0.7.5 is available on Steam right now! The update contains a bunch of much requested features and improvements:

• Major pathfinding improvements. Previously, colonists looking for a destination (a job, a bed, a crate, etc.) chose the closest object in a straight line - completely ignoring terrain, walls, floors and stairs. In small and easy-to-navigate colonies, this didn't matter much. But for complex colonies, with large underground sections and big buildings with many rooms and floors, this could lead to some really bad decisions that resulted in unnecessarily long paths for colonists. Often, this caused cascading problems, with beds intended for one group of colonists being claimed by the "wrong" colonists, resulting in problems for both groups. The colonists are making their decisions a lot more intelligently now!
  
  
• A compass. The compass will display the location of colony banners, making it a lot easier to explore, travel and find back your colonies, and the colonies you share with friends in multiplayer.
  
• "Limit groups" for crafting jobs. Previously, changing the production limits of a job at a job block changed the limits for all job blocks of that type. Change the amount of bronze arrows produced at one anvil, and the crafting limits of all other anvils will change as well. That's still the default functionality, but you're now able to create custom "limit groups" and you're free to change which limit group is used by every single job block. For example, you can now have one anvil set to produce bronze arrows, while another only crafts crossbow bolts.
  
  
• Pausing. The game now pauses when you press escape. The new system that allows us to adjust the "simulation speed" of all the game's systems to 0, also allows us to change the simulation speed to other numbers - both slow-motion and fast-forwarding. You can experiment with this by enabling developer buttons in the settings menu and then using the numpad-buttons. Alternatively, with developer buttons and cheats enabled, use "/debug setsimspeed #", with # being less than 1 for slow-motion and more than 1 for fast-forwarding.

As always, the update might contain hidden bugs. If new problems appear, please let us know and we'll try to fix them as soon as possible! Have fun with 0.7.5 :)


Previous blog explaining some biases present in survey data

Last week, we asked you to participate in a survey. More than 500 of you did so! Thanks a lot, the results are very useful, and we'll discuss the most prominent ones here. First of all - how are you doing?



A vast majority of you are doing well, which is great to hear! We hope that those of you who didn't feel well feel a lot better this week.

Next up: what things have you done surrounding Colony Survival?



A large majority has played more than 50 hours, which is pretty amazing! Despite that, a smaller proportion has reached the glider and the colonization of distant areas. Only a small minority has left a Steam Review or a comment here or on the other channels. Which makes sense - I've completed plenty of surveys on places where I've never left a comment myself. Thanks, silent majority :) (Lots of thanks to the reviewers and commenters as well, of course!)

Next question: what's a fair price for Colony Survival?



$20 is seen as reasonable by the majority but is skewed a bit to "cheap" - $25 is seen as reasonable as well but is skewed towards "expensive". $22.50 seems to be "precisely reasonable". After over three years of updates and inflation, we're seriously considering to slightly increase the price of the game. If we're reading these results correctly, a majority of you would consider that to be pretty reasonable.



"High price, frequent discount" is a common strategy for lots of games, but it doesn't seem to have a lot of support among consumers. That doesn't mean you hate all discounts though, there seems to be quite a lot of support for a discount now and then. Our last discount was back in the middle of 2018. Since then, we've added a lot of new features and done a lot of polishing, and with the next couple of updates, the game should be even more fun and intuitive for new and old players alike. We might try to get a boost of new players by holding a bit more frequent discounts in the future.

To get a sense of the biggest problem in CS, the area where improvement is the most beneficial, we divided up potentil development in five areas. To explain what these areas roughly are, we wrote a metaphor about a racing game. Here's that metaphor:



The results to that question were very clear and interesting!



It seems very clear that the "hook" question is the area that deserves the most attention. The next update should contain a major change in that area. In last week's blog, we talked about a plan to fundamentally overhaul the happiness system. That plan has gotten a lot more serious and will probably be implemented! It's not set in stone yet, so this is a great moment to voice your considerations :)

Veel plezier in 0.7.5!

