Participate in the survey here!

This week, we've been doing a lot of thinking about the plans proposed in last week's Friday Blog. We received a lot of positive replies, and we've gotten more confident in implementing them.

But simultaneously, we've noticed how some of these features are fundamentally linked to other major changes in the game. This would mean that Colony Survival could become a significantly different game than it currently is. Instead of adding new features while not changing the core, these plans could mean that fundamental systems will be radically overhauled.

One of the most significant changes we're considering, is an overhaul to the stockpile and logistics. Currently, the stockpile operates like a 'cloud server'. Miners deep underground 'upload' their items using a nearby crate. Smelters above ground don't have to descend into the mines to gather their ores: they can just 'download' the ores using any random crate.

While this system is easy to operate and pretty intuitive, it also deprives players of a large amount of interesting challenges. Jobs can be placed without much consideration in tall, ugly skyscrapers with no impact on efficiency.

So many interesting things in real life are related to the problem of getting items and people from A to B. Ships, trains, harbors, bridges, tunnels, highways, cars, conveyor belts, elevators. The entire concept of cities is intrinsically linked to the necessity to be physically close to important places.

The “magic stockpile” in Colony Survival deprives players of all of these things. There is no necessity to consider the location of your industries. There is no benefit to building realistic supply chains, like placing your smelters next to your miners. Trading between colonies is purely UI-work, and it doesn’t matter whether there is a huge distance between the colonies or that they’re in sight of each other.

Demanding that items are ‘physically’ transported from one place to another changes all of this. The location of your jobs will have a large impact on the efficiency of your colony. Suddenly, features like (upgradeable) delivery men, trains, conveyor belts and elevators become useful. This gives us a lot of opportunities for the development of interesting new features.



But it’s not all sunshine and rainbows. It will make the game more complex, and the start of the game becomes more difficult for new players. The update will probably be incompatible with older worlds, or at least it’ll radically change their efficiency. (Older branches of the game are available for download via Steam, meaning it’s always possible to replay old worlds and old versions with a low amount of effort) Colony Survival will become a different game, and some older players will be disappointed. Is this worth it? Should we implement these big changes in Colony Survival, or should we leave the core gameplay intact and reserve these ideas for a potential sequel?

Another big change is linked to realistic logistics. When transportation of items becomes more important and challenging, it makes sense to “open up” a bigger part of the world, to allow the logistics to play out over a larger area. Currently, players are constrained to a relatively small “safe zone” in a huge open world. We’ve been thinking about ways to allow players to make use of a much larger part of the world, without worrying about safe zones and monsters. Imagine a feature that allows players to build a large “monster-portal”. When it’s activated, monsters won’t spawn “in the wild” anymore - they’ll only spawn at the portal and travel to your banner from there. You’ll still need to defeat the same amount of monsters, but you’re free to use a much larger part of the world without caring about safe zones, walls and stationing guards everywhere.

This could allow us to spread different resources around the world more. Currently, all main ores are available everywhere. But imagine having to mine gold and iron at different places, and growing wheat in a third place, and making sure there is proper transportation between all these places - with paths and bridges for travelling colonists, inns along the way to provide a sleeping place, and perhaps automated ships and harbors, perhaps trains!

We’re very excited about this idea, but simultaneously realize what a big change to “standard Colony Survival” this would be. Without the “magic stockpile” and monsters everywhere, it becomes a different game. Is this a game you’re all looking forward to? Do you want this change in this Colony Survival or is it more appropriate for a sequel?

We’d love to have your feedback. As always, we read the comments and our Discord is open for discussion, but we’d also love to have your feedback on the survey!
Bedankt voor het lezen!

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

Survival Lab REC-5, by Littlesproatie

Happy New Year! The start of the week saw the release of 0.8.1. It seems not to have caused significant issues. There was a missing button, but that was fixed in a small patch. We hope the new Job Management Menu will be very useful for all of you!

This blog showcases screenshots from Littlesproatie's Survival Lab REC-5, a survival map with a unique story. It's available on the Workshop! It requires three mods to function, developed by NACH0, Adrenalynn, Kenovis and Boneidle. These are all linked on the Workshop page for the Survival Lab and can be installed easily. Thanks to the creators for building this world and the mods, and have fun building a colony in this futuristic world!

While working on some smaller bugs and fixes, we're thinking of our next big step. What feature should we add? We're discussing a bunch of related ideas. Some have been mentioned before, others not. We'd love to have your feedback. What ideas are you most excited for?


