Colony Survival is a wildly unrealistic game. Everything is blocky. Colonists don't have mouths and are born as adults from a wood-and-cloth construction. The night only lasts a couple of minutes. It's permanently summer and wheat only requires a couple of days to grow.

But despite all of these simplifications, many parts of the game required quite a lot of real-world knowledge to develop. While working on the graphics, we had to learn how light scatters through the air and reflects from various surfaces. When adding the new ores and metals in 0.4.0, we had to learn about real history and even physics.

The attempts to underlying realism might seem like overkill. I believe it isn't. The following paradox is relevant:

A.) My hands are physically able to draw a photorealistic sketch
B.) My brain knows when a sketch is not photorealistic
C.) Despite A and B, my brain cannot let my hands draw a photorealistic sketch

I often wondered how this is possible, and I think I have a solution. We have got a lot of unconscious knowledge and experience. In the specific case of photorealism: we are looking at the world nearly every waking moment. We know what real life looks like. We've got many years of experience with it. But we don't know why exactly the world looks like it does. While we have years of experience and know it perfectly well unconsciously, we cannot consciously verbalize the reasons why something looks realistic or fake.So while nearly all of us can judge whether a sketch is photorealistic or not, only a few us have the knowledge and skill to draw a photorealistic sketch.

I think the same principle applies to many aspects of developing Colony Survival. To portray a historical colony in a semi-realistic world, we need to understand some historical/biological/geographical principles in quite a lot of detail. The better we understand those principles and represent them in-game, the more immersive Colony Survival will be. When we 'break' those rules, you might not be able to explain precisely what's wrong, but you will feel that something is off.

In the past week, we've been struggling with the principles behind natural variety. Why do deserts and jungles exist? Why are they located where they are located? How does a desert transition to a jungle? How can we apply these principles in-game?

One of the charts we've been looking at a lot is this one:


Source

Most of the chart make sense. Tundras are cold and dry. Deserts are hot and dry. Rainforests are hot and wet.

But to me, some of the info was pretty surprising. It's possible for a desert to receive just as much rainfall as a temperate or boreal forest. I didn't know anything about temperate rainforests.

Another thing that surprised me was the "border" between biomes. Many of them are angled from the bottom left to the top right.



Look at the red line, the border between shrubland and forests. What does it mean exactly? I struggled to put it into words.

Apparently, as the average annual temperature increases from 0°C to 22°C (30°F to 70°F), more rainfall is needed to sustain a forest.

The same can be seen all over the chart. Transitioning to a 'higher' biome requires more rainfall as the temperature increases. And 'higher' biomes are generally biomes with more vegetation. I modified the original chart to represent that a bit better:



At first glance, I thought this was a bit weird. Don't plants and trees 'like' sunlight? Not in extreme amounts, but an average annual temperature of ~10°C doesn't sound high, and in the "low rainfall scenario", there's already significantly less vegetation at that temperature compared to colder climates.

Then we figured out that the problem probably is not the heat directly, but the increased evaporation. As the temperature increases, rainfall disappears quicker, and there's less water available for vegetation to grow.

Here are some "rules" we've tried to distill from the charts above:
1.) More water = more vegetation
2.) Higher temperature = more vegetation
3.) Higher temperature = water disappears quicker (Paradox!!!1!!1!)
4.) Maximum rainfall is way higher in hot climates, meaning that a wider variety of vegetation can appear there (everything from 'none' to 'lots')

Here's what that would look like, from north to south. Average annual temperature:

Below 2°C/36°F: Tundra. It barely rains, but once it rains, the water barely evaporates. It's too cold for trees or lots of bushes, so everything is covered in grass and moss. There are no deserts.

Below 8°C/46°F: Taiga. Rainfall increases. Nearly all of the region is covered in trees. Only the driest of places revert to shrubland/grassland.

Below 22°C/71°F: Temperate. On average, more rainfall. Most of the region is covered in trees. Relatively dry places revert to shrubland or grassland. In the hottest and driest corners of the region, some small deserts exist. In the hottest and wettest parts of the region, there are temperate rainforests.

Above 22°C/71°F: Tropic. The driest ~20% of the tropics is a desert, because the heat makes the water evaporate quickly. As the rainfall increases, vegetation increases from desert to grassland, to shrubland, to woodland, to seasonal forest, to rainforest.

We believe applying these rules in Colony Survival will result in a world that's a lot more realistic and more fun to explore. We're looking forward to showing you our first successful attempts at generating the new world! This week's attempts mostly looked like brown hills, so we've still got some progress to make :)

Bedankt voor het lezen!