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Participate in the Survey by clicking here!

Update 0.7.5 will be released next week. If everything goes according to plan, the update will be live on Wednesday. In case of unexpected issues, the release will be delayed one or more days. The release will be announced on all the usual channels.

Major new changes in 0.7.5 are:

• The ability to pause the game
  
• Crafting limit groups
  
• Improved "goal finding" - colonists should choose more sensible beds/crates/occupations
  
• A compass to find your way to colonies

With the release of 0.7.5 being very close, we've started pondering about our next plans again. We'd love to have your input, so we've organized another Survey, and we'd really appreciate it if you'd participate :)

We're thinking about fundamentally restructuring two core systems: science/the tech tree, and the happiness system. We're unsure about the precise solution and are debating many solutions.

The current happiness system gives a fixed reward for giving the (varying!) amount of colonists a certain amount of each happiness item. E.g., 20 happiness for providing each colonist with a candle per day. As you recruit more colonists, unhappiness due to overpopulation rises, while the amount of candles consumed per day grows. The reward, 20 happiness, doesn't change though. This requires players to continuously seek for new, better happiness items and to discard old ones.

In practice, this is a complex system that's not very intuitive or realistic. The continuously shifting balances and cost/reward-ratios aren't very clear. We could work very hard to make the Happiness-interface clearer, but another option is to make the mechanic itself more sensible and easier to understand.

A potential option is removing unhappiness, and giving players a fixed reward for each distributed happiness item. E.g., one candle distributed to a colonist = +1 "HAP". As you boost your production and recruit more colonists, the amount of HAPs received grows rapidly. HAPs could be integrated into many parts of the gameplay: recruiting colonists could cost HAPs, just like unlocking new tech or crafting a Colony Starter Kit. Perhaps there's even a mechanic that allows you to kill large amounts of monsters in an emergency which would cost large amount of HAPs. I believe this would be more intuitive and more rewarding than the current system, but we'd love to have your opinion!

Bedankt voor het lezen en het meedoen aan het onderzoek :)

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Fifty-nine blogs ago we warned players about a significant pathfinding problem. Actually, it’s more of a goal-choosing problem. When choosing the closest bed/crate/grocery store/job/anything, they do not actually compare the paths they would need to take there. They compare the straight distance between their current location and their goal - ignoring walls, floors, terrain, anything that blocks their path.

This is visualized in the image above. The miners will need a bed during the night. They search for the closest bed, ignoring terrain, and find the beds in the house above them. Within that circle, there are no closer beds. Then they calculate a path, which is a pretty long one. That path takes them through another underground room filled with beds. They’ll ignore those and go to the “closest” beds.



As you can see in the image above, when night falls, the colonists will go to the “closest” beds that actually require the longest path. This is how it has always been in CS. We’ve received a moderate amount of complaints about wonky pathfinding and very weird bed use by colonists. We’re pretty sure a large portion of these issues are caused by the problem described above. Well - in the internal dev build, this problem is now fixed :D



This is what our scenario looks like in dev build 0.7.5 - the miners are all in the sensible, closest beds! This won’t make a massive difference in small, simple colonies, but it will probably have a major impact on large, complex colonies with twisting mines and multi-level buildings with limited stairs and entrances. We’re planning to release 0.7.5 in 1-2 weeks and then we’d love to hear how this changes things! Hopefully, a large amount of issues are fixed at once.

Bedankt voor het lezen :)

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JoeMan’s Underground Colony / Unterirdische Kolonie

The pathfinding has seen major improvements this week! In "debug-world", the closest crate or unused bed can now be found taking into account an approximation of the actual distance to get there instead of just the straight line distance. Now we’ve got to work to implement the improved code from the debug-world into the actual Colony-Survival-colonists. We hope to be able to show some impressive results in the next few weeks! For a detailed explanation of the pathfinding-problem in CS, please read this blog.