Currently, 'colonist actions' like crafting and mining cannot take longer than ~15 seconds. This is to prevent colonists getting stuck at their workplace while night falls and monsters are approaching. But this also means no ore can take longer to mine and no item can take longer to craft. This is of course pretty silly and unrealistic, and it leads to workarounds like items having a bunch of costly requirements (lots of copper nails and iron rivets, for example). We hope to add a feature that makes it possible to "subdivide" item crafting: imagine a matchlock gun taking 10 cycles of 15 seconds to craft.

When this has been added, we can immediately alter crafting recipes to make more sense and be less confusing. It also allows us to add new "Colony Points Upgrade Paths", reducing the crafting time of these items. Last but not least, it makes it more worthwhile to add industrial content, with complex machines that can radically speed up your crafting.




Colony Points are still a new feature and could use some more flesh on their bones. We're thinking about for example different tiers of beds that produce a nightly boost to your point income, and the upgrades to crafting efficiency mentioned above.


A long held dream of us, we'd love to add a new era to the game, with more modern tech. Players should be able to process oil and generate electricity. Perhaps there'll even be nuclear energy and primitive computers. We're thinking about the best way to implement this: there should be some new mechanics that allow players to make their own designs, with various benefits for different configurations. Simultaneously, these mechanics shouldn't be too difficult too understand.


Currently, there's a "magical stockpile" that immediately "transports" items from one crate to another. We could make it so that items have to be physically moved from place A to place B. This will force players to rethink the design of their colonies, and could allow for new features like 'delivery colonists', conveyor belts and 'item-elevators'. Perhaps the current content will still use the 'magical stockpile', with new industrial content requiring physical transport. We're still debating the best solution!




We lack a decent, in-game tutorial. We'd love to add a system that introduces players to all features, step by step. This should start with small steps like "recruit 4 berry gatherers", and end with missions like "start a colony in the Far East". These missions could have rewards like Colony Points, or be required for specific unlocks. Although the drawback is that this makes the system very essential, and perhaps it should be optional, so more experienced players can disable it. Perhaps there are "repeating missions", like "produce 1000 meals", "survive 10 nights" or "defeat 500 monsters".


There are only a handful of guards and monster types in-game, at the moment. We'd love to add new ones. These could be tied to for example the industrial era. We're also thinking of having special monster waves, that have to be manually activated by the player. These monster waves should be extra difficult, and perhaps have their own special monster types and unique defense mechanics. They should give great rewards to those who manage to defeat them.


Last but not least, but probably least likely of all features mentioned here, are parallel worlds. Imagine a special teleporter at the end of the industrial era, that consumes huge amounts of energy to teleport you to a different world. These other worlds could have wildly different terrain generation, atmospheres or challenges. Your primary colony is required to produce the prerequisites to survive in or support the other worlds. Start a colony on Mars, a radioactive hellhole or a floating paradise!

All of the features mentioned above are rough ideas, not specific plans for 2021. Let us know which one are your favorites and why! If you want to improve an idea, or if you think you've got a better plan, let us know! We read all comments under the blogs, and if you want an active discussion, Discord is the best place. We're online there a lot of the time.

Gelukkig Nieuwjaar :)

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

Update 0.8.1 is now live on Steam! It's main new feature is the Job Management Menu. It provides an overview of all current jobs, and allows players to remotely disable and enable them without physically removing the job. This is useful in general, but vital when you've lost a large amount of colonists and want to recover your colony. To help players deal with a shortage of colonists, there's the Set Balanced button, which intelligently distributes your colonists across all available jobs.

Apart from the new feature, there's a long list of bug fixes and small tweaks. The "garbage can" has moved from the hotbar to just below the stockpile, to prevent accidental trashing of items. Your health is now properly saved when health upgrades have been unlocked and you exit the game. Colonists don't 'refund' their 'job tool' to the stockpile anymore when they die. See the in-game changelog for more info.

Have fun with the update, and let us know when things work and don't work as you hoped! For pressing bug fixes, Discord and the comments under this blog are the best place.

Veel plezier :)

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

This week has been fully focused on bug fixes and other small issues that players have noticed in 0.8.0. In the past, players have complained about Siege Mode activating when they left their colony to explore the world. This happened pretty randomly, and we weren't able to consistently reproduce the bug. This week, we received a savegame where the issue did happen reliably! We expect this will help us fix the problem.