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"SummerTales" by Pyris-TT

Last week, we posted a video of functional multiple colonies. While the basics were done, many jobs and systems like science didn't work yet. Zun spent nearly the entire weekend fixing those issues, and it's done now! All jobs and systems are functional with multiple colonies now. We've made a video to show the changes:

https://youtu.be/iISE1YBYD-Q
While old systems are functional, multiple colonies require many new functions. Naming your colony, trading, travel, producing banners, info on remote colonies, etcetera. But instead of immediately continuing to work on those issues, we've decided to enjoy some variation by working on a different problem: the new world generation.

World Generation

Until now, exploration hasn't been important in Colony Survival, but it will become so in 0.7.0. The non-standard biomes are pretty simple, boring and ugly currently, so that definitely has to be fixed.

We'd like to make the landscape a lot more diverse. Random flowers and plants, rock formations, cliffs, grasslands in the desert and patches of trees in the tundra, etcetera.

The transitions between biomes is very harsh now. I've been thinking of ways to improve it. I realized there's no clear line in Finland separating taiga from tundra. Nor does the desert in the west of the US appear suddenly. There's a gradual transition that looks roughly like this:
No vegetation (snow/sand) -> grassland -> shrubland -> some trees -> forest

This doesn't mean the world will be a simple monotonous transition from grass to forests either. IRL, there are patches of sand in the middle of fertile Europe, and there are patches of green in the middle of the desert. I'd like biomes in Colony Survival to be like that as well.

When sharing these conclusions with Zun, he responded that he had already come up with similar ideas independently. He'd like to generate some underlying statics like temperature and humidity, and to pick a relevant biome based on that info. This should make the world both interesting and realistic! We hope to be able to show you some of the first experiments with the new world generation next week. A fastforwarded flythrough of the old world can be seen in the video above.



First Complete Texturepack!

There have been people in the past who've redone some textures, and others who've made new textures for mods. As far as we know, there is nobody who has redone all the textures in the game. Until now! Pyris-tt has made the SummerTales texturepack. It's used in all the screenshots in this blog, and the middle part of the video. It's beautiful! He's also made new icons for nearly all the items, and they improve a lot on the default icons. Thanks Pyris-tt!

In related news, Pandaros has expanded the team working on the Settlers Mod. The team now includes Pandaros himself, Pyris-tt, Kenovis and Servius. They've got many exciting ideas, and they're also planning to use the upcoming multiple colonies and happiness features. We can't wait to see what they'll produce!

Bedankt voor het lezen!

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We recently had some relatively boring and frustrating weeks. A lot of things changed behind the scenes, but there was barely any visible progress. Those weeks of work finally paid off! We've got a new internal development branch with new features. It's far from perfect, but it's now possible to start multiple colonies in singleplayer! Here's the video:

https://youtu.be/lh0bQ37JBE8
It's a lot of work to "port" features so that they work with multiple colonies. Step by step, we're adding jobs and mechanics back into the game. For example, area jobs and science are still broken and require attention. It takes time, but 'multiple colonies' is a mechanic with a lot of potential and we're looking forward to testing it more extensively!


We mainly wanted to add the multiple colonies mechanic so people could start new colonies in different and far-off lands. Now that multiple colonies are in-game, we realized it's quite fun to start new colonies relatively close to your first one.

If the happiness mechanic works the same for your second and third colony as it does for your first one, it becomes even more desirable to start new colonies nearby instead of expanding your first one. Why recruit colonist #400 in your first colony, who will require coffee, tea, chocolate and more, while colonist #50 in your third colony will be happy with only a new shirt once in a while?

It's actually pretty good if people are motivated to build new colonies. On the other hand, it's frustrating if the optimal way of playing the game requires you to start lots of highly similar small outposts. We'll have to find a way to balance it. One way of doing this would be to make productivity research apply only in the colony it was researched in, instead of globally. Another way is to make trading relatively expensive. Anyhow, it'll be hard to balance, and we'll require a lot of testers once these features are fleshed out a bit more :)




"Drawing" 3D models and textures for a game is very different from "normal" drawing. A computer can take multiple relatively simple objects and textures (normal maps, height maps), apply a fancy lighting system and make it look pretty great. With the right settings, of course.

"Normal" drawing lacks those luxuries. The shadows, the reflections, everything has to be done by the artist. It's a lot harder.