One of CS's most active modders, Pandaros, has made some patches to expand the modding functionality of the game. One of these functionalities is to have the client show markers in the world when holding some type in the inventory. These patches have been integrated into the next update and are used for a new tool: the compass. Whenever you wield it, you'll see icons located at the banner of colonies you own. This functionality can be seen in the screenshot below:



To complete the pathfinding-trilogy, I’ve also been working on a pathfinding-related programming experiment this week. My C# / Unity skills aren’t quite good enough to work on Colony Survival yet, but my learning-projects are getting more and more advanced. This week, I worked on and finished a maze-solver that allows people to generate a grid of a dynamic size, and to create a maze in it. That maze will be explored and solved dynamically. Here’s a GIF of the project :)

Bedankt voor het lezen!

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Bog’s Starter Colony

All changes mentioned in this blog concern the internal dev build, no update has been published to the public branch yet

Our current task is improving the pathfinding. The code has been optimized, resulting in better performance. In some situations, the colonists do make better choices in regards to their paths. They’re better at avoiding winding paths - which means they’ll also avoid unnecessarily climbing blocks and stairs.

There still is the problem where they choose their targets (beds, crates, etc) based on the straight line between the colonist and the target, totally ignoring the actual path they need to take there. Zun is thinking about this problem right now, and he’s considering some options that might fix this.

Zun’s considered solution will probably be implemented within a couple of weeks, which means we can hopefully release 0.7.5 before the end of September. 0.7.5 will include the new individual crafting limits feature, the ability to pause the game, the (hidden in cheats/dev options) capability to adjust the simulation speed and the pathfinding improvements.

Afterwards, we’ll focus on better colony management tools, like the ability to remotely assign/disable jobs. They should be released in 0.7.6 :)


Last week, I had a little holiday (which was great!), and instead of a regular blog we released a roadmap. This resulted in a very enthusiastic response, which is always awesome. There were also some questions which would be useful to answer publicly.

Carrot_shark - i wonder if they could give us a timeline for the updates

Sorry - no :(. 0.7.5 would have been the colony-management-tools-update, but Zun got some brilliant ideas for pathfinding/simulation speed so we ended up here. Plans and priorities shift all the time, sneaky problems and hidden opportunities appear frequently, and this makes all precise long term planning pretty much useless.

Gary - So we will only be able to attack these AI Colonies? Would it be possible to friend them for trading resources?

AI Colonies are the most distant and uncertain feature, so it’s hard to guarantee specifics. I doubt we’re getting a complex diplomacy thing but you never know!

Growlingpie - What about something simple like assigning certain jobs to certain beds. I love the game but when my miners have to walk all the way up and across my base to their beds is just a waste of time.

Hopefully, the pathfinding update solves this problem entirely! If not, we’ll consider other solutions, like job-specific beds (green beds for farmers, grey beds for guards, black beds for miners, etc).

Windvex21 - for the blueprints i would like if we can like go to like a 3D model type thing, build however we want the building to look like, then we can save and use it wherever we want

We would love that too!

Katyusha - I quite like the idea of the industrial era tech level, one thing I feel that could be a nice addition would be some fast mode of transport between colonies

Definitely agreed. Perhaps we’re getting transport modes like the glider but quicker, but we’ve also been thinking about adding teleporters with huge electricity costs as an end-game technology.

------------------------------------

Bedankt voor het lezen!

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[This block of text was written last Sunday. The roadmap was written even earlier. I should've been spending the past five days on holiday. I might get back home and polish this up Friday evening, but if you're reading this, that probably didn't happen :) ][Edit: Zun was here]


Game development is unpredictable. When working on a feature, we regularly discover it’s a lot harder or a lot easier to develop than we expected. Sometimes, good ideas get supplanted by better ideas. At other times unexpected problems or new opportunities get on our path. So our plans are not set in stone. We cannot give you a 100% guarantee that these things will unfold exactly as written here, but at least you can distill the rough outlines of what we're going for.


