Yesterday, we released update 0.6.3! We're used to releasing updates on Friday, simultaneous with these blogs. But we were expecting a large group of new players at the start of the Summer Sale, and we expect 0.6.3 to be very useful for new players. There are a couple of important changes.

Nearly every item shows where it is made in the tooltip now. Pretty useful when you're getting used to all the different job blocks. There is now a search bar in the stockpile, which can be used to find both individual items and categories of items like "food", "ammo", "weapon" and "job".

The loading screen has had a major makeover. It now has a random stylized background and a random hint. There's also a rotating gear, which will probably stutter when large files are loaded. The in-game UI has also been slightly tweaked. The statistics screens in the top left and top right corner look slightly different, but I believe it's a significant improvement.



Arrow trails have been added to both guards and weapons used by the player. There is a difference between them. Guards instantly kill a monster when they shoot, but players fire actual projectiles which travel through the air. So the arrow trails made by guards also form instantly, and look slightly like laser beams. The arrow trails of projectiles fired by the player do follow the projectile properly.

Nevertheless, the arrow trails are very useful. It's a lot more obvious which guard is doing what now. It also adds a bit of extra impact to the combat.

0.6.2 added the World Settings Menu, accessible by clicking on the gear symbol in the banner menu. Working together with mod developers, we've given them the ability to develop their own custom menu. They can now add extra options to the World Settings Menu. Together with other improvements to the mod support released in 0.6.3, this will lead to even better and larger mods in the future!


Yesterday, 10AM Pacific Time / 7PM Berlin Time the Steam Summer sale started. Today, from the same time onward, Colony Survival is on the frontpage for 24 hours! If you don't own the game yet, this is a great moment to purchase it. If you do own the game, now's the time to bother your friends about buying it ;)

Next week: the Looming Abyss

From October to March, we added a lot of content in 0.4, 0.5 and 0.6.0. We spent the time from April to now working on smaller quality of life issues. But now, our focus has shifted back to adding new content. Which is awesome. And slightly terrifying. 0.7.0 will be the biggest update in Colony Survival History. We were planning to add more 0.6.X updates with new features in preparation for the new world in 0.7.0, but we've discussed this idea some more this week and we're afraid it'll slow us down too much.

Splitting up the 0.7.0 update into smaller updates will result in lots of additional work, and the updates may not make much sense because they rely on future updates. We'd rather focus our efforts on one big, awesome update! :) We are planning to share the password of the dev branch in our Discord once we've developed a significant amount of new content and features.

Here's a rough, work-in-progress overview of the planned changes. Consider the 0.6.X features on the left to be "dev-branch-updates" instead of "full" releases.



Bedankt voor het lezen!

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Tomorrow, it's June 16th, meaning Colony Survival has been available on Steam for one full year! It has been an amazing year. In 12 months, we went from a handful to more than 100,000 players. We want to thank all of you for making this possible! In this blog, I want to give a summary of the progress we've made in the last year.




We've used Steam to share builds of the game internally since 2015. Because there was no large group of testers, the build version was always "0.1.0". June 1 2017 was the first time we updated that version number. 0.1.1 contained a number of new items and jobs that added a bare-bones end-game. It added gold ingots, the minter, the merchant, flax farmers, linseed oil and coated planks. It also contained a long list of other tweaks: a sprint function, a delete button in the world load menu, a better tooltip and much more.

From then to the release date, there was a new build nearly every day. For example, in 0.1.0, you had to place crates to increase the size of the stockpile. This feature was removed in 0.1.3. Update 0.1.4 added more achievements. 0.1.6 added the "no-path-indicator". In 0.1.7, players gained the ability to temporarily remove the banner. Two days before the release, update 0.1.11 added Japanese localization. One day later, we're already in version 0.1.14, which added among other things a German and Lithuanian localization. On June 16th, the game was publicly released as version 0.1.15! Later that same day, we already released 0.1.16.




Version 0.2 contained a long list of bug fixes and tweaks, and also a couple of new jobs and items. In 0.1, many players destroyed their early colony by spending all their food on colonists. The only way to get food was by farming wheat and baking bread, which required multiple days and multiple colonists. This caused many starvations. In 0.2, we added berry farmers to give players an easier way to gain food. Making bread was made harder, it also required a grinder to turn wheat into flour now.

0.2.3 was released June 30th. It added a couple of new cosmetic items: cherry trees, red planks and black planks. We kept releasing fixes and tweaks up to version number 0.2.7, released July 21th.