Update 0.8.1 will contain these bug fixes, and the Job Management Menu. We hope to be able to release the update on Monday!


Halfway last year, July 2019, we released 0.7.0, the biggest overhaul and content update the game had ever seen. It introduced many new features and menus that needed adjustment and improvement. We learned a lot from watching your experiences and hearing your feedback, so thanks a lot for that!

Many updates were released to help finetune and improve 0.7.0. At the end of 2019, 0.7.1 added Steam Workshop support. In February 2020, we released 0.7.2, which contained a big overhaul to the way shadows were calculated and torch lights were rendered. A couple of months later, in May, 0.7.3 added the statistics menu.

August saw the release of 0.7.4, which changed a large part of the UI. Lots of menus were “work-in-progress” and pretty ugly, and 0.7.4 tried to improve that significantly. It also added new functionality, like support for UI scaling, the ability to trash items in the stockpile, and the option to convert worlds from SP to MP and back.

0.7.5 was released in October, and it updated how colonists choose their goals and find their paths. The new compass item hopefully does the same for players. Last but not least, we released 0.8.0 at the end of November, which replaces the old Happiness feature with Colony Points! This update was just in time for the Jingle Jam, where the Yogscast played Colony Survival for a large audience. The bundle earned millions for charity and brought a lot of new players into the game.

This is just a short summary of the biggest changes made this year. For a full list of all changes, see the in-game changelog!

Despite all the problems in the ‘general’ world this year, it has been a good year for Colony Survival. We’ve fixed things we wanted to fix, we’ve added features we’re excited about, new players have joined the community, long time players have stuck around, and we’re looking forward to adding new content in 2021 (and we’re even making serious plans for the years after 2021!).

Your participation has been essential in that process. Your feedback, your purchase, your recommendations to friends, your participation in the community - all of it has been immensely valuable. We’re very grateful, so thanks a million for making all of this possible! We wish you a very merry Christmas, and an amazing 2021.




We live in the Netherlands. For our entire lives, this has been a stable and tranquil place. That changed in 2020. In January, we saw weird videos emerging from China. Patients on the streets? Apartments being welded shut? It was worrisome, but we expected the problem to stay contained in the region. In February, we got anxious when the virus started spreading west. First Iran, then Italy. Would it reach the Netherlands - and then, what?

In March, things quickly escalated from the first handful of patients, to overwhelmed hospitals and a lockdown. We had never experienced something like this, and we were very worried. But Spring quickly arrived, and the amount of cases dwindled again.

But as Summer ended and the temperatures dropped, the amount of cases rose again. Thousands of people have died, normal life reached a standstill and the hospitality industry has been closed for months now. We’ve failed to contain the virus, and now suffer the consequences. It’s a frustrating situation, and it leads to difficult personal choices.

It also leads to a lot of philosophizing related to the game. Colony Survival is a “society simulation” - players build their own little city or kingdom. They’ve got to make choices to keep their colony safe and productive. The current crisis gives valuable insights into the way societies try to manage that, and how some succeed and others fail. We haven’t found specific ways to implement these insights, but I’m sure they’ll influence future developments (indirectly, we’re not planning to add literal pandemics as a feature).


We’ve also noticed how playing Colony Survival is in some ways the inverse experience of 2020. Unlike games like Rimworld and Dwarf Fortress, we don’t have “random” events disturbing your colony. Mistakes can cause a chaotic cascade of failures, but the core of the game is pretty stable and predictable. So while 2020 feels like a messy chaos that you don't have any control over, your colony in CS is a predictable place where you’ve got full power.

Some players have asked for more ‘chaos’ in Colony Survival - unexpected events that require quick and correct responses. That’s certainly a valid and sensible request, and a potential direction in which to develop. But we’re currently convinced that it’s best to “stay the course”: the ‘stability’ of your colony is an essential part of the ‘soul’ of the game, a core reason why many players enjoy it. Of course, this doesn't mean the game shouldn't be challenging. With the upcoming Job Management Menu, it's easier to recover from a loss of colonists - giving us more "room" to disrupt your colony in that way. We're also thinking about "voluntary chaos", like monster waves that have do be deliberately summoned by the player.

Do you recognize this feeling and agree with us? Or are we mistaken? Let us know!


Last but not least, we’ve both been reading the Dune book series this year, and we’re enjoying them immensely. An impressive thing about the books, is the relatedness of everything. On one hand, the book is concerned with huge things, like the ecology of entire planets, genetic lines over hundreds of years, religious reorganizations and the way governments are structured. On the other hand, the book also focuses on little details, from forehead wrinkles and the way certain words are intoned to the effects of tiny plants and animals. The book manages to connect all of these to the central plot.