The current tools for managing your colony are relatively primitive. A lot of things have to be arranged “in-game” - you can only remove/disable jobs by “physically” walking to the right job-block. You receive some text notifications when things go wrong, but there’s no nice interface which summarizes these problems. We’re working to change this. This should simultaneously help new players understand the game quicker, and help more experienced players to manage their large colonies. It’s currently our highest priority.


Currently, we don’t have something that could truly be called a “tutorial”. The game starts out with a pop-up that contains core information, and there’s a link to a PDF manual that explains the details necessary to set up a self-sustaining colony. It works, but it could be better. That’s why we’re planning to add a “Mission System”. The missions will start out simple enough: plant a banner, recruit a berry farmer, let an NPC kill a monster. Ultimately, they will “pull you” through most of the game, with missions like “recruit 1000 colonists” and “build a steam engine”. Experienced players will complete these missions automatically, without being hindered by them. Newcomers can find in-game instructions on how to fulfill the requirements.


Back in 2018, we added both builders and diggers to the game. You can select an area, and these colonists will either remove all blocks there or fill the area with a selected block. They’re very useful, but are hard to use for generating complex, detailed structures. There are some mods that have added primitive ‘Blueprint Builders’, a new job that allows colonists to automatically build predefined houses, cathedrals and castles. It seems like a very useful feature, but making it work properly in-game is pretty hard. You’d also need a tool that defines blueprints, and there are other tough problems like rotation: how do we intuitively clarify to players in which direction the blueprint is facing? We hope we’ll be able to figure this out. We’ve played around with adding a top-down view to help solve this issue, but we’re highly unsure about that last plan at the moment.


Over the years, we’ve noticed different problems and tried different solutions to fix those. The main “path” of the game has become a bit of a patchwork because of this. We’d like to redo a large part of the tech tree with a new design philosophy that can scale from tiny colonies to huge megacolonies. The full process of growing your colony from the former to the latter should be a smooth and steady progression, with new goals and rewards continuously appearing at a steady interval.

To accomplish this, we want to add a new resource: Data. Progressing your colony will require ever larger amounts of Data. Historically, this has scaled really well with the development of civilization: starting from handwritten manuscripts to the printing press, and eventually moving from punched cards to the computers and the internet. Players will be able to use Data to improve the fundamentals of their colony: more output for farmers, more damage for guards, more efficient crafters, more productive miners, etcetera.

We’re also considering two other new resources: VAT and XP. VAT is earned by handing out valuable items as happiness goods to your colonists. XP is earned by letting your guards slay monsters. We will try to integrate them with the fundamentals of the progression of the gameplay.


The Happiness Mechanic that we added in 0.7.0 is pretty complicated, and the UI that should explain it is imperfect and confusing. We’re planning to improve the UI, but we’re also considering to overhaul how Happiness works fundamentally. Expect major changes here!


When we released Colony Survival back in 2017, we were thinking of a Viking-theme, roughly 800-900AD. 0.4.0 added crossbows and matchlock guns, and 0.7.0 further extended the timeline with a printing press. We’re hoping to extend the tech tree into the Industrial Revolution. Steam engines, oil, electricity - these could offer plenty of interesting gameplay opportunities, and a reason for mega colonies.

These new technologies should also impact your guards. We'd like to add new types that use more complex weapons and ammo to deal more damage. Perhaps we'll even add new "weapon styles" like weapons that do area-of-effect damage, weapons that slow down monsters and weapons that do damage over time. Of course, to keep things balanced, these more powerful guards will also have to face new types of powerful monsters!


AI Colonies have been a common suggestion, that we’ve often dismissed. We thought we couldn’t make it work. After a lot of discussion, we’ve thought of a potential solution. Perhaps we’ll add enemy colonies that can be attacked in the same “tower defense” way that monsters attack your colonies. You’ll only be able to select which troops attack the enemy colony, and where you’ll spawn them. There won’t be any complex siege-gameplay, just that. If that’s something a majority of you is interested in, and we have finished all the other things on this list, we might add something like that! But consider it the least likely thing that you’ve read here.

Bedankt voor het lezen!

