’s wrong to break savegames in a game without that label. But there’s a decent percentage of players who think Early Access means unoptimized buggy jank. Some even believe that it’s Steam that does a quality check before you can leave Early Access - and that being in Early Access means you don’t pass that quality check. That’s not how it works.

So we feel like we’re stuck between two suboptimal situations. Keeping the Early Access label means a significant percentage of potential players will instantly think bad of the game. But if we remove the label, we feel obligated to keep savegames compatible into eternity - which means that fundamental changes to things like world generation and the tech tree become impossible.

Maybe we need a new label? Something like “Perpetual Development”? We’d love to know your opinion about this dilemma! And about the new top-down view and blueprint builders of course :)

Bedankt voor het lezen!

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The newest update is live right now and contains a massive overhaul of NPC movement and pathfinding. In all previous versions, NPCs were rigidly constrained to the voxel grid. They could only move in straight lines to the blocks directly next to theirs.

0.14.0 changes that. NPCs are now able to move diagonally! This is true for both colonists and monsters.

Before 0.14.0, NPCs didn’t really care where they walked. Grass or an actual floor, dry land or water - they were equally quick on all terrains, and had zero preferences. This has changed too! All NPCs now strive to avoid water. Colonists prefer walking on proper paths and get a minor speed boost there, while they are slightly slower on blocks like grass and sand.


Monsters can’t open doors anymore - but have learned to destroy them. They have a bit of a dislike for doing that, making colonists behind doors safer in a lot of situations. But block the path towards the banner with a door, and they’ll have no problem smashing them to pieces!

Previously, colonists could walk through beds without a problem - that prevented a lot of pathfinding issues. Beds are not total blockers in 0.14.0, but they do slow down colonist movement quite dramatically. “Bed seas” are not an optimal solution anymore!

Apart from those major changes to pathfinding and movement, there are some smaller changes. The “old” quarterblocks can now be placed with the same system as the newer dynamic quarterblocks, allowing for example vertical placement on walls. Other “dynamic” blocks that adjust their shape based on context, like rails, torches and street lanterns, will now show a green placement preview, like static objects had been doing for a while.


There is a pretty long list of minor fixes and changes. Some destruction particles have been adjusted, some text issues have been improved, a ragdoll bug was patched. For the full list, see the in-game changelog!

If you encounter any issues, or would otherwise like to share your opinion, please let us know! We’re very active on Discord and will certainly monitor the Steam comments on this blog.

Veel plezier met update 0.14.0!


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The new update is live on Steam! The biggest changes are “rubble” and bombs. When you or a colonist destroys a block, small chunks of rubble will appear and fall to the ground. Bombs take advantage of this new system by instantly removing large amounts of blocks and blasting the rubble away.

There’s also a complex fuse system that allows you to detonate the bombs remotely. The fuse system supports junctions, “elevators” to go up a level and special fuse blocks that introduce a delay to the system.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S9mLnbCWU18

You don’t have to wait until you’ve unlocked and produced gunpowder to try the new system. Fairly early in the game, you can unlock them in the merchant, where they can be purchased for Colony Points. (Which is the currency you earn in-game, not some microtransaction nonsense)

The rubble system automatically limits the amount of rubble generated when large amounts of blocks disappear simultaneously. It's also affected by the "particle effects" setting, so it can be tweaked to your preference.

We added some smoke with the explosions, and that smoke is also visible when you or guards use the grenade launcher. The area-of-effect damage of the grenade launcher didn’t work when the player used it manually in the past, but that has been fixed with 0.13.0 as well!


The previous update added the transparent green outline that shows up before you place certain items. Some items, like fences, adapt their shape depending on the surroundings when placed. The old system couldn’t properly predict that.

The fuses can be stacked to create a “fuse elevator” that allows the fuse to go up a level. This is a bit of a unique system so we want to make absolutely clear how it works. But the green preview couldn’t properly show that transformation. There was a pretty technical problem here regarding the communication between the server and client, but Zun completely overhauled that.