We would love to move in that direction. The way in which everything in Dune interacts with and affects each other, how the availability of resources shapes society and individual humans, and vice versa - it sounds like the perfect game. On the other hand, directly transferring these ideas to implementable features is hard. Once again, we don’t know yet how it will influence future developments, but we’re sure it’ll have an impact.

Thanks for reading that entire wall of text! :D Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

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

Last week, we asked you what it was like to play 0.8.0. We got a massive number of responses and they're all very useful. Thanks a lot! Of course, feedback is always welcome, so feel free to respond with a description of your experience in the comments of this blog as well.

The Jingle Jam ended this week. It was a massive success. The event raised nearly three million dollars for charity! We're glad we were part of the bundle.

We've continued work on the job management menu. It now has sliders that allow you to easily and remotely disable specific job types! For example, if you've got 8 flax farmers and need only 4, you can quickly disable half of them. Here's what it looks like in our internal dev build:



We've also been thinking about the next updates. Last week, we talked about "monster waves", special assaults that can be manually triggered by the player. Lots of you responded enthusiastically, which was great to see! But.... we're considering to prioritize something else first.

Replacing the Happiness System with Colony Points made the game more intuitive and less complex, but for some, it has made the game too straightforward and simple. Lots of job blocks are simple cubes without any requirements, that can just be placed anywhere.

We're thinking of adding more complexity here. Since 0.7.0 some jobs require access to water, like the fisherman and the water gatherer . This has often motivated me to dig some kind of "sewer" / canal to my colony. Jobs like that are more interesting and satisfying than "default job blocks".

When we released Colony Survival, all jobs were very primitive and the game could have taken place in the Viking era, around 800AD. Later, we moved "forward in time", adding later inventions like the crossbow, the musket and the printing press. This changes the "game era" at the end to roughly 1500AD. We've mentioned it before, even a long time ago, but we're still interested in moving the "end date" of the game to a more recent era, somewhere in between 1800 and 1950.

This could coincide nicely with more complex game mechanics. Imagine blocks that need to be connected to an electricity grid, or to pipelines with water, steam or oil. Hopefully, we can turn these new machines into "multi-block job-blocks" - they should be more complex than simple 1x1x1 cubes.

To make these new machines useful, we want to make it so that items can have longer crafting times. Currently, every item has a maximum crafting time of 15 seconds. Otherwise, workers can get "stuck" at their jobs too long around sunset, causing them to be attacked by monsters. We hope we can solve this problem by allowing workers to "store their progress". Imagine a musket that takes 300 seconds to craft, but a worker can "drop" it any time with their crafting progress saved at for example 15% (or 37%, if they manage to get that far).

There's a serious chance that one of the next updates introduces the "longer crafting times" system, combined with a big overhaul of lots of jobs, items and recipes. Currently, the game contains lots of "workarounds" to make some items take more crafting time than others. For example, silk requires a lot of silkthreads. If we can just make silk itself take longer to craft, intermediate steps like silkthreads could be removed from the game.

When that's done, we can work on more complex production mechanics that allow players to build industrial machines to craft complex items more quickly. Of course, we're not merely going to lengthen the crafting times of current items - we want to add a lot of new ones! And when some items take longer to craft, it's also worthwhile to add a Colony-Points-upgrade for the production speed of different types of jobs.

The monster waves ideas has not been discarded, but perhaps it's more suitable for development after the new production mechanics. The industrial era allows us to add new weapons, and the longer crafting times are also useful for special ammo.

We'd love to know how you feel about this, so feel free to respond here on our Discord!

Bedankt voor het lezen :)

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

0.8.0 has been released two weeks ago. Many of you have tried it, and we've received a lot of enthusiastic replies. We're very grateful for them! We weren't completely certain that replacing the Happiness System with Colony Points was a good move, but it seems to have turned out well.

Despite that, we don't know exactly what your experience is like. We've tried it ourselves, and because we know exactly how the feature works, we rushed through the content pretty quickly. For us, it was relatively easy to gain large amounts of Colony Points. On the other hand: we've watched the Yogscast play it, and it took them quite long before they really started using the new system. Which makes a lot of sense: they didn't design the system! We've also received reports from people who say that it takes them a lot longer to set up their colony now, and that they find it hard to earn enough Colony Points.