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Built by SlayerOfLight, available on the Workshop here

[All changes mentioned in this blog concern the currently unreleased internal dev build]

After adding “pausing” as a feature, we’ve granted another common community request this week: individual crafting limits! In 0.7.5, you will be able to create new “limit groups”. This is a custom set of crafting limits. They can be applied to individual job blocks. For example, you could have 10 anvils, 5 operating with the default crafting limits, 3 using a scheme focused on bronze arrows and 2 focused on crossbow bolts. This should give players some much-requested extra control over their crafters!



Zun has also been working on pathfinding this week. It has mainly been work focused on optimization, but he has some plans to make pathfinding more sensible! There are currently some limitations that cause suboptimal choices in certain situations - especially when the “point to point” distance is small but the actual path they’ve got to take is long. We think this can be improved.


In the past months, plenty of people have asked us for our roadmap. We’ve linked them to a handful of Friday Blogs, but had to admit that we lacked a clear, updated roadmap. We’ve decided to make one, and we’ll release it next week. It’s going to be featured on the official website - which coincidentally already had a roadmap! It’s over three years old, and very outdated. Before replacing it, we’d like to discuss the old roadmap with you point by point.



We’ve got trading, decent co-op features, builders, “removers” and Steam Workshop support now! Blueprint builders aren’t there yet, but we’re still strongly considering them. Colony vs colony combat is a lot more distant and uncertain, and anti-griefing measures are difficult to implement. Making an area “ungriefable” allows players to trap each other, which is not an improvement.



Pretty much all the things mentioned here have been implemented :) Just no animals (except for the chicken coop) and we’re still generating the world from a 2D height map.



As mentioned before: no animals, but there is Steam Workshop support!

Many other things that weren’t on the roadmap have been implemented in the past three years, and new things have appeared in our list of future plans. Next week, a freshly updated roadmap will be presented!

Bedankt voor het lezen :)

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The release of 0.7.4 went smoothly! But as predicted, there was a minor issue. The colony ownership buttons (kick / set to leader / leave) weren’t working properly. So we released 0.7.4.1 this week, fixing that and simultaneously updating the German and Chinese translations.

Zun already had an idea for a new change. We did have a command for changing the time of day, but it didn’t affect the rest of the world. He has been working on a new system that alters the speed of nearly all in-game systems. You can make a day pass by 10 times as fast, and colonists will actually walk and work 10 times as fast as well. It also works in the reverse direction, with a 0.1x speed being possible, resulting in extreme slow-motion. Last but not least, it enables us to easily add pausing to the game. In our internal unreleased 0.7.5 dev build, pressing escape now freezes your world.

In that dev build, numpad 1 to 5 control the speed, going from slow-motion to fast-forwarding. But this only works when “Enable developer buttons” has been toggled on and cheats have been enabled as well. For finer control, there’s also a new command: /debug setsimspeed #. “#” can be anything from 0 to infinity.

We’ve been thinking about making access to the simulation speed available in a more “official” way, but we’re not sure whether that’s a good idea. Why grow bigger and recruit 10 scientists, when you can have 1 scientist and fast-forward x10 for the same effect? We’re worried it’ll remove a core incentive of the gameplay.

Currently, monsters aren’t saved. When going back to the main menu, monsters are ‘deleted’ and will not reappear when reloading the world. This happens because otherwise they will try to do things in a half-loaded world, which leads to all kinds of problems. With our newfound ability to change the simulation speed, the monsters can be paused during loading, preventing these problems and allowing us to restore monsters when loading a world. Zun will try to implement this next week!

Slow-motion and fast-forwarding are obviously features that don’t work well in static pictures. That’s why we made a video! Disclaimer: there's some stuttering/teleporting going on because of the high sim speed (x30), it's a known issue and WIP :) Here it is:
https://youtu.be/4F-h0nAUK1g
Bedankt voor het lezen!

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We've just released a fresh update! It should be arriving at all of your PCs right this moment. It’s the most serious overhaul of the UI since the Early Access release three years ago. We’ve strived to make the UI simultaneously more intuitive, more beautiful ánd more capable. We think we’ve accomplished all of these goals simultaneously, but we’d love to receive your feedback! To view images of some of the changes without launching the game, check this blog or this blog.

Here’s a partial list of changes. The full changelog can be found in-game.

• Huge overhaul of the Colony Tab, features have moved from pop-ups to the tab itself
  
• Updated core UI elements: new lists, new buttons, new font. These appear in multiple places.
  
• Diplomacy menu has been improved significantly
  
• Trashcan: it appears when dragging items and can be used to delete them
  
• In-game savegame converter SP<>MP
  
• UI scaling, which is mostly meant for 4K support but can be useful in other circumstances as well
  
• Dynamic crosshair, which changes based on your target, and can be modded easily
  
• It’s not necessary to use F1 to disable the quickstart anymore
  
• Unity has been updated from 2018.4 to 2019.4. This slightly changed some post processing effects, and deprecated Linux 32-bit support (official system requirements demanded 64-bit since the release)
  
• Added an option to permanently toggle on the “block highlight” visual

The update contains a long list of other changes. Some are minor optimizations, some are small tweaks too tiny to mention, some are fixes for problems that only occur in specific set-ups which won’t be visible to the majority of players.

Hopefully, 0.7.4 won’t introduce any new problems - but it probably does. It has been tested, but small problems might always slip through the cracks. If you notice something out of the ordinary, please let us know! We’re ready to release a hotfix 0.7.4.1 if it’s necessary.

Heel veel plezier met 0.7.4! (It rhymes)

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Things got wonky in 4K

All mentioned changes in this blog concern the internal dev build that has not been released yet

This week's work had quite a lot of visible results, and we’re eager to share them with you. First of all, we’ve added a new menu called “interface settings”. It adds the much requested feature to be able to permanently see the blue “block highlight”, that during normal gameplay only appears when you’re removing and placing blocks. Toggling this option “on” means you’ll always see it when hovering over a block.

Apart from that, the menu also allows you to rapidly re-enable the “developer buttons”. These are the functions mapped to the F keys. They were enabled by default in 0.1.0, but too many people accidentally broke their game with them. A while ago, they were disabled and hidden behind a toggle, and that toggle has received a better place in the UI now.



A new option, enabled by default, is the adaptive crosshair. It subtly changes shape and color according to the context. It’s small and simple when the crosshair is aiming at the air or a distant block. When clicking will result in mining a block, the crosshair grows larger. When hovering over the banner, it turns red/yellow; when hovering over a colonist; orange, when hovering over a job block; blue. The results can be seen in the following image, with the size of the crosshair 400% enlarged for clarity purposes:



It’s a minor change, but it should make the game feel slightly more “tactile” and intuitive. Last but not least, there’s a UI scaling option that’s mainly meant to resolve a common issue for people with 4K monitors. Until now, the UI itself didn’t scale with resolution. Compare it to plates on a table: when you shrink the table, the plates stay the same size. That’s pretty useful to keep things legible on a small / low-res monitor, but on a 4K monitor it meant you had some tiny plates in the corners of a massive table.

We thought fixing this issue was relatively complicated, but some minor tweaks worked a lot better than expected, so we’ve now got support for UI scaling. Players can choose what they feel is comfortable, and playing in 4K resolution is a lot more viable now.


Fullscreen

While Zun has been working on issues like this, I’ve kept growing my Unity / C# / VR skills. My projects have been growing steadily more complicated - up to the point that I’m regularly breaking them in a way that can’t be fixed with some CTRL-Z’s. I’ve finally decided to learn to deal with Git. It was easier to set up than I thought, and it works very well. Git is a hugely important tool in many organizations that develop software, and it makes collaboration a lot easier and more reliable. It’s another small step in the long road of being able to contribute to Colony Survival directly, instead of merely providing textures / 3D-models / ideas :)

Bedankt voor het lezen!

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