This means that the green preview now exactly shows how the fuse will adapt to the surroundings when it’s placed, and this improvement has been applied to other items as well, like the fence.


A noticeable other change concerns “scribe-type-colonists” - they can now pick items from high shelves, to a maximum of five stacked shelves. 0.13.0 contains a bunch of other small tweaks, improvements and bug fixes - see the in-game changelog for the full list!

We hope the number 13 won’t bring us bad luck. Let us know how you feel about the changes, and please report any issues!


Veel plezier met de update :D

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We’re participating in the City Builder & Colony Sim Fest which means Colony Survival is currently 30% off! This is a great moment to purchase the game if you don’t own it yet.

As promised in the previous blog, we made a video showing the new systems! Here it is:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S9mLnbCWU18

We didn’t merely work on the rubble-effect. We also added explosives! There are currently three types. (In the internal development build that will be released publicly quite soon)

Firstly, there are regular bombs, which destroy blocks all around them. Need a building gone rapidly? These are for you!

Secondly, there are shaped charges. They blast away a 3x3 area in front of them. They’re very useful if you need to make a tunnel.

Last but not least, there are shaped charges that target downwards diagonally. This leaves a stair-like shape standing. Very practical when you’re digging a mine!


To trigger these explosives, we’ve implemented a fuse system. They can be placed on the ground and they automatically connect to each other and to bombs. They can’t be placed vertically on walls though, so we had to think of an alternative way of going up a level.

That turned out to be the “fuse elevator”. It’s made by building another fuse right on top of an existing fuse. The fuse now turns into two square rings on two different levels, connecting nearby fuses on both levels together.

Another useful part of the fuse system is the fuse timer. It works like a regular fuse, but it contains a delay of four seconds. All combined, it’s a pretty complex and powerful system!

Development on these new items and features is mostly finished. Just some finishing touches are needed. We’re hoping to release the update within a couple of weeks!


Bedankt voor het lezen :D

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At the end of 2024, when testing the addition of the mill, I did another cheat-free playthrough of the game. I made a mistake in my planning and had to remove a fairly large wall that I had accidentally placed two blocks to the right of where it had to go. Destroying it was a bit of a tedious, repetitive task. I could’ve let my colonists do the work but I couldn’t be bothered setting up a construction area.

It made me vividly realize that currently, destroying blocks is pretty…. boring. A bar fills up, a block disappears, repeat. But in real life, smashing a brick wall is actually pretty exciting. Chunks fly off, rubble rolls and falls everywhere.

Why shouldn’t Colony Survival be like that? I instantly thought that I wanted to make the direction of destroying the block matter. Make it more interactive, less repetitive. Give players the choice to direct all the rubble into a specific direction.

So that’s the new big change we’re working on! We currently have an internal dev build where this works fairly well.


We used a “shatter algorithm” to break a 3D cube into many fractured parts. We took some of the smaller parts and use them when you are in the process of breaking a block. Where your cursor hits the block, little chunks fall off.

When the block itself disappears, large chunks spawn inside of the now empty space, and they fly away based on gravity and the direction of your mining efforts.

The fractured parts from the shatter algorithm work very well for stone blocks. But they make less sense for other blocks like leaves and wooden planks. So we’ve added more types of chunks, each fitting to a different groups of blocks.

Testing the new chunks is a joy. It’s really fun to make big piles of rubble and to watch them bounce down slopes and tunnels. One of the first things I instinctively tried was letting them drop into water. At first, all the chunks sunk down to the bottom as if the water wasn’t there. Which kinda makes sense for stone rubble… but not for leaves or wood! So now we’ve also assigned different weights to the rubble, making some float and others not.

For now, you’ll have to enjoy the rubble in the static screenshots in this blog. But they do look pretty amazing when you can actually see them moving, so we’re planning to share a video in the next blog!



We were invited by Steam to participate in a Daily Deal! In the middle of January, we had a significant discount and were featured on Steam’s frontpage. It worked out really well, leading to a serious boost in new players. Some of them are probably reading this, so welcome!

We worked together with Allcorrect to get professional translations of the game in some major languages. They were implemented before the Daily Deal and we noticed a significant increase in players from the related countries.


But we hadn’t gone through the “LQA” process beforehand. LQA means Linguistic Quality Assurance. The professional translators who worked on our game only received a bunch of text files. They didn’t actually see their texts in the full context of the game. During the LQA process, a group of specialized testers actually played the game and tested the translations. It resulted in quite a lot of feedback that is now being implemented into the game.

If any of you are using the new professional translations, please let us know how you feel about them! Fully content? Do you have criticism? We’d love to hear it.



We have gotten some questions from new players whether we are continuing to update the game, and whether there will be significant additions to the gameplay. The answer to both questions is yes!

We’ve had some very deep and serious discussions about the future of Colony Survival at the start of this year. What would we still love to add before we leave Early Access? What is still missing, what fun can still be had in the framework of the current game?

We actually had some very inspiring ideas and we’re quite certain about developing in that direction. Yet simultaneously, we’re not 100% sure how to actually translate those into detailed gameplay and specific updates.

We’ve still got some smaller ideas related to the rubble/chunks/destruction effects, so we’re working on those now and that will be the main content of the next update. Simultaneously, we’re working out how to actually implement those bigger ideas we’ve got for the future of the game. When we’re more certain about that, we’ll certainly share those plans with you!


Bedankt voor het lezen :D

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We have just released update 0.12.1! The most significant change is the addition of official game translations in major global languages. Both the storepage and the in-game content are now available in:

• German
  
• French
  
• Spanish
  
• Czech
  
• Polish
  
• Russian
  
• Japanese
  
• Korean
  
• Chinese (simplified)

We’ve worked together with Allcorrect. It’s not often that we collaborate so closely with other companies, or that professionals go through our .json files so thoroughly. But it went very well, with high-quality results delivered very quickly! And no, we aren’t paid or obligated to share this ;)

The translations in all these languages will be updated officially when texts are changed or added in future updates.

We had fanmade translations in all these languages beforehand, and they have been made redundant. We do still appreciate the makers of these translations, they have been very valuable in the past 7.5 years. For the many players who speak languages not covered by the nine in the list above: your fan translations are still very useful, feel free to keep submitting them! The game now supports both official and fanmade translations.


December the 27th is the birthday of Zun! He is the programmer who started work on the very first prototype of this game 12 years ago. None of this would have existed without him. Congratulations are welcome in the comments and on Discord!


The last blog of 2023 was a little dark. We didn’t know precisely what to choose for the next update, and we were thinking about switching over to a sequel. That has changed quite a bit. We’ve got a lot of inspiration for new updates, and we’re very proud of the steps we've taken this year.

We started 2024 by announcing the winners of the Builder’s Contest, with our very first voice-overed video.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5M-xUwPVuTw

In February, we released 0.10.1, which added water transparency! It makes a big difference to how the world looks, and we made another video to demonstrate it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IRUsFNhlkpk

In the same month, we released updates that overhauled the lighting. We released the third video of the year three weeks after the second. Something that doesn’t work well on video but that’s still quite significant: those updates also added Steam Cloud Sync support.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d_i8hXLc-EU

In March, we released 0.10.3, which added proper controller support. A month later, all of that was verified by Steam, and Colony Survival was also approved as “Steamdeck Compatible”!

The Builder’s Contest, the new water and the improved lighting all came together in the production of the new main trailer, which was uploaded on April 19.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WbbDsOB_3zQ

At the end of May, we released 0.11. The biggest difference was the new colonist model. It’s quite different from the old one, but we’re very happy with it. It has allowed us to add unique models for different jobs, instead of only changing the colour of the shirt. Apart from that, 0.11 also significantly enhanced construction jobs with new features.

During the Summer, we worked hard on a new lighting system that features much more differentiated indirect lighting. It definitely makes the game look a lot better. I think we were a bit too soon with the filming of the new main trailer! It was released in 0.11.1 at the end of August.

Which means we’ve already arrived in September and work on 0.12, which was released less than a month ago! The biggest change is the addition of the mill, and we’re very happy with how it turned out. It was quite a change for us:

• The mill rewards player crafting instead of work done by colonists. We’ve pretty much always focused on the colonist-part of the game, but encouraging the player to participate in certain ways actually works really well.
  
• The 3D-objects we’ve added in recent years were always fairly small, the size of one or sometimes two voxel blocks. The mill is much bigger.
  
• All our jobblocks are static, not animated. The mill actually moves! It makes it much more interesting to look at.
  
• We’ve always struggled to make UIs that combine functionality with being intuitive, aesthetic and moddable, and focused primarily on the first one. I believe the mill UI to actually be a big step forward in the other domains, and we hope to get more UIs up to that level in 2025!

So we’re very happy with the progress we’ve made in 2024. We feel like all those changes were serious upgrades, and we’ve also sharpened our own skills. We’re looking forward to keep applying those.

Heel veel plezier met de update, fijne Kerstdagen en een heel gelukkig 2025!

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The newest update is available on Steam right now! It’s fully compatible with your pre-existing 0.9/0.10/0.11 worlds.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1zdFjAWNUDw Watch the release trailer here!

Update 0.12.0 has a strong focus on the early game. From the very beginning, a mill is available to the player. The mill does not need colonists and can craft items 24/7. It can produce some fundamental early game items like beds and torches, and a handful of building blocks and roofs. It changes the start of the game quite significantly. There’s more to do for the player. Personally cutting down trees is more rewarding now. Players can also generate meals by removing naturally occurring berry bushes and putting the results into the mill.


The mill does need time to do its crafting, and results are not automatically deposited in the stockpile. Players have to walk to the mill and choose whether to deposit the results in their personal hotbar or in the communal stockpile. Mills are limited to only one per colony or outpost. These drawbacks make the mill fairly balanced. It’s a great boost at the start, but as your colony grows it becomes more convenient to let colonists produce these recipes.


From a technical perspective, the mill is quite revolutionary for Colony Survival. It is currently the biggest object in the game, and it has actual moving parts. We had to develop some new systems to accommodate this, and we hope to use those systems for future additions. To make placing the mill more predictable for players, a greenish variant of the mill is shown where the player is aiming with the mill equipped. This new system is reused for a bunch of other objects too.


A small change with big consequences concerns the roofs. They were added a couple of updates ago and many people have used them, but they had a problem. When you place a diagonal roof on the front of a building, the roof-block becomes part of the facade of the building. But it does not adapt to the specific type of blocks in that facade. We chose some default cobblestone and planks textures for these facade-roofs, but in many builds, that didn’t match what people were actually using. It looked pretty wonky.
Zun has built a new system that allows roof blocks in facades to automatically adapt to the block they’re resting on. It makes roofs look a lot better! The existing tiled roofs were only available when you had progressed quite a bit into the tech tree. We made new roof types that can be made with the mill at the start of the game: wooden roofs and straw roofs. Of course, they also use the auto-adaptation system.


Roof awkwardly connecting to blocks in 0.11


Straw roof smoothly connecting to blocks in 0.12

For a long time, we’ve had quarter blocks in the game. Players could use these to build stairs. They were available in multiple colors, but they were untextured, and we have gotten quite some complaints about that. Zun could easily apply the auto-adaptation system to these quarter blocks, so we’ve added a new type of them: dynamic quarter blocks. They are automatically textured in the style of the block they’re resting on. And to make them even more dynamic, they can also be placed vertically! They also reuse a system from the crown moulding. Wherever two quarterblocks meet in a corner, they actually connect to form a unique shape. It opens up a lot of decorative possibilities.


In 0.11, farms could not have too big of a height difference between the highest and lowest part of the field. This has changed pretty radically. Farms on steep hills are now a possibility!


Last but not least: by popular request, we’ve reintroduced coated planks!

Heel veel plezier met de update :D

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Everything shown and described in this blog is not available publicly yet, it will be in the next update.

Work on the projects detailed in the previous blog continued this month. We finished the mesh for the auto-crafter. To distinguish it from regular jobblocks, and to signal that it can do productive things without human input, it’s powered by wind - it’s a mill.


We’re trying something new here. It’s not just a voxel-sized workbench, or a single large mesh like the banner. The mill is actually a combination of many smaller parts, most of which fit neatly within the 1x1x1 voxels of the game.

Yet you won’t build it part-by-part. It will assemble automatically. The in-game bed already does the same. Technically, it’s two parts that both place at the same moment when you click once.

But a structure with so many parts - we’ve never done that. Zun is working on some new systems to properly integrate this. I’m excited - we might add more structures like this in the future! Hopefully, we can actually get the blades of the mill moving while it’s active.


Most of the UI is functional. You can see it in the image below. On the left, there’s a list of possible recipes, currently only containing two test-items. You can select them and see some information about them, and then you can add them to the production queue. When items are done, they’re added to the box on the right. Players have to walk back to the mill to collect these items physically, either by assigning them to the hotbar or by sending them straight to the stockpile.


The new auto-textured quarterblocks look pretty great, and it made us want to use them more in our builds. Which quickly led to another desire: being able to use them vertically too. So Zun actually added that ability to the new dynamic quarterblocks! They can now be placed on the side of blocks too, instead of merely on top. This allows for a whole new range of decorative options.


Talking about decorative options - many people demanded the return of coated planks, the darker and more reflective variant of planks. A couple of updates ago, we replaced the old planks texture with a new one, but we didn’t add a “coated” variant. I’ve now made one for the new planks texture!


Bedankt voor het lezen :D

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The two most dramatic overhauls of the game were update 0.7 and 0.9. With 0.7, we wanted to make the game more challenging and complex. That’s why we introduced features like the happiness system.

Later on, we realized there was a problem with some of these features. They punished growth and recruiting more colonists. That was never the intention. We reworked the happiness system into the current Colony Points system.

With 0.9, we wanted to make expanding and hiring more colonists more rewarding. One of the ways we tried to do this was by strictly limiting the player-crafting. If players can create hundreds of building blocks with the click of a button, letting colonists do this work is a bit wasteful and inefficient.

We stand by this decision, but it has made the early game slower and less exciting. We want to fix this by letting players make early-game building blocks and other essentials without relying on colonists. But for the sake of balance, this should not be possible with just one click and zero other costs. We’re strongly considering to introduce the “auto-crafter”, a mill-like building that processes inputs into certain building blocks. But the auto-crafter takes some time to finish its production, and players need to be physically present at the auto-crafter to deliver and gather materials. It’ll empower the player in the early game, without being totally unbalanced.

So we were thinking about the topic of proper early-game building blocks, and thought that we should add some new ones. The special roof blocks have been quite popular, but they appear pretty late in the tech tree. So an extra early-game roof block sounded good to us.


And what is a sensible primitive roof? A thatched roof made of straw of course! So we’ve been making all roof variants necessary to generate proper thatched roofs in all possible shapes. We’re very happy with the end result!

While working on the roofs, we discussed another common issue. The sides of the roof are “their own thing”, but wherever they meet the front of a building, they have to match the blocks. The roofs that are currently in the game use some default textures for that front side - planks and stone bricks. If you were using those to build that structure, perfect, it’ll look great. But if you were using any other building materials, you get this weird stairs-like pattern where your chosen blocks meet the default texture of the roofs.


So, Zun decided to fix that! In the current unreleased dev-build, the front of roofs will actually match the block they’re standing on. It looks much better!

And with that feature developed, Zun applied that a bit further. Why shouldn’t quarterblocks also match the texture of the block they’re standing on? So we’ve been playing around with the “dynamic quarterblock” now, which does exactly that.


All of these should become available in the next update, which hopefully makes the early game a lot more interesting!

Bedankt voor het lezen :D

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