So we'd love to receive more detailed reports. Is the game harder/slower than it was in 0.7.0? Is it difficult to figure out the new systems? And how does the difficulty feel at different "colonist levels": is it hard to get from 0 to 50 but easy to go from 100 to 150, or vice versa? Please let us know, here in the comments, or on Discord!


As explained last week, we're working on a Job Management Menu. This should make it possible to temporarily disable jobs, and to make sure new recruits take the right jobs. This is helpful in general, but crucial when your colony fails and lose a lot of colonists, resulting in lots of empty jobs.

Our internal dev-build now has a new prototype-menu that tests new features and offers new possibilities. It's possible to disable all jobs with one click. Another button automatically re-enables jobs and properly balances different jobs while taking into account how many colonists you have - to make sure you've got some wheat farmers and some bakers, instead of only bakers, for example.

We're planning to add sliders to this menu that allow players to manually reduce the amount of 'open job slots' per job type. Imagine you've got 8 flax farmers and a surplus of flax: you could decide to temporarily 'fire' 4 flax farmers, assigning them to different jobs, while the rest keeps working.



Last but not least, once again we're thinking "one update ahead". What will we do after 0.8.1 and the Job Management Menu? One interesting idea is "Special Monster Waves". Imagine a menu with a list of special wave attacks. A specific amount of strong, special monsters attacks your colony. Defeating such a wave unlocks special rewards. Perhaps the reward is 'Monster Points', or maybe it's required to defeat such waves before you can do specific upgrades.

The monsters could have special traits. Think of boss monsters with thousands of HP, or monsters with armor that require lots of damage or specific weapon types to break them. There could be new types of guards that do fire, poison or area of effect damage.

There are a lot of dilemmas to consider. Do the new monster types also appears in regular nights, outside of the "Special Monster Waves"? Do guards automatically choose the right ammo and the right strategy, or does the player have to manually decide how the special monsters are fought? If everything happens automatically, it might not be very interesting and engaging. On the other hand, if players have to do manual adjustments and assignments, and the special monsters appear every night, this might get tedious and repetitive very quickly.

We're unsure how to approach this, and your suggestions are welcome!

Bedankt voor het lezen :D

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

Last week, we released the new update! In general, it seems to have received a positive response. Old worlds required some adjustments but were compatible, there were no serious bugs and a large majority seems to feel like the Points System is an improvement compared to the old Happiness System.

Of course, there were minor problems. So we quickly released 0.8.0.1. Colonists got stuck when they couldn't find food on their grocery visit, while their hunger wasn't critical yet. This has been fixed. The "Upgrades" tab received the more fitting name "Colony Points". The Colony Points counter in the top-right of the screen is formatted #/#, to indicate current points / current points capacity. This made the "/" in the ammo counter confusing, so the dividing symbol between different ammo types is now a "-".

A couple of days later, we released 0.8.0.2 to fix some other minor issues. For example, the stockpile still had a "Calories" filter button, and this has been updated to "Meals". The "woodcoating" item was still around but was not used anymore, and it has been removed. Clicking on a grocery store didn't properly open the Colony Points tab - now it does.

Another important event this week was the start of the Jingle Jam! Colony Survival is part of the bundle, and the Yogscast has been playing the game for many hours last Wednesday. They seem to have enjoyed themselves, but there was one noticeable issue. Someone's colony failed a bit and lost a lot of colonists. Recovering was relatively hard, because there were a lot of empty jobs and it was hard to sent new recruits to the right ones.

The same issue has occured frequently for other players, and we're resolved to fix this. We're working on a "Job Priority Menu" that should give players more control over jobs, making it possible to temporarily 'disable' unimportant ones so that new colonists automatically take the important jobs. Developing this shouldn't take too much time, and the feature will be released in 0.8.1!

Bedankt voor het lezen :D

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

Colony Survival is part of the Jingle Jam 2020 Bundle! The Jingle Jam is organized by the Yogscast, who have played lots of Colony Survival since the very beginning. The proceeds will be donated to charity, with some examples being The Mental Health Foundation, The Open Bionics Foundations and War Child UK.

Tomorrow, Colony Survival should be part of multiple streams! We're looking forward to seeing them play 0.8.0. Watch their main channel here, and check their schedule below:



Have fun!

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

The new update is now live on Steam! If Steam doesn't update automatically, use "verify integrity of game cache" to force it download the update.