Blocks in Colony Survival benefit from those fancy lighting systems. To make an icon, I just screenshot a block and crop out the block, and it will look relatively decent. A couple of months ago, we updated a couple of icons. For example, the bed had a terrible hand drawn icon, and now it's a screenshot of an in-game bed. It looks a lot better.

But I can't do that with a lot of other items. Science bags, bread and wheat seeds lack an in-game 3D item. I can't screenshot them, so they've got hand drawn icons and a decent amount of them is terrible.

With the happiness mechanics and the new world in 0.7.0, we're going to have a lot of new items without in-game 3D models. Cacao, chocolate, sugar, cups of tea and coffee, etcetera. Instead of expanding our repertoire of terrible hand drawn icons, we believe it's a good idea to start updating our old icons, and to replace them with rendered icons. Make a simple 3D model that will not be used in-game, and render it in software like Blender. I've been experimenting with it this week, and I'm quite happy with the results. One of the results is the image at the start of this Friday Blog :)

Bedankt voor het lezen!

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Last week, we explained how we could add happiness to the game. I'm pretty sure we didn't have a single negative response! The idea seems to be pretty popular, and we're pretty sure we're going to add it in 0.7.0.

We've been thinking about the full consequences of adding happiness, and we ran into some inevitable mathematical problems. It's pretty difficult to explain, but I believe it's pretty interesting, and we'd like to explain why we make certain choices.

The first concept you need to understand is "required colonists". To stay alive, you need food, ammo, and guards. If you lack one of these three, your colony will inevitably collapse. Let's say roughly 1 in 7 colonists needs to be a guard, 1 in 7 colonists will need to produce food, and 1 in 7 colonists needs to produce ammo. This results in the next graph:



The dark green line is the total "required colonists" to stay alive. The black line is the total amount of colonists. The space in between them represents the amount of colonists that can be dedicated to non-essential tasks, like research, producing large amounts of cosmetic blocks and digging giant holes.

For colonies with less than 100 colonists, these colonists might not be essential to keep the colony alive in the next 24 hours, but they are essential for research and to gather resources for a basic fort. From 100 to 300~500 colonists, most people still manage to find purposeful work for their colonists. But larger colonies often have a surplus of 'useless' colonists. We often see entire skyscrapers full of farmers while the colony already has a 150K food surplus. It's where the game becomes less challenging and more repetitive.

We've been thinking of how to prevent this for a long time, but we didn't want to add arbitrary requirements. It's very frustrating if your colony collapses because arbitrary item '25C' isn't present.

The happiness idea as explained last week fixes the issue above, but if implemented exactly as described, it'll inevitably destroy itself. Here's the math:

• every new colonist adds +1 to global unhappiness
  
• this can only be countered by providing every colonist with new happiness items
  
• as your colony expands, the total amount of required happiness items grows both because every new colonist needs those items, but also because every colonist needs more items as the colony grows and unhappiness increases

Here's the problem visualized in a graph:



The green line in the graph represents the 3 out of every 7 colonists that are required for food and defense. As your colony grows, you'll need to add a happiness item like tea to counter the unhappiness generated by new colonists. Let's say, as a hypothetical number, that 1 out of every 7 colonists needs to produce tea now. Not a problem, you've still got 3 per 7 colonists left to do other tasks. But keep adding required happiness jobs, like colonists who produce coffee and chocolate, and you'll reach a hard limit. If 7 out of 7 colonists are required to work to merely sustain the colony, there's no room for growth and creativity. And it's of course impossible to require 8 out of every 7 colonists to do essential work, but that's where last week's proposal inevitably leads.



The graph above compares the total amount of "required colonists" to sustain your colony, and as you can see, it quickly surpasses the total amount of colonists in your colony. Which means the game becomes impossible.

Instead of requiring 1 out of every 7 colonists to produce, we could make it so that 1 colonists can produce enough tea for 20 or even 50 colonists. But this would mean that happiness is a barely relevant mechanic at the start of the game, and it wouldn't fundamentally solve the problem. It would just occur later in the game. We're thinking of a 3-tier solution.


These are the standard jobs, without upgrades. They produce too little to keep up with the many demands of a large colony.


Tier 1 will be productivity improvements. They'll be done by the scientist. In the past, we were opposed to productivity improvements, because larger colonies had an excess of colonists anyway. In 0.7.0, they'll be fundamental to your Colony's Survival. You'll have to improve the productivity of certain jobs to prevent the red line from crossing the black line in the graph above. For example, the output of flax farmers could be increased from 100% to 200% (or more!) in multiple steps, so you'll need less colonists to produce clothing. The same improvements can be applied to others who gather and process resources.


While Tier 1 is focused on optimizing existing jobs, Tier 2 adds new jobs. We don't want these jobs to completely replace older jobs, but they'll dramatically optimize a part of the production line. Let's use clothing as an example again. Currently, the tailor turns both flax into linen, and multiple pieces of linen into clothing. We could add a new job where a colonist uses a machine to quickly turn a significant amount of flax into a significant amount of linen. Your tailors will still be required to turn linen into clothing, but they can now completely focus on this complex task, while simpler tasks have been outsourced to colonists with machines.


1893 weaving machine, source

We'll try to apply the same principle to more jobs. The Tier 2 jobs might require electricity, to differentiate them from other jobs and to reward players for setting up an electricity network.


Ultimately, with the solutions above, we will still hit a limit where the colony can't produce enough happiness to fuel growth. And we know there's a lot of people who just want to recruit as many colonist as possible, even when they've run out of content. That's why we'll certainly add some kind of "infinite research", that for example improves the happiness produced by happiness items by 2% every time the research is completed. It'll cost a lot, to keep large colonies occupied :)

So, this is how we want to keep the game challenging for colonies with ~250+ colonists. You'll have to explore the world and utilize new inventions to balance happiness and productivity. We'd love to know what you think about it!

How to mail

We've been thinking for a while now that we should set up some sort of mail system. We'd like people to be able to subscribe to five kinds of updates:

• A mail every time we release a Friday Blog
  
• A mail every time we release a smaller update like 0.6.3
  
• A mail every time we release a larger update like 0.7.0
  
• A mail once we leave Early Access
  
• A mail every time the game is on sale

I can imagine there are a lot of people who don't read every Friday Blog, but who would want to be notified when there's an update. The system above would be very useful for them.

There are a lot of services online where you can set up a system to mail large amounts of people. Nearly all of them seem to be meant for people who want to spam as many people as possible with fancy newsletters, and they become very expensive once you've got a lot of subscribers. There are cheaper alternatives, but they require you to set up your own cloud server, which seems a bit like overkill. We're now thinking that an RSS system might be ideal, but our ears are open to other solutions :)

Our biome suddenly turned tropical

We live in the north of the Netherlands. That's less than 200 km/125 miles south of Scandinavia. When it's 25°C / 77°F here, it's considered to be pretty hot. It's seldom much warmer than that, so we don't have air conditioning.

The prediction for today is 36°C / 97°F. That's very close to the highest temperature ever recorded in the Netherlands. For some reason, it's hotter here than anywhere else in Europe. It's chilly in Spain, Italy and Greece, compared to the Netherlands. It has been pretty hot here for weeks now, and they're predicting it'll stay like this for another couple of weeks. We're not sure why the weather gods are displeased with this country!

Despite this, we've continued to work to the best of our ability. We've made good progress on the "behind the scenes" systems that are required to make multiple colonies function. The Progress Meter from previous blogs is pretty outdated, now that we've decided to change our plans for 0.7.0. We'll make a new Progress Meter for next week's Friday Blog!

Bedankt voor het lezen!

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We switched from green to blue for those with color blindness. Light blue for previous progress, dark blue for this week's progress.

Last Saturday, hundreds of people had already answered the survey. Thanks to everybody who participated! The results are very interesting. A large majority was in favor of adding post-medieval tech like electricity. But modern tech like nuclear reactors and jetpacks was pretty controversial. The group opposed to modern tech was nearly as big as the group in favor of it.

One of those opposed to modern tech is our most prolific modder, Pandaros. A couple of weeks earlier, we already had an intense discussion with him about this subject. He doesn't want the game to turn more into a tower defense game, a sentiment expressed by others as well. He wants us to add other sources of difficulty instead of merely "kill the monsters". Many people want us to add a happiness-mechanic that forces players to keep their colonists happy.

We like the idea, but we always thought it would result in two problems:

A.) Experienced and skilled players will quickly optimize their colony's happiness and gain the benefits of a happy colony (for example, increased crafting speed). Their stockpiles, which often already contain 100K+ food, will grow even larger.
New and less skilled players are often already struggling to survive, and happiness will make the game even harder for them. If their colony becomes unhappy, it might start a death spiral they cannot recover from.