0.3.0 was our first attempt to expand the end-game. It added the tailor, the technologist and the scientist. The only science that could be unlocked in 0.3.0 were basic HP upgrades, but it did give colonies some purpose and was a necessary stepping stone for future updates. And, I'll probably have to stop mentioning this for every update, this update also contained a long list of fixes and tweaks. You can read them all in the in-game changelog :)




There was no 0.3.1. We took two months to focus on overhauling the entire game. We added much more content. Three new guards, new monsters, new ores, new metals, new crafting jobs and many new items.

In previous versions, all jobs and recipes were available from the start. In 0.4.0, most content was locked behind science. This contributed a lot to the longevity of the game. The amount of simultaneous players since 0.4.0 has been released has never dropped below the lowest numbers reached right before the release of 0.4.0.

We noticed that the extra content made the game too complicated for some people. We fixed this by hiding even more features behind research. Since 0.4.3, released November 22, wheat, flax seeds and other items are locked behind science. The science interface also received a makeover.




Many players wanted more building blocks, so the Christmas Update added them! It added three new herb farmers, a stonemason and a dyer. It also added lanterns, which can be used to emit many shades of colored light.

0.5.2 (January 19) added another common request: stairs! Well, they aren't true stairs, they're quarter blocks which can be placed and used pretty much like stairs. Still very useful :)




This update contains probably the most complex new jobs we've added since the public release: builders & diggers. The update also contained many other significant changes. Performance for large colonies was vastly improved. It added the option to change your draw distance. Last but not least, 0.6.0 also contained a port for macOS!

Since 0.6.0, we've started working with a fourth digit in our version numbers. So we've later released a 0.6.0.1, 0.6.0.2 and 0.6.0.3 followed by 0.6.1.0. Our current logic:

X.0.0.0: 0 = Early Access, 1 = Definitive release
0.X.0.0: Major updates with a significant amount of new items, jobs and research
0.0.X.0: Significant updates with noticeable changes to the interface, performance or other parts of the game
0.0.0.X: Small hotfixes to pressing issues or minor changes for modders, will probably not be noticed by a majority of players

The most significant change in 0.6.1 (May 5) is the new server browser menu. The old one was very basic and limited, the new one adds a lot of new features. There were 5 hotfixes, up to 0.6.1.5.

Update 0.6.2 (June 1) contained a significant overhaul to the monster spawning, and added a world settings menu in the banner tool which can be used to change the settings for both day and night monsters.

The list above is just a summary of the most notable changes. The full changelog contains literally thousands of other tweaks and fixes. Recipes had to be rebalanced, obscure bugs had to be found and performance has been optimized. It has been a busy year :D


We're now working on 0.6.3. There are already some awesome changes we can show to you.


Link to fullscreen

There's now a decent search bar in the stockpile. It won't merely find specific items, it can also find entire categories like "food", "weapon" and "ammo"! Combined with the enhanced tooltip, it should make the game more understandable for new players. And once we release 0.7.0, you'll all feel like new players ;)

Here's our new in-game loading screen:


Fullscreen

They say taste is subjective, but we're pretty sure the new loading screen looks a lot better than the old one! Hints and backgrounds are chosen randomly.

There's one important thing we still want to add to 0.6.3: arrow trails. Currently, there's barely any visible interaction between guards and monsters. Monsters just seem to randomly deactivate. We want to test what the game looks like if projectiles leave trails behind them. We'll have to add some kind of 2D sprites to the game for the trails, and we might be able to use the same technology to add some kind of "impact sprites" to the monsters, to visualize them being hit. We'll probably share screenshots on Discord!

Once again, thank you all for making Colony Survival a success. Thanks for purchasing it, thanks for modding it, thanks for playing it and leaving feedback, thanks for reading the blog and writing comments, thanks for translating it, thanks for hosting servers and thanks for joining our community on Discord!

Here's to a great Year 2 for Colony Survival!

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This week, we've spent our time improving the interface. Here's what the tooltip looks like now:



Nearly every item's tooltip shows where the item is made now. This will be pretty helpful, especially for new players. We're certain it'll prove useful too when we add more new jobs and new items in future updates.

The change mentioned above is practical, but we're also trying to make the UI more beautiful. Some parts of it looked pretty ugly or just really unfinished. For example, here is our loading screen:



And here's a mock-up of what we're roughly striving to create:



Changes like these may not affect the gameplay, but they do make the game look a lot more professional!


When we started using Steam as gamers, nearly a decade ago, the amount of games on Steam was limited. It was relatively hard to make a game available on the store.

Later, Steam Greenlight was launched. Nearly four years ago, we added Colony Survival as a Greenlight submission. When we were approved for release on Steam, we were ecstatic.

Shortly after releasing Colony Survival (nearly one year ago!), Steam Greenlight ended and Steam Direct started. This makes it even easier to launch a game on Steam.

Many people feared a flood of low quality, subpar games. To a certain extent, this has probably happened. The amount of games on Steam has increased dramatically in the past years, so the average quality has probably declined somewhat.

But it's hard to decide when a game has zero value to anybody. Even if a large majority of gamers thinks a certain game is total garbage, a minority can enjoy the game tremendously. And a minority of gamers can contain millions of people.

That's the reason, AFAIK, why Steam dropped Greenlight and launched 'Direct'. They found it very hard to decide which games should be on the platform, and which shouldn't, and tried to remove themselves from that decision as much as possible. Accept all (legal and non-trollish) games, and let players decide which ones succeed and which ones fail.

This has caused quite a lot of controversy. There are bad and offensive games on the Steam Store, and some people want Steam to take action against them and remove them from the platform.

There seems to be a broader trend in recent years of exerting control on what happens on the internet. Facebook tries to fight fake news, YouTube demonetizes controversial content creators and Google tweaks their search results.

We understand why. Some rules need to be enforced and some content needs to be removed. But too often, harmless and serious content creators suffer the consequences.

Instead of trying to exert more and more control over their platform, Steam has decided to do the opposite and open up their platform. We applaud that decision. Steam has a near monopoly on the PC games market, and they can make or break game developers.

Developing a decent games takes years. Game developers need some kind of stability. They need to be sure their games will not be banned from platforms for vague and unclear reasons.

We feel like Steam gives us that stability. They cannot guarantee that customers will like our game, but they can ensure our own place on their platform, where we can promote, explain and sell our games. We like Steam's direction very much. Thanks Steam :D

If you want to know more, click here to read Steam's own blog post about the issue!

Bedankt voor het lezen!

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The new update is now live! It significantly changes both monster spawning and the stockpile.

In the past, long mazes decreased the total amount of monsters that spawned, while killing them early increased the spawned amount. This has been stabilized. Only the amount of colonists determines the amount of spawned monsters now. If you've got long mazes, you might have to readjust your defenses!

Another change to the monster spawning involves the spawn location. Before this update, monsters only spawned a couple of blocks above and below the original terrain heigth. This mean they would not spawn on buildings made by players, nor in deep tunnels. This has been fixed as well. Monsters might now spawn in locations you aren't used to!

We've also made it easier to adjust the difficulty in existing worlds. There's now a settings icon in the banner tool menu. Click it, and you'll be able to determine the amount of night monsters and the amount of day monsters you want to fight.



Last but not least, the stockpile has been updated. You can now craft items directly from the stockpile. Shift-click to transfer items from the stockpile to the inventory. Control-click to produce a full stack of items.



Because you can now craft items directly from the stockpile, we removed the warning above the stockpile that explained how this works. We slightly changed the place of the stockpile in the menu, and now there's more room for visible items.

We'd love to know how the updated monster spawning affects your world. More or less monsters? Earlier or later in the night? What does your colony look like? Please share your experiences with us in the comments or on Discord!

As always, the update might have unexpectedly broken things that we haven't noticed yet. If anything out of the ordinary happens, let us know!

Next week

We aren't 100% sure what we'll work on next week. We planned to start working on bigger new features, but we might spent one week optimizing the interface. The Yogscast suggested an improved tooltip that includes info on where items are produced, and we think that might be an excellent idea. See the mock-up below.


This mock-up was made with the old stockpile menu. Spot the differences!

Something like this might be very useful, especially when 0.7.0 is ready and all kinds of new blocks, jobs and items are added. Combine the improved tooltip with a search function in the stockpile, a decent loading screen and a nice splash screen, and it seems like a week of work well spent. Your input is welcome too :)

Have fun with the update, and please report problems!

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Boneidle's world

This week, we've made good progress on the World Settings Menu. It's a new menu, accessible from the Banner Tool, to access and change settings for that specific world. Currently, it's hard to change options like the presence and amount of monsters and whether they spawn during the daytime. The new menu will solve this problem!

We want to extend the World Settings Menu with the 0.7.0 update. We want to add new monsters, and we'd like to make sure you can toggle monster types on and off. We'd like to add for example monsters that can attack you and your colonists with missil projectiles, but we understand that some people might find it very annoying. With the new menu, it'll be easy to completely remove them from your world! It also makes it easier for us to add 'annoying' enemies that are toggled off by default, like explosive enemies or enemies that place and/or remove blocks.

We hope to be able to release the update, including the new menu and a monster spawning overhaul, next week!

Programmer Pipliz

Regular readers of this blog probably know that our team consists of me and Zun, the programmer. I'm responsible for the textures, the models, the Friday Blog and other social media, and a majority of the game design choices, while Zun has written all of the code. Pathfinding, lighting, savegames, the UI, everything.

You might have noticed that not a lot of new models and textures have appeared in the game in the last couple of months. Recent updates like the builders & diggers required mostly programming work and barely any texturing work. This will be true for many planned updates as well, like the ability to start multiple colonies, new world generation, improved MP(/PVP) and splitscreen functionality.

So I've decided to start learning programming. I've made some half-hearted attempts in the past, but I've tried it again with more determination this week. I've actually managed to make a couple of simple but useful programs this week! Not useful for Colony Survival yet (unless you think a dynamic Formula 1 Racing Schedule and Countdown is a great new feature), but it feels great to actually produce simple software in C#.

It'll probably take many months before I'm able to do anything that might actual contribute to Colony Survival, and that will probably be simple stuff like working on the UI so Zun can focus on optimizati new gameplay features. So the title is pretty much complete clickbait :) But we hope that this will have significant consequences in the long term.

Yogscast

While writing this Friday Blog, it came to our attention that the Yogscast released a new Colony Survival video. Here it is!

https://youtu.be/ph_HKmBgwME
They suggest smart new features like a better tooltips menu that shows where items are produced. They also discuss that they would like to see more frequent updates that would add simple new jobs like apple trees and a new colonist that can turn apples into cider.

This is something I've thought about a lot in the past couple of weeks. I would've loved to release more frequent updates with new gameplay and content.

We did that more often in the past. In the first months after releasing the game, we released smaller updates containing a couple of new blocks, like colored planks, cherry trees and carpet. We stopped doing that, because we don't want to clutter the game. We could for example release simple variations of foods and weapons every week. A crop that takes slightly longer to grow but has a higher food value. A new guard with a bow that has more range but with slower reload speed. A new projectile that's more expensive but does more damage. Etcetera, etcetera.

It might be fun in the short term, but in the long term, we believe many players would tire of these simple variations. We prefer to add unique features like the builders and diggers, despite them taking longer to develop.

We've got many ideas for new weapons, new foods and new jobs, but we'd like to spread them over multiple colonies to prevent drowning players in confusing options in their first colony. Of course, this requires us to first add the new multiple colonies feature. To do that decently, we'll need to add other new features like ways to travel faster and a method to trade between colonies. Something like this takes months, not a single week...

Once the features above have been added, we can start working on the new weapons, foods and jobs. But these are all very codependent. The new crops and jobs and ores are dependent on the new biomes, and the new weapons and guards are dependent on the new monsters, and vice versa. It would be useless to add the new guards without the new monsters, and destructive to add the new monsters without their counters.

So we've chosen to work on bigger updates that take longer to develop, but will hopefully result in a more interesting and balanced game, instead of a hotchpotch that gets increasingly cluttered and unbalanced :)



Death of TotalBiscuit

Today, it was announced that John Bain, known as TotalBiscuit, has died. It's hard for us to find appropriate words to describe this sad event, but we don't want to end this Friday Blog without even mentioning it either.

In 2014 and 2015, when we made lots of fundamental choices for Colony Survival, we watched a lot of his "WTF is...?" videos. We agreed with his criticism very often and he gave us a lot of insights into good (and bad!) game design.

We often compared the games in his videos to Colony Survival. We hoped to one day see it in a "WTF is..." video. We would've loved to hear his genuine judgment.

I'm sure his opinions have had an effect on Colony Survival. He often criticized practices like pre-orders, day-one DLC and lootboxes, and we've tried to stay far away from things like that.

Rest in peace.

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!

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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!

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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!

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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!

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