Update 0.8.0 contains fundamental new systems that will change the way you play. The Happiness System has been replaced by Colony Points. They are earned by distributing Meals and Luxury Items. Instead of having to fiddle around with sliders, this happens automatically now. The confusing "calories" sliders is also gone now. Snacks like cake and chocolate have lost their food value, and the colonists require one proper meal per day.

The old system strongly disincentivized population growth. Happiness Items provided a set amount of Happiness if every colonist received a certain amount of items, regardless of the amount of colonists in the colony. This meant that bigger colonies needed to produce more items to gain the same amount of Happiness. Simultaneously, recruiting more colonists caused Unhappiness due to overpopulation. This made earning Happiness very difficult and counter-intuitive.

Colony Points should do the opposite: they should reward growth. Recruiting more colonists makes it easier to produce and distribute lots of Meals & Happiness Items, resulting in many more Colony Points. These Points can be spent on a range of upgrades. These upgrades have many levels, with rapidly escalating costs. Colony Points are also required for certain unlocks in the tech tree.

These core changes also cause a range of smaller changes. The tech tree has been overhauled. Some unlocks have been merged, others have new requirements. Certain minor items, like the separate coating item required for coating planks, and "fishmeal", have been removed. Other items have been rebalanced. The F1-Quickstart-Menu has been updated, and some achievements related to food, happiness and the tech tree have been changed or removed as well. For full details, check the in-game changelog.

Now that the game has new core systems, it has become easier to add new content. We're planning to add new sources of Colony Points, and new ways to spend them. And of course, we'll be listening to your feedback! Tell us what works and what doesn't, and we'll use that to improve the game in future updates.

Heel veel plezier in 0.8.0 :D

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

The release of the next update, 0.8.0, is scheduled for next Friday! We've done a lot of testing, fixing and recalibrating this week. The new Colony Points system isn't perfect yet, but it should be better, more rewarding, more intuitive and more accessible than the current Happiness/Calories system.

Despite that, last week's blog received a fair amount of criticism. We want to take a moment to respond to these concerns.

"The new system is less realistic"

Agreed! It's less 'grounded', it's more game-like. We understand that it seems less appealing to 'grind points' instead of satisfying the concerns of your colonists. But the fact that it's a bit less realistic and more game-like should make it easier for players to understand and use.

We understand the appeal of the old happiness system - otherwise, we would've never taken the effort to develop and implement it. But in practice, it has never lived up to our expectations. It's not intuitive because it runs on some very strange logic (items generate a set amount of happiness regardless of your amount of colonists, and thus regardless of how many items you've got to produce). It punishes people for growing their colony and recruiting more colonists. It's hard to understand for many players, especially the "Calories-Slider". This is probably a large cause of the reason why only a small minority of all players actually reach the "end of content".

We've tried to make the system more intuitive, but we've finally decided to fix the root cause (the wonky system itself) instead of addressing the symptoms. We understand that the new system might not sound as appealing, but we believe the reworked incentives work a lot better in-game. The system is still pretty bare-bones, but we're planning to make it even better in the near future, both more satisfying to use and with more exciting rewards.

0.8.0 isn't merely an addition, it's a fundamental change, and that means that we're also losing some of the benefits of the older systems. We've tried to avoid that as much as possible, but we feel that the benefits of the new system are big enough to justify it.

"Why are you changing these systems instead of adding new content?"

A handful of blogs ago, we released the results of our survey. They indicated that while most players would like to see some new content, their actual highest priority is better progression systems, a more engaging way to 'hook' the player. We were already suspecting that (because most players don't reach the earlier mentioned end of content), and are now working to improve this.

Another problem is the fact that the old Happiness system was not a stable foundation to work from. It worked in a highly specific way, and in itself, it was already too complex for a sizeable part of the community. Lots of players simply disabled it. The new system has been developed with these lessons and the future in mind. It should be easier to integrate new subsystems in it, like a system with different levels of beds and daily rewards for providing your colonists with better beds.

We understand that some players (especially those who have learned to work with the current happiness system) may feel like our priorities are misguided. Don't be too worried: we're planning to start working on actual content again relatively soon :)

We're really looking forward to seeing your reactions to 0.8.0, and we're planning to enhance and extend the new systems a lot further based on your experiences. We hope 0.8.0 will be the stable foundation that was lacking in 0.7.0, and are hoping to build a lot of exciting features on that new foundation. If you've still got concerns, questions, or feedback, please respond in the comments or on Discord!

Bedankt voor het lezen :D

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