B.) The happiness feature can be very extensive. It could add politics, social policies, crime & justice, revolting colonists, etcetera. This will take a very long time to develop.

This is what we were pondering about last Saturday. Simultaneously, I hadn't played any games for more than a week, and that's inexcusable for a game dev ;) So Zun and I started looking for a game we could play together. We ended up choosing Civilization V, something we hadn't played in many years.

After playing for a while, our civilizations started growing unhappy. We searched for the cause of this, and found it. In Civ V, the growth of the population causes unhappiness. This can be countered by building things like the Colosseum, theaters and stadiums.

Moderate amounts of unhappiness in Civ V don't cause death spirals, they just slow down the growth of cities. Which in itself, was the cause of the unhappiness.

Suddenly, we realized that the happiness mechanic in Civ V solves all the problems we expected from a happiness system in Colony Survival. It's an additional challenge for players that grow quickly, but it's not a problem at the start of the game. Unhappiness prevents growth, but it doesn't cause collapses. And the system is pretty simple, it's not excessively complex.

It might look weird to make 'population growth' a source of unhappiness, but the end result makes sense. Small villages don't have theaters and stadiums. Primitive civilizations don't have luxury goods like coffee and tea. As cities and civilizations grow larger, they do start to offer more (material) sources of happiness to their inhabitants. Franchises like Total War use the same system. Population growth causes social unrest, which can be countered by building temples or other sources of order and happiness.

We think it might be a good idea to adapt such a system to Colony Survival. We've made a simple mock-up of what happiness might look like in Colony Survival:



Every new colonist will add unhappiness to the colony. With a "Starting Happiness" of something between 30 and 100, it won't be a problem for small colonies. But as you grow larger, you'll have to start producing goods to increase the happiness of your colonists. These goods could for example be clothing, jewelry, tools, shoes, coffee, tea, chocolate, luxury meals and books. They could also be services like religious ceremonies and doctors.

We'd like you to be able to select different "rations" for these goods. Coffee could for example be a rare luxury that your colonists enjoy once a month, or it could be so common that your colonists will drink it three times a day. The more common something is, the more happiness it provides.

When a colony becomes unhappy, it will be more expensive to attract new colonists to the colony. If the unhappiness becomes too high, we might disable the ability to recruit new colonists entirely. Colonists might even start leaving.

It will be possible to make sources of happiness with the resources found in the spawn area, but ultimately, you'll have to start outposts in different biomes to produce new resources for new sources of happiness.

We think it's a great system and we're very enthusiastic about it! We're considering to postpone the freeze/poison guards and work on happiness instead, but before we make this choice, we'd like to have your input. Would you like to see the system described above in Colony Survival? Would you mind if freeze/poison guards were postponed or even cancelled in favor of happiness?


Nearly 700 people participated in the survey, in less than a week! We're very happy with the huge amount of responses. Many people told me they'd love to see the results, so I've made a lot of graphs to visualize the answers.

The first question was "What should the priority of these features be?". Here are the four lowest priority features:



PVP had the highest amount of "very low priority" votes. We expected PVP to be unpopular, but we didn't expect it to be this unpopular, because it's a feature that's asked for pretty often.

With the recent sale, we got a significant amount of negative reviews complaining about the (lack of) tutorial. This isn't reflected in the votes. We think this is caused by the way the 'voters' were selected. People turned off by the lack of decent tutorial don't read our Friday Blogs and don't participate in the Discord.

We were surprised by the many "low priority" votes for decorative items, because they're suggested pretty often. Vice versa, we were surprised by the many "medium priority" votes for animations, because they're not complained about often.



The Yogscast wanted us to add more content by "copying" old jobs. No new features in these jobs, just new textures, new items and new crafting recipes. We agreed and we expected the idea to be relatively popular, but the feature received mostly 'medium' votes. I think it has to do with the unappealing description.

Boats scored worse than expected too, probably because they weren't called "ships" :) "Jobs with new features" scored pretty good!



Steam Workshop support scored a lot better than expected, so consider the priority to be increased. Better coop and multiple colonies scored best, and that's perfect, because that's exactly what we're working on!

Questions 2 asked "How should we divide our time between "more content" and "improve existing gameplay"?". Here are the results:



"4" was the most popular option, so that's pretty balanced and close to the middle. But it is closer to "more content" than to the other side, and that's pretty obvious from the results as well. A 75/25 split seems to be roughly the way you want us to divide our attention between more content and improving existing gameplay.

Question 3 was "Which direction would you favor or oppose?".



