For some weeks now, we’ve been seriously considering implementing realistic logistics. We’ve been sharing the progress in our plans. This week, the team agreed on some basics, but we simultaneously discovered the full implications go a lot deeper.


In last week’s blog, we mainly talked about logistics between colonies, with long paths marked by milestones and shipping routes. I assumed we also wanted realistic transport inside each colony, but Zun suggested that we could skip that. Current logistics could keep applying to “intra-colony-logistics”. This would make the start of the game easier for new players, and would in general just save a lot of hassle and performance. Transport in between colonies seems to be the more interesting challenge anyway.

But… the plans also involve making it easier to set up new colonies. We’re considering focusing the monster threat in one spot, making the rest of the world monster-free. That would make it a lot easier to “expand wide”, to build many colonies that are each relatively spread out (without the need to hide everything behind walls and moats). That contradicts the plan to only have realistic logistics between colonies.

A potential way out could be a wholly different approach to what constitutes a “colony”. Perhaps banners become a lot less important, and you just have Outposts, with smaller ranges than the current maximum banner range. In the “Outpost Range” logistics would be “magical” like they currently are in a colony, but in between Outposts, you’ve got to do realistic transport. This would be a pretty massive overhaul to the gameplay though! We’re very careful about making such big steps.


While designing the “Guilders Plan” mentioned in the previous blogs, I was thinking about realistic societies. Societies where ultimately, most goods are used by individual consumers with relatively unstable, fluctuating needs. These consumers live spread out through the entire country and demand all kinds of different products that are produced in wildly different locations. One month a household orders a washing machine, the next month it needs a bicycle, and another month it buys a new laptop.

Do we want that in Colony Survival? Should the endgame look like a continent filled with many colonies, all relatively equal in size and importance, each one importing and exporting many goods to and from all other colonies? An alternative could be a hierarchy like the one in “The Hunger Games”: one rich and advanced Capitol, supplied by impoverished districts focused on specific industries like textiles and lumber. This would radically simplify the logistics system! Such a situation could do without Guilders and complex automated systems. Items flow from the outposts to the capital. There could be a “backflow” of tools and some other bare necessities, but that would be it.



This is going to be a huge update with consequences for all major systems. Production chains will change, the monster threat will change, the entire goal of the game will shift. There are plenty of good reasons to do so: we’re seeing a lot of opportunity for exciting new gameplay. But dealing with all edge cases, crossing all the t’s and dotting the i’s, is difficult. Scope creep is real. So once again, we’re asking for your input! How important is realistic logistics inside colonies, versus logistics between colonies? Would you prefer a complex network of interdependent colonies which requires automated systems to keep the balance, or do you think a hierarchical model with a capital supplied by outposts results in better gameplay? Let us know in the comments or on Discord!

Bedankt voor het lezen :D

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

Last week, we attempted to explain our plans to add some kind of economic system to Colony Survival. These ideas are connected to many of our other plans for the next big update, and related to frustrations about current systems. I skipped a large part of the context and went straight for a complex explanation with a lot of numbers and imaginary examples. Lots of people found this to be very confusing, for good reasons! Today, I'll try to explain our plans in a more sensible way.

Let's start by looking at an example of a randomly generated world in current Colony Survival. You spawn in the center of the world. Your colony inhabits only a very small portion of the entire spawn region, and all resources from that region can be found and grown in that very small portion. All ores spawn everywhere, and all "spawn crops" can be grown anywhere in the spawn region. There's no important reason to set up a second outpost in the spawn region.

At the very end of the game, players get the ability to start a second colony. You're meant to traverse the entire spawn region, and then you've got to cross an "inhabitable region": an ocean, a desert or a steppe. When you succesfully do that, you enter a new region with unique crops and some extra ores, for end-game luxury items. Again, one colony will gain access to all of these unique resources in that region.

Resources can be traded between colonies. This happens purely via an interface menu, and is not connected to anything you've actually got to build in-game.



We loved the fundamental ideas behind this plan, but we're not very happy with the execution. After staying in one place for nearly the full game, players are suddenly expected to travel through multiple kilometers of empty landscape until they cross an arbitrary line. It's asking a lot, while the rewards aren't worth it for many players.

So, we're thinking of a big change. We'd love to build a new world, where resources are scattered through the map and each location has unique benefits and drawbacks. The current world already renders a "temperature" and a "humidity" for each chunk of the map, and combined with something like "fertility", we could realistically make certain parts of the map more suitable for some crops and less suitable for others. Farming in the perfect spot yields large harvests; building in a less perfect spot results in diminished harvests. Some crops would love high temperatures while others are more suited for lower temperatures, etcetera.

Basic ores would still be found easily, while more "advanced" ores like iron, coal and gold would only be available in certain locations, which could be found with for example the current compass tool. Instead of walking many kilometers to cross an arbitrary line, players will actually have to scout the terrain and make an intelligent decision about the placement of their colonies.

Your network of colonies has to be connected via actual physical paths. These could be roads, bridges and tunnels marked by milestones, or waterways marked by buoys. Later on, we could even get rails with trains/minecarts. The cost of trading between colonies will be determined by the length and efficiency of these connections.


Map made with Inkarnate

This system should offer a more gradual introduction to multiple colonies, make setting up these colonies more fun, and make the rewards for doing so larger. To prevent players from having to set up the same defenses against monsters again and again, we want to implement a way to redirect most or all of the monster threat to one specific place, like a well-defended capital or a special castle.

Now, last week we tried to explain a system of "Guilders" which was considered confusing by many. Here's where they become relevant. The way your colonists spend their working time has changed throughout the updates, but the amount of seconds they can work in a day hasn't. Let's say there's 300 "labor seconds" per colonist in one day. On average, per update, they'll be spend roughly like this:



In 0.1.0, every colonist needed food and attracted monsters, resulting in the necessity to craft ammo to fight these monsters. So for every 10 colonists, you need a majority of them to craft food and fight monsters just to sustain these 10 colonists. A small proportion of time is spend on "Perma-Crafting": crafting items that are perpetually useful, like workbenches and bows. The rest of the "labor time" can be spend as players wish.

In 0.4.0, a bunch of science bags were needed to make progress, demanding a share of labor time and giving purpose to "extra" colonists. In 0.7.0, things were made rather difficult with the introduction of happiness. Now colonists needed a bunch of special items to stay happy. If you failed to produce them, the resulting unhappiness would hamstring your colony. This was rather punishing, and in 0.8.0 we switched to the system of "Colony Points", retaining a lot of benefits from the happiness system while removing the large punishment.

For the next big update, we want to give job blocks the ability to have longer crafting times for specific recipes. For example, crafting a matchlock gun should be able to cost for example 150 seconds, instead of 15. These extended crafting times should be reserved for the "perpetual upgrades". In return, the daily requirements to keep your colonists alive, food and ammo, should become a bit "cheaper" in terms of labor time. Their cost should be reduced even further to compensate for the addition of "delivery time", now that items will have to be physically delivered from one place to another.

In historical times, before trucks and trains, delivering bulk goods was difficult and costly. Your wheat and firewood probably didn't travel very far to get to your home. But simultaneously, valuable and 'transportable' items like golden adornments, silver coins, silk and spices did get traded between distant places. In the Bronze Age, civilizations already set up far-ranging trade networks for things like tin and charcoal. Ötzi's axe was made from copