Last Saturday, we released 0.6.1.4. It included a very small change to monster pathfinding with major consequences in some worlds. Prior to the update, monsters would search and attack guards, colonists and the player if they were within a 31 block range and the path towards them was shorter than the path to the banner.

It makes sense, but causes big issues in situations with very long paths to the banner. If the banner was very very very far away, and guards were within the 31 block range but also required a very very long path to reach them, monsters would constantly be calculating ultra long paths. Apart from causing weird monster behavior, it also caused lots of lag.

So we shortened their "search behavior". They'll only attack other targets than the banner if there is a path towards them that is shorter than ~100 blocks. In certain worlds, this causes FPS on the server to go from 0.6 to 50+ frames per second!

On Wednesday, we released 0.6.1.5. There was a slight mistake in the code making savegames which was only revealed by specific behaviour from a mod, causing loss of inventory and science. A small hotfix solved that issue.

We've also continued work on 0.6.2. We've currently got an internal testbuild with two major changes:

• Monster spawning. The terrain in Colony Survival is generated using a 2D height map. This height map is used in the default version of the game to spawn monsters. The monsters only spawn in places where it's possible to spawn on the standard height determined in the height map, plus or minus three blocks. If the standard terrain has a a height of 65, monsters will only spawn in that place if they can spawn anywhere between 62 and 68. If you build a wall that stops at a height of 70, no monsters will spawn there, even if it's outside of the banner safe zone.
  In 0.6.2, monsters will spawn anywhere outside of the safe zone, no matter what you've changed or built. We've tested this in older worlds and it does make a significant difference. Monsters will start spawning in new and unexpected locations.
  
  
• The new build also fixes the problem described here. In the default version of the game, colonies with long walls and mazes will encounter significantly less monsters than colonies with shorter paths towards their banner. This is pretty unfair and not sensible, so that has been fixed in our testbuild. All colonies with the same colonist count will encounter the same amount of monsters, regardless of path length and guard placement.

This means your colony might be overrun and slaughtered by monsters when we release the update! If you want to prepare your colony, keep the next things in mind. If monsters need to travel very far to get to your banner, especially if they survive this path for a long time, invest in more guards and more ammo production! If you've built walls and towers outside of the safe zone, make sure you're prepared for monsters that will spawn on top of them. Keep the path from those towers and walls into your safe zone guarded.

There are multiple other things we want to add to 0.6.2 before we release it.

• More advanced difficulty options when starting a new world. Currently, the options are no monsters, standard monsters, double monsters, and day monsters. We'd like to add some kind of slider that allows a better selection of the desired monster amount. For example, "half monsters" or triple monsters. Another fun challenge would be continuously increasing monster amounts, instead of keeping them in sync with the colonist count.
  
• A way to easily change those settings once you've started a world would be useful too.
  
• We want to port the hotbar/inventory from client to server side. It gives us and modders more options to stop cheating, and it also means it'll be easier to add features like "shift-click to transfer items from the stockpile to the inventory".
  
• Last but not least, another significant optimization to monster pathfinding.

We hope to finish and release 0.6.2 in two weeks. Afterwards, we want to start working on "new real content" again, as seen in the table below. Just add "+1" to 0.6.2, 0.6.3 and 0.6.4 ;)



In last week's blog, we asked you whether you wanted underground monster spawning, below the safe zone. Opinions were very divided. Some people loved it and totally didn't mind colony-breaking updates; it's an Early Access game for a reason. Others were more concerned about the consequences. We've decided not to add monsters below your safe zone in 0.6.2, but they might still come in 0.7.0 :)

We also expressed concern about a sudden increase in negative reviews. We welcomed a lot of new players during the sale, but they also brought along lots of negative reviews. For a few days, our ratio of positive/negative reviews was roughly 50/50! We hoped this would improve later, because negative reviews are often written by people who've become bored or frustrated by the game after a couple of hours (sometimes even minutes), while positive reviews are often written by people who've spent dozens of hours in-game. We were very happy to see this prediction proven true!


Our recent review graph, last Friday versus this Friday

Apart from the positive reviews, we also received lots of kind comments praising Colony Survival and telling us not to worry too much about the negative reviews. We appreciate those comments a lot, so thank you very much! We're very grateful that so many people enjoy Colony Survival.

Bedankt voor het lezen en tot volgende week!

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The entrance to Bilzander's Dwarven Kingdom

In last week's Friday Blog, we told you the update was finished but we wanted to wait till Saturday morning to release it, so we could be on standby to fix potential issues. That was a pretty good decision :) Shortly after releasing 0.6.1, we received complaints about guards not working properly. We found a bug, fixed it, and released 0.6.1.1 as soon as possible.

Later this week, we released 0.6.1.2. It adds a small new feature: hold left alt while placing a construction area, and you can place a second identical construction area without automatically switching to construction jobs. Previously, when you wanted to place 4 wooden walls, you had to...

• Select the builder, select planks
  
• Place the construction area
  
• Game automatically switches to construction jobs, place them
  
• Return to the command tool, select the builder, select planks
  
• Place another construction area
  
• Place construction jobs
  
• Repeat all steps above

In 0.6.1.2, you can now place the same 4 wooden walls a lot quicker:

• Select the builder, select planks
  
• Place the construction area while holding left alt
  
• Place 2nd, 3rd and 4th construction area
  
• Place jobs and you're done!

Another small improvement is applying the "0-item" improvement to the item selection menu for construction areas. 0.6.1.2 also contains many small fixes to the server browser and significantly improves the mod support. Last and least is 0.6.1.3, which improves texture pack support.



Now that most servers have updated to 0.6.1, we can finally showcase all features of the new server browser. A check mark in the first column means a server is passworded. Passworded servers are a new feature and as you can see, it's used a lot.

A check mark in the second column means a server uses mods. To the right of the server browser, you can see which mods exactly are used by the selected server. You don't need to download them before you join, they'll be downloaded automatically! As you can see, the biggest servers all use mods.

You can also see which players are present in the selected server, how many colonists they have and for how long they have been playing. The total colonist count is also calculated. Pretty handy, right?


We want to improve the monsters in 0.6.2 on a pretty technical level. Here are the three changes we want to implement:

• Currently, monsters don't spawn in places where the terrain has been significantly altered. This means they won't spawn in tunnels, or on bridges and walls, even if they're outside of the safe zone. We want to fix this. This might also mean that we will cause monsters to spawn in your mine, and you'll need to guard it during the night. We like the idea, but don't want to destroy many colonies with an unexpected change. We'd love to hear your feedback!
  
• We want to fix the problem of wildly varying monsters counts based on your defense layout described here.
  
• We think we can optimize the monster spawning significantly by reusing pathfinding.

We believe we won't need a whole lot time to develop the changes above, and we want to do it now before we start working on complex new content for 0.6.3/0.6.4.




Last Tuesday, we managed to get on the frontpage of Steam with a 25% discount. Frontpage attention has worked very well for us in the past, so we're glad we got this opportunity! It reaches a whole group of users that otherwise would not have known about the game. And more sales means we can keep releasing free updates for a longer time. There's a big chance we would've stopped updating the game and left Early Access already if the game wasn't this successful :)

But there's also a slight negative affect. During the sale, our recent review score dropped from 90% positive to 80% positive. We received 9 negative reviews in a couple of days. We always try to listen to feedback, but interpreting negative reviews has become somewhat harder since 0.4.0. Before 0.4.0, 80%+ of negative reviews complained about the same problem: a lack of content. Since 0.4.0, criticism has become more diverse. For example, some people think the game is too easy, others think it's too hard. Despite that, we do our best to distill potential improvements from all reviews.

We think there's another phenomenon at work behind the 'avalanche' of negative reviews. Negative reviews are often written by people who grew bored or frustrated with the game after a couple of hours (or sometimes, minutes). But the writers of positive reviews have often spent 40, 80 or even 120 hours in-game. It's nearly impossible to do that within a couple of days - so we cannot expect these reviews to appear during or directly after a sale. We hope this theory will be proven correct by new reviews during the coming weeks :)



Bedankt voor het lezen en tot volgende week!

Reddit // Twitter // YouTube // Website // Discord

The new update is ready, and will be released tomorrow 10AM CEST (UTC+2). Countdown here! We intended to release it this evening, but the update contains six weeks of changes and hasn't been tested very thoroughly yet. It would be pretty problematic if players ran into major bugs tonight, while we are asleep. The dev branch has been opened to modders and many are now working to update their mods.

The biggest visible change is the new server browser. The old server browser was very basic and limited. The new browser contains lots of extra features. It shows for example which mods are used in a server, which players are active and the total colonist count. It's now possible to sort by ping or player count.

We've also made it easier to set up a server that cannot be joined by random strangers. You can now set a password on your server. The server browser will show which servers have passwords and which haven't.


Some features, like showing active players and mods, don't work with 0.6.0 servers and aren't visible in the screenshot above. We might tweak the update when more people have tried 0.6.1 servers and sent us their feedback.

Crates of bread are part of the update! They're visible in the first screenshot of this blog. We've broken one of our own rules that we announced last week: the bread crates do look a lot like the default crates. We hope they won't be too confusing. They can be used to store food in singleplayer, or to gift it to friends in multiplayer.

Another small but noticeable tweak is "0-items". Once an item has been present in your stockpile, it won't disappear anymore. If you run out of the item, it'll show the icon with "zero" on top of it. This will prevent your stockpile from continuously rearranging itself when you've got lots of colonists quickly adding and removing content from the stockpile.

A couple of weeks ago, we posted a short texturing guide. Since then, multiple people have started working on new texture packs. They noticed that it was relatively hard to replace textures, especially when you want to add textures to places that currently don't have unique textures, like the tops and bottoms of logs. We've worked on the issue and it's now a lot easier to replace textures!

Last but not least, the server has been significantly optimized, resulting in a noticeable performance boost. We hope the new features will be useful, and if you run into any issues tomorrow, please let us know! We're very active on Discord, but we also read all comments on Friday Blogs :) And of course we try to read most posts on the Steam Forums and Reddit.

Thanks for reading the blog and testing the game!

Reddit // Twitter // YouTube // Website // Discord

Today, king of the Netherlands Willem-Alexander turns 51. On his birthday, a national holiday named Koningsdag, he decided to visit the city of Groningen. Groningen is the confusingly named capital of the province of Groningen, which we live in.

Our king has been running his colony with over 17 million colonists for nearly 5 years without a single frame drop or lag spike. I decided I had to investigate this and went to Groningen. I managed to take the photo seen above and we're studying it to see if we can extract further performance gains from it!


Pantoufleee's amazing and detailed world

Work on the improved server browser has continued this week. It's nearly done, but we're still working on some small issues like making sure all text can be translated to other languages properly.

The new server browser adds a lot of new features. You'll be able to sort by ping or by the amount of players. It directly shows how many colonists are present on a server, which players are online, and whether it uses mods. If it does, it'll show you which mods are active. Update 0.6.1 also allows you to set a password for your server.

We're pretty sure 0.6.1 will have been released next Friday, and hope to be able to push it live significantly earlier!

In the most recent Yogscast Colony Survival video, they figured out they could use the new builders and diggers to quickly trade resources. One player uses builders to place hundreds or thousands of excess blocks, and the other player uses diggers to transfer them to his or her stockpile. Great idea, but it immediately frustrated me because it could not be used to trade vital resources like food.

Which made us think of a simple solution. 100 bread + 1 crate = 1 physical food crate that can actually be placed in the world and used for storage or gifted to a friend. We'd love to add the idea, but are unsure what the new block should look like. Here are the constraints:

• It's going to be a simple 1x1x1 cube like nearly all other blocks
  
• It should be very different from regular crates, to make sure people don't mistakenly assume colonists can use it like they use other crates
  
• We'll add only one new texture for the food crate. We could potentially use other textures (like planks or bricks) for the bottom/top/sides.

If you've got a good idea for what the food crate should look like, please put your description or a link to decent inspiration in the comments or on Discord!

Another simple improvement we found on the Steam Forum is "0 items". In bigger colonies, many items often get produced, added to the stockpile, and immediately taken by other colonists. It causes the stockpile to look pretty chaotic, because icons keep popping in and out of existence. Intelex suggested that items that get added to the stockpile should never disappear, they should just display "0". We believe this is a great idea and we'll probably add it in the near future!

Bedankt voor het lezen en oranje boven!

Reddit // Twitter // YouTube // Website // Discord

This week, while working on the server browser, our programmer noticed something inefficient that could be dramatically optimized. The server caculated a timestamp for every colonist for every frame. The server runs on 50FPS, so with 500 colonists that means 25,000 timestamps every second, and that number quickly increases as you get more colonists.

The issue has now been fixed. The server now calculates a timestamp only once at the start of the frame, regardless of how many colonists you have. The fix should be especially useful for multiplayer servers with lots of players and colonists, and hardware that's bottlenecked by the processor. But it should help in singleplayer as well: even in SP, there's a server running in the background.

The patch will be included in 0.6.1, the update that also contains the new server browser!



Something that has been less optimized in the past week is us. We both got hit by something flu-like. Simultaneously, the Netherlands faces a sudden and record breaking heatwave. Two weeks ago, we were still wearing multiple layers of clothing under our winter coats, and now it's 27 degrees Celcius / 80+ degrees Fahrenheit. That's pretty hot for us northerners. It's currently cooler in Greece!

To compensate for the short Friday Blog, here are some cheats that can help you have some fun during the weekend. In the chatbox (T), type:

/cheats on
/setflight true - Press F to fly, press F again to stop flying. Press Q to go straight up and Z to go straight down. Shift to fly faster.
/loot [itemname] [#] - For example, /loot planks 100 to get 100 planks. When you use /loot water, please don't blame us after flooding your own world ;)
/lootall [#] - Receive the specified amount of all blocks in your stockpile.
/time add [#] - Skip # hours. For example, /time add 12.
/debug research1 - Instantly unlock whatever you are currently researching
/debug researchall - Instantly unlock all science
/teleport [x] [y] [z] - Teleport to the specified coordinates. Press F5 to check your coordinates. For example, /teleport 0 50 0 will teleport you to the jungle.

Bedankt voor het lezen en veel plezier!

Reddit // Twitter // YouTube // Website // Discord

A couple of weeks ago we made a nice 'infographic' with our plans but I've forgotten multiple times to upload it. Here it is:



These are the 'big plans'. We've got some smaller plans first and we want to add them in 0.6.1. One of those plans is an updated server browser, with options for e.g. passworded servers. Here's a screenshot of our current server browser:



And here's a screenshot of our work-in-progress server browser:



As you can see it isn't finished yet, but there's room for a lot of extra options. It should make multiplayer significantly more accessible!

Animations

Colony Survival doesn't contain a lot of animations. Guards fire missiles projectiles from their chest and colonists craft things by staring at blocks. We're so used to this, we barely notice it anymore. We don't receive many complaints about it either. But this week, we've discussed the issue with multiple people. It would be great if it was easier to see which guard is shooting which monster, certainly when we're going to add new monsters and new guards.

We believe that the first step to solving this problem may be adding projectile trails. When working on this new graphics feature, we might be able to add proper impact sprites as well. This should make the combat a lot clearer and more visually impressive.

Texturing Guide

Multiple people have asked us if and how they can make textures for Colony Survival. It's actually pretty simple! For those interested, here's a short introduction.

We've got three main textures for each block. Albedo, normal and height/smooth/specularity maps. You can find these maps in Colony Survival\gamedata\textures. There you can choose between "icons" and "materials". Choose "materials" if you want to edit the textures.

In this folder, you find three new folders: water, npc and blocks. Blocks are the easiest to edit so we'll start there. Open the blocks folder and you'll find folders for albedo, normal and height maps. Here's an example of what these textures look like for planks:



In the top left corner, you see the albedo map. It's the "standard" texture.
In the top right corner is the normal map. It determines how light interacts with the surface.
In the bottom left corner you can see the third texture. This texture is a bit different; it's 3 black and white textures combined; the height map (red), smoothness map (green) and specularity (blue). The height map can create relief, and the smoothness and specularity maps determine how reflective a surface is.

So, let's turn the planks into 'test blocks' and try to figure out how they work.



The albedo map has been turned into a "testblock" texture, and the other maps have been made "empty". This is what the new planks block looks like in-game:



Let's put some work into the "empty" textures.



Photoshop CS6 allows you to create normal maps without any plug-ins. It's one of the default 3D-filters. It turns the black and white image on the left into the blue-purple image on the right. Black = high, white = low. So create a black-and-white height map, turn it into a normal map, and the game's lighting will act as if there are actual ridges and dimples.

In the bottom left corner, you can see the updated height map. It's the red channel in the "heigthspecularsmooth" map. To the right of it, you can see how it changes the final, combined map. The actual height map works very different compared to the height map for the normal map: black = low and white = high.

This is what our test block looks like with these two updated textures:



You can see that it looks less flat and way more 3D! This is just a very simple example, but it contains the basic knowledge you'll need to change what blocks in CS look like. Just messing around with the textures and looking at the in-game consequences will teach you a lot. We'd love to see your experiments! If you need some quick feedback, please poke us on Discord. If you want to see other things explained in similar guides, let us know in a comment!

Bedankt voor het lezen, en veel succes!


Reddit // Twitter // YouTube // Website // Discord

Sorry regular readers, the first part is meant for people who just learned about the update because of the visibility round :)

We released multiple patches this week and we hope all major bugs have now been patched out of update 0.6.0. Here's a reminder of the new content:

• Official OS X support
• Diggers: colonists that can remove all blocks in a selected area
  https://youtu.be/koa_E3jkuVM
• Builders: colonists that can fill an area with a specified block
  https://youtu.be/6bIVUv1_xf0
• Special diggers: colonists that remove only the specified block from a selected area https://youtu.be/2xCoeuGH3lI
• A new setting in the graphics menu that allows you to dramatically extend the view range
  
• Hold CTRL to crouch and not fall of edges
  
• Hold CTRL to recruit 15 colonists simultaneously
  
• And many other small changes, visit the changelog for a complete overview!

If you'd like to know what happened in previous updates, here's a short summary with links to previous Friday Blogs for more info:

• 0.5.2: Stairs
  
• 0.5.0: Lanterns, herbs, new jobs and new cosmetic blocks
  
• 0.4.0: New ores, metals, weapons, guards, monsters and science
  
• 0.3.0: The science system, technologists & tailors
  
• 0.2.0: Berry farmers for quick and easy food, more complicated but also more effective bread production process

We now return to your regularly scheduled programming

We've released three patches this week: 0.6.0.2, 0.6.0.3 and 0.6.0.4. The first patch fixed the builder menu. It was very often a bit broken. The icons didn't spread like they should and sometimes it didn't load all the blocks it should.

0.6.0.3 makes sure loading chunks close to the player has priority over loading other chunks. We sometimes encountered a problem where a chunk close to the player wasn't loaded in time, resulting in some annoying problems like blocks not disappearing properly. It also fixes a minor problem with the builder; they sometimes placed blocks in the wrong location.

The last fix in 0.6.0.3 concerns the science menu. It sometimes didn't load properly. But 0.6.0.3 actually seemed to make the problem worse instead of better! We quickly released 0.6.0.4 to fix the issue properly.

We're now pretty confident that 0.6.0 works as intended. That's why we've decided to start our first visibility round. Steam gives developers the ability to request some extra visibility for their games, primarily intended to be used after updates. We haven't used a single visibility round for previous updates and we believe this is the right time for our first one. Visibility rounds have to be attached to announcements, so that's why this Friday Blog started with info that must be familiar for regular readers :)

We hadn't updated the trailer on the store page since releasing the game back in June either. We've worked on a new trailer and uploaded it to Steam yesterday! Here it is:
https://youtu.be/GbHFdB3yJmY
Common requests

Last week, we announced our plans for the next couple of months. Many people responded with suggestions for other new features. Thanks for your input! It's great to know what players truly desire. Many suggestions are definitely on our roadmap, others are less feasible.

• A better UI to keep track of production. We definitely want to add this; we love statistics in games. The production statistics in Factorio are one of the best examples of great in-game statistics that we know of, and we want to add something like it!
  
• Steam Workshop support. We want to start by adding support for sharing worlds on the Steam Workshop, and we'd love to add mod support to Steam Workshop as well.
  
• Better co-op gameplay. Many people would love to share a colony with friends, instead of building separate colonies. We've already announced that we'll work on multiple colonies per players, and we think we can add multiple players per colony.
  
• PvP. The PvP feature we like to add will probably not be very advanced, and it'll be easy to toggle off. But we're interested in a simple PvP feature where players can add their own soldiers to the monster horde that attacks other colonies.

There are other common suggestions that sound great, but that we probably will not implement in the near future:

• Significantly changed water physics. Our current water spreads down and to the sides infinitely. That might be slightly unrealistic for smaller lakes, but it makes a lot of sense for oceans to work like that. It makes it easy to fill moats and canals. The current system has drawbacks, but every other possible system has drawbacks as well. Terraria has awesome water physics that allow you to drain lakes, but 3D water physics are a lot harder to compute than 2D water physics. We don't know a single game with fully realistic dynamic 3D water physics, but we'd love to be proven wrong :)
  
• Melee guards. We understand the appeal, but they'll be hard to add in practice and require a lot of new system to function properly. Colonists and monsters currently move through each other. Melee guards obviously have to block monsters and make them "queue" realistically. We'd also need fight animations and balance it properly. We consider the feature very hard to add. If they're properly balanced, they won't really change the way the game is played, meaning our effort is pretty much wasted. If they do radically alter your defenses, they're probably overpowered, breaking the balance of the game. Both options seem far from ideal.
  
• Colonist happiness. It would be great to add a system where your colonists need certain items to stay happy. We've got a lot of ideas for a system like that, but they'll take a long time to add and they'll change the core mechanics of the game. We're pretty certain that we won't work on such a feature before leaving Early Access.
  
  We hope this last bit wasn't too disappointing :) Please keep posting suggestions, we definitely keep track of which features are often demanded, liked and disliked.
  
  Last week, we asked for specific suggestions: Suggestions for new guards and what resources they could need from other biomes are very welcome. The most detailed response was given by Xolotle in the Steam Forums. Summarized, he suggested adding obsidian/volcanic glass, resulting in very powerful weapons that punch right through armor, and Greek fire made from pitch. These kind of suggestions are very useful in the short term for the biome&guards update and have a big chance of being added in 0.7.0!
  
  Bedankt voor het lezen en alle suggesties!

Sorry regular readers, the first part is meant for people who just learned about the update because of the visibility round :)

We released multiple patches this week and we hope all major bugs have now been patched out of update 0.6.0. Here's a reminder of the new content:

• Official OS X support
• Diggers: colonists that can remove all blocks in a selected area
  https://youtu.be/koa_E3jkuVM
• Builders: colonists that can fill an area with a specified block
  https://youtu.be/6bIVUv1_xf0
• Special diggers: colonists that remove only the specified block from a selected area https://youtu.be/2xCoeuGH3lI
• A new setting in the graphics menu that allows you to dramatically extend the view range
  
• Hold CTRL to crouch and not fall of edges
  
• Hold CTRL to recruit 15 colonists simultaneously
  
• And many other small changes, visit the changelog for a complete overview!

If you'd like to know what happened in previous updates, here's a short summary with links to previous Friday Blogs for more info:

• 0.5.2: Stairs
  
• 0.5.0: Lanterns, herbs, new jobs and new cosmetic blocks
  
• 0.4.0: New ores, metals, weapons, guards, monsters and science
  
• 0.3.0: The science system, technologists & tailors
  
• 0.2.0: Berry farmers for quick and easy food, more complicated but also more effective bread production process

We now return to your regularly scheduled programming

We've released three patches this week: 0.6.0.2, 0.6.0.3 and 0.6.0.4. The first patch fixed the builder menu. It was very often a bit broken. The icons didn't spread like they should and sometimes it didn't load all the blocks it should.

0.6.0.3 makes sure loading chunks close to the player has priority over loading other chunks. We sometimes encountered a problem where a chunk close to the player wasn't loaded in time, resulting in some annoying problems like blocks not disappearing properly. It also fixes a minor problem with the builder; they sometimes placed blocks in the wrong location.

The last fix in 0.6.0.3 concerns the science menu. It sometimes didn't load properly. But 0.6.0.3 actually seemed to make the problem worse instead of better! We quickly released 0.6.0.4 to fix the issue properly.

We're now pretty confident that 0.6.0 works as intended. That's why we've decided to start our first visibility round. Steam gives developers the ability to request some extra visibility for their games, primarily intended to be used after updates. We haven't used a single visibility round for previous updates and we believe this is the right time for our first one. Visibility rounds have to be attached to announcements, so that's why this Friday Blog started with info that must be familiar for regular readers :)

We hadn't updated the trailer on the store page since releasing the game back in June either. We've worked on a new trailer and uploaded it to Steam yesterday! Here it is:
https://youtu.be/GbHFdB3yJmY
Common requests

Last week, we announced our plans for the next couple of months. Many people responded with suggestions for other new features. Thanks for your input! It's great to know what players truly desire. Many suggestions are definitely on our roadmap, others are less feasible.

• A better UI to keep track of production. We definitely want to add this; we love statistics in games. The production statistics in Factorio are one of the best examples of great in-game statistics that we know of, and we want to add something like it!
  
• Steam Workshop support. We want to start by adding support for sharing worlds on the Steam Workshop, and we'd love to add mod support to Steam Workshop as well.
  
• Better co-op gameplay. Many people would love to share a colony with friends, instead of building separate colonies. We've already announced that we'll work on multiple colonies per players, and we think we can add multiple players per colony.
  
• PvP. The PvP feature we like to add will probably not be very advanced, and it'll be easy to toggle off. But we're interested in a simple PvP feature where players can add their own soldiers to the monster horde that attacks other colonies.

There are other common suggestions that sound great, but that we probably will not implement in the near future:

• Significantly changed water physics. Our current water spreads down and to the sides infinitely. That might be slightly unrealistic for smaller lakes, but it makes a lot of sense for oceans to work like that. It makes it easy to fill moats and canals. The current system has drawbacks, but every other possible system has drawbacks as well. Terraria has awesome water physics that allow you to drain lakes, but 3D water physics are a lot harder to compute than 2D water physics. We don't know a single game with fully realistic dynamic 3D water physics, but we'd love to be proven wrong :)
  
• Melee guards. We understand the appeal, but they'll be hard to add in practice and require a lot of new system to function properly. Colonists and monsters currently move through each other. Melee guards obviously have to block monsters and make them "queue" realistically. We'd also need fight animations and balance it properly. We consider the feature very hard to add. If they're properly balanced, they won't really change the way the game is played, meaning our effort is pretty much wasted. If they do radically alter your defenses, they're probably overpowered, breaking the balance of the game. Both options seem far from ideal.
  
• Colonist happiness. It would be great to add a system where your colonists need certain items to stay happy. We've got a lot of ideas for a system like that, but they'll take a long time to add and they'll change the core mechanics of the game. We're pretty certain that we won't work on such a feature before leaving Early Access.
  
  We hope this last bit wasn't too disappointing :) Please keep posting suggestions, we definitely keep track of which features are often demanded, liked and disliked.
  
  Last week, we asked for specific suggestions: Suggestions for new guards and what resources they could need from other biomes are very welcome. The most detailed response was given by Xolotle in the Steam Forums. Summarized, he suggested adding obsidian/volcanic glass, resulting in very powerful weapons that punch right through armor, and Greek fire made from pitch. These kind of suggestions are very useful in the short term for the biome&guards update and have a big chance of being added in 0.7.0!
  
  Bedankt voor het lezen en alle suggesties!

The release of 0.6.0 last week went well! There were no severe bugs, so we patched one in last Tuesday.

The most noticeable problem in the update was the changed ragdoll. As part of the NPC rendering optimization, the amount of simultaneously ragdolling monsters was scaled back. Multiple people started noticing monsters disappearing immediately after getting shot.

We improved the ragdoll system with a small patch. There's now a setting in the graphics menu where you can choose how many ragdolls you want to render! The patch also included a fix for the normal mapping. In the past, we would have chosen to either not number the update, or to number it 0.6.1. But now we decided to add a fourth digit: 0.6.0.1.

This worked fine on any system where Colony Survival was already installed. But it broke the game completely in fresh installs. Soon after releasing the update, we received confusing reports of menus without text and unexpected black screens. Shortly after midnight, we fnally realized our error. A new hotfix was released at 1AM, 9 hours after introducing the problem, to fix the problem. For some reason, the fourth digit made fresh installs unplayable!



We've made a rough outline of what we're planning to do during the coming months. We'd love to hear your feedback!

Stage 1: Small Improvements

0.6.1 and perhaps 0.6.2 will contain a number of small additions. We'd like to improve the server browser and add passworded servers. We want to solve the monster spawning problem explained here. We'd like to bring the inventory from the client to the server, so we can properly add shortcuts like transferring items from the stockpile to the inventory by shift-clicking.

Stage 2: Multiple Colonies

Later 0.6.* updates will contain a big new feature: the ability to start a second (and a third, a fourth, etc) colony. I expect the update to be split in multiple parts:

• Boats or small ships, so you can explore the world without having to walk everywhere
  
• The update where you can actually start a second colony with a separate stockpile and research
  
• A trader that you can use to send items from one colony to another, preferably with an option to automate it (send from A to B when item count in A exceeds X, or when item count in B drops below X, or send every day, for example).
  
• The overseer job: a special job so you can manage your colony remotely, without having to sail there yourself

Stage 3: 0.7.0, A New World

A huge overhaul to the world generation. New algorithms to generate biomes, hills, forests etcetera. New blocks, new trees and new biomes. Colonies in different biomes will have unique jobs, crops and research.

We want to add new monsters. Swarm monsters, armored monsters, boss monsters, perhaps even monsters that will use missiles to fight back.

Of course, there will be new guards to fight the increased threat. We'd love to add guards that require resources from other biomes to craft their missiles. For example, a guard with a blowpipe that can use poison darts could require poisonous plants that only grow in the tropics. A different guard could need special resources from the arctic to freeze and slow down monsters.

We'd love to know what you think of our plans! Suggestions for new guards and what resources they could need from other biomes are very welcome.

Bedankt voor het lezen!

Reddit // Twitter // YouTube // Website // Discord

The release of 0.6.0 last week went well! There were no severe bugs, so we patched one in last Tuesday.

The most noticeable problem in the update was the changed ragdoll. As part of the NPC rendering optimization, the amount of simultaneously ragdolling monsters was scaled back. Multiple people started noticing monsters disappearing immediately after getting shot.

We improved the ragdoll system with a small patch. There's now a setting in the graphics menu where you can choose how many ragdolls you want to render! The patch also included a fix for the normal mapping. In the past, we would have chosen to either not number the update, or to number it 0.6.1. But now we decided to add a fourth digit: 0.6.0.1.

This worked fine on any system where Colony Survival was already installed. But it broke the game completely in fresh installs. Soon after releasing the update, we received confusing reports of menus without text and unexpected black screens. Shortly after midnight, we fnally realized our error. A new hotfix was released at 1AM, 9 hours after introducing the problem, to fix the problem. For some reason, the fourth digit made fresh installs unplayable!



We've made a rough outline of what we're planning to do during the coming months. We'd love to hear your feedback!

Stage 1: Small Improvements

0.6.1 and perhaps 0.6.2 will contain a number of small additions. We'd like to improve the server browser and add passworded servers. We want to solve the monster spawning problem explained here. We'd like to bring the inventory from the client to the server, so we can properly add shortcuts like transferring items from the stockpile to the inventory by shift-clicking.

Stage 2: Multiple Colonies

Later 0.6.* updates will contain a big new feature: the ability to start a second (and a third, a fourth, etc) colony. I expect the update to be split in multiple parts:

• Boats or small ships, so you can explore the world without having to walk everywhere
  
• The update where you can actually start a second colony with a separate stockpile and research
  
• A trader that you can use to send items from one colony to another, preferably with an option to automate it (send from A to B when item count in A exceeds X, or when item count in B drops below X, or send every day, for example).
  
• The overseer job: a special job so you can manage your colony remotely, without having to sail there yourself

Stage 3: 0.7.0, A New World

A huge overhaul to the world generation. New algorithms to generate biomes, hills, forests etcetera. New blocks, new trees and new biomes. Colonies in different biomes will have unique jobs, crops and research.

We want to add new monsters. Swarm monsters, armored monsters, boss monsters, perhaps even monsters that will use missiles to fight back.

Of course, there will be new guards to fight the increased threat. We'd love to add guards that require resources from other biomes to craft their missiles. For example, a guard with a blowpipe that can use poison darts could require poisonous plants that only grow in the tropics. A different guard could need special resources from the arctic to freeze and slow down monsters.

We'd love to know what you think of our plans! Suggestions for new guards and what resources they could need from other biomes are very welcome.

Bedankt voor het lezen!

Reddit // Twitter // YouTube // Website // Discord