As described in the beginning, modern tech was pretty controversial. Magic was #1 out of 4 in "strongly favor" votes, but also #2 out of 4 in "strongly oppose" votes. It's pretty controversial, and we're not planning to add that either. The random events were pretty popular, but there was also passionate opposition in the text replies.

Question 4 asked "Some people are excited for more modern technology like electricity, others think Colony Survival should stay medieval. Is there anything you'd like to say about this subject?". The replies were text, so they can't be easily visualized.

The text replies were less polarized than you might expect. Most replies were something along these lines:

1.) If you add modern tech, it should be at the end of a long time of gradual progress
2.) Allow people to choose whether they want to use modern tech or not
3.) The modern tech shouldn't look too modern, it should have a steampunk-aesthetic or something similar

We haven't decided against modern tech, but we'll be sure to follow these rules above if we add it!

Question 5 asked for some info about you, "the voter".



We were surprised by the amount of people under 26, which includes us :P, who've played more than 25 hours! During the first hours, the percentage of people who had talked with us was a lot higher, but that's probably because of the @everyone on Discord. "Steam review, ever" means "I've written a review for a Steam game".

Question 6 asked "Was learning the gameplay of Colony Survival unclear or frustrating when you first started playing the game?".



Most people seem to agree that the game isn't perfectly clear, but it isn't frustratingly unclear either. Which we're pretty happy with, we had expected worse!

Question 7 asked people who've voted '1', '2' or '3' in the question above to explain which parts exactly were unclear. Many people answered that the game had already improved a lot since they first started playing the game, so their complaints weren't relevant anymore, according to them. The rest of the answers were pretty diverse. It doesn't seem like there's a single big problem that most people stumble over.

Question 8 was "We use many forms of social media to stay in touch with our players. How often have you visited our place on:". The possible answers were:
-Never, I don't like that platform
-Never, but I'm glad you use it!
-I've been there a couple of times
-I'm there often



A lot of people dislike Facebook, and to a lesser extent, Twitter and Reddit. Discord is the only platform where the votes for "often" outnumber "sometimes", a testament to the addictiveness of Discord ;) Our YouTube Channel was more popular than we expected. We'll be certain to upload videos of the new features in 0.7.0 when we've got something interesting to show!

Question 8 was "Thanks for answering these questions! Is there anything else you'd like to say?". We got a lot of very kind and encouraging comments. Thanks a lot for them :D


Multiple colonies is one of the most important features in 0.7.0. This requires us to change how many jobs, items and systems are saved. Many things that are now related to the player (difficulty, crafting recipes, etc) have to be connected to specific colonies instead. Simultaneously, we were already experiencing some problems with our savegames. Crashes often corrupted them. That's why we've spent the last couple of weeks working on savegames, adapting a new savegame system that both fixes the corruption problems and works with multiple colonies.

Yesterday, Zun released the last internal stable branch. A version of Colony Survival that works, with as many savegame improvements as possible. After he did that, he pretty much killed the game. We can't release functioning builds anymore. He's now rebuilding certain systems, and after a couple of weeks of work we hope to be able to revive an enhanced version of the game, with a rudimentary system for multiple colonies!

Thanks for reading this extremely long Friday Blog. We'd love to have your feedback about the proposed happiness mechanic!

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Would you like to help us shape the future of Colony Survival? Participate in this survey and share your opinion!

During my short stay in France, Zun enjoyed some extra days of rest. Despite that, he also made some progress on 0.7.0. He fixed some common issues that occur in corrupted savegames, specifically the ones with invisible crates and beds. During that process, he also prepared them for multiple colonies! You can compare this week's Progress Meter to the one posted last week.

There has been some controversy regarding our plans for 0.7. Some people love our plans for more modern technology, while others think the game should stay medieval. We've discussed and thought about the subject a lot, and we decided we wanted to organize another survey. We'd love to know what you think, and the previous survey was very useful. We hope you're willing to participate!


During the past week, many amazing screenshots have been submitted to the Industry Challenge. We've selected five winners. All of them will receive a Steam Key for Rise of Industry! They'll also be promoted to "King" on Discord and gain access to the illustrious secret Kings Channel ;) Here are the five winning submissions:

"Rise of Industry on the Final Frontier" by Aardvark


Full size

Car Prototype Factory from Rise of Industry by nobrains21


Full size

Huge industrial compound by [sirdragonov]


Full size

Industrial Dutch harbor by Thorvic


Full size

Victorian Industrial Steampunk City by Bilzander


Full size

We were thoroughly impressed by the quality of the submissions and want to thank everybody for participating! We had a hard time picking the best five, and many of those who "lost" lost only by a very small margin. We'd love to organize new challenges in the future, and hope you'll participate again!


I had a great time in Normandy, France. The castles and manors kept reminding me of Colony Survival, and the landscape is a great inspiration for the new world generation. The history of the region is also very interesting and awe-inspiring. Zun spent some days completely absorbed by an addicting book series :)

I arrived in the Netherlands again yesterday, and today work continued with renewed energy. We're hoping to make some good progress during the coming week! We'll keep you updated.


A chateau near Pointe du Hoc, last Tuesday. Full size.

Don't forget to participate in the survey! :)

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We owe thanks to a lot of people, but this week, Pandaros deserves a special mention. He gave us a lot of advice regarding the savegames. Especially during the weekend, it felt like Zun and Pandaros were exchanging info from early in the morning to late in the evening. Thanks Pandaros! If you're looking for more Colony Survival content while waiting for 0.7.0, you should definitely try his Settlers Mod.

We received a lot of feedback when we described our plans for 0.7.0 last week. Some were concerned the medieval feel of the game would be lost if we added too much modern technology. We understand those concerns. We will probably try to make the modern tech look a bit "retro".

Another good suggestion was "aggro the monsters". It would be awesome if players could draw the attention of the monsters from minor colonies to their strongholds. This would be a fun new job with of course some costs associated.



We've made the Progress Meter above to accurately display what we've worked on and what still needs to happen before the update can be released. The more modern stuff announced last week is not tracked, because we're planning to release it in 0.7.1 and later.

The Progress Meter was accurate last Tuesday evening, but this Friday it's hopefully appropriate to color one or two dots green next to "multiple colonies". If everything goes according to plan, I should be in France right now for a short week. Zun is holding the fort and available on Discord!


During the Summer Sale, we bought Rise of Industry. We've got to keep tabs on the competition! ;) We got in contact with the dev who started the project, and he had already played Colony Survival for dozens of hours! We decided to organize a contest together. We're organizing a Rise of Industry contest, they're organizing a Colony Survival contest.

You can win one of five Rise of Industry Steam keys. To win, you've got to build something with an industrial theme in Colony Survival, make a good screenshot, potentially edit it, then share it on our Discord. If you're among the best five submissions, you'll win!

The rules

• Post the image in #IndustryChallenge in our Discord. You've got to be verified before you can post images there. You'll be verified if you post a message in one of the channels. It can take up to a dozen or so hours before you're verified.
  
• Images should be submitted before 4PM UTC Friday July 13th.
  
• The winners will be announced in the next Friday Blog.
  
• You're allowed to post only one image. If you post more, they'll be deleted and only the first one will count for the contest.
  
• It should be a still image, preferably JPG or PNG. Videos, links to website or albums, GIFs or MP4s will be disqualified.
  
• Mod use is allowed, as is editing your images.
  
• The most impressive and beautiful five screenshots will win!

If you'd like to enter the Colony Survival contest, join the Rise of Industry Discord! Here is the link: https://discord.gg/riseofindustry

Good luck with both contests!

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We've been making plans for 0.7.0/0.7.1/0.7.2 for many months, and we've finally agreed on a rough outline of all the changes we want to make to the game. We're still in a very early stage, so we can take your feedback into account! We'd love to know what you all think of the plans.

1.) Colonist requirements

The only thing currently required to recruit a colonist is a bunch of food. This is relatively hard to get for new colonies, but larger colonies can often recruit many dozens of colonists simultaneously. We'd like to scale the requirements as the colony grows. Colonists will be cheaper for small colonies, to speed up the first stage of setting up a colony. We've heard many players say that the early game is pretty slow and boring, and that it gets way more interesting later on. We'd like to help players get to that stage faster.

We'd like to increase the colonist recruitment cost for larger colonies. Apart from food, other items like clothing, tools and a small amount of coins could become required. We'd like to increase the cost gradually. Colonist 250 should be more expensive than colonist 150, which should be more expensive than colonist 50.

2.) New world generation

The world generation has barely changed in more than a year. We'd like to put a lot of effort in a more interesting world. Different mountains, new cliffs, random fields of wheat or flowers, interesting "sub-biomes" like swamps or an oasis in the desert, etc.

In every direction, you should eventually find an interesting different "top-biome" where a new colony can be started. There should be an arctic area in the north, a tropic biome in the south, a "far east" obviously in the east, and a "new world" to the west.

Each of these biomes should have distinctive items and resources. This makes sure every colony has a unique purpose. Every biome should have special items in each of these three categories:

• Local items/food like rice in the far east and potatoes in the new world.
  
• Resources for weapons. For example, poison plants for poisonous projectiles in the tropics, freeze missiles from the arctic and obsidian in the new world for powerful armor penetrating projectiles.
  
• Resources for more modern technologies, like rubber, cobalt for batteries and 'importanium' for energy production.

Of course, this will require new features to let players start multiple colonies, trade and travel between them, and to manage them from a distance.


Built in the temporary 0.6.3 testserver

3.) New monsters and guards

We'd like to add new monsters. These are the ones we're pretty sure about:

• Monsters with more HP. The strongest monsters are now killed in one shot by the matchlock gun. We'd like to add "boss monsters" that are perhaps 10 times stronger.
  
• Armored monsters. This allows us to add more differences between projectiles, because they will now also require armor penetration.
  
• Monsters that fire projectiles at guards and the player. It would be nice if the monsters have some way of fighting back from the middle of a maze. They shouldn't have a very long range, so a properly designed defense can keep your colonists save.

We might also add slightly more "magical" monsters. These monsters might have "magical armor", or they could perhaps buff/heal/revive other monsters.

These monsters of course require new guards. We'd like to add:

• Guards that do armor penetration damage, with for example obsidian projectiles.
  
• Guards that fire poisonous projectiles, to damage monsters over time.
  
• Guards that fire freeze projectiles, to slow down monsters.
  
• Guards with area of effect damage, to damage multiple monsters simultaneously

If we add "magical" monsters, we'll certainly add guards to counter them as well!

4.) New technology

When you've built a global empire with colonies all over the world, you should be able to combine resources from different biomes to invent and use somewhat more modern technology. You should be able to generate small amounts of electricity with machines running on coal. This electricity can be used to power new jobs like better furnaces, to activate lanterns or as a weapon.

These simple generators should give players a taste of what is to come. If they want to use significant amounts of electricity, they'll require more advanced machines that can turn 'importanium' into electricity. This will require a complex process where importanium is refined and enriched before it can be used. This process will require resources from multiple colonies, like rubber and cobalt.

5.) The endgame: an infinitely upgradeable jetpack

You've explored the entire world. You've found and processed all resources. Your colonies are defended by every available type of guard. You've got advanced jobs powered by importanium. You've unlocked all the science. What could your next goal be?

We'd like to add a new kind of scientist that can only be unlocked at the end of all the other content. This scientist will require high amounts of electricity and other resources to do his job. He has access to unique science which can be repeated many times. This science could for example make other jobs more efficient, in many small steps.

A fun option could be a jetpack. By default, the capacity of its battery is very low and it can only sustain a short flight. The "end game scientist" can be used to upgrade the battery in many small steps, and perhaps other stats like speed and height as well. This will give your 'empire' a reason to keep producing large amounts of electricity and resources.

What's your opinion of the changes proposed above? Please share it in a comment or on our Discord!


Built by Suryezon and DrSwam

This week

We purchased Unity 5 multiple years ago and have been using it for a long time now. Since then Unity started a monthly subscription version which got a lot of updates and features we didn’t get. This week we decided to switch to this newer version, hoping that this will help us squash a few of the hard to fix bugs.
The last couple of days we tried different versions of Unity to see which would benefit the game the most. 2018 being the newest, but a bit unstable. We decided to go with 2017.4 for now, and hope it will fix a couple of weird errors in Colony Survival. For example, it doesn't work when people have got FaceIt installed. These problems might have been fixed in Unity, and might thus be solved in Colony Survival 0.7.0.

Another problem that keeps occurring is corrupted savegames, especially when a server is stopped in an unexpected way like by a Windows Update. We'll probably require you to start a new world in 0.7.0 (older worlds can always be accessed by rolling back to an older build!), so this is a great moment to fix that problem by switching to a different format for our savefiles.We've been exploring possible alternatives during the last couple of days.

A couple of months ago, we said we felt like we were stitching up Colony Survival after a surgery. Now we feel the exact opposite. We're preparing Colony Survival for the biggest surgery it has ever had. It'll take many months, but we're excited for the outcome, and we'd love to have your feedback on our plans!

Bedankt voor het lezen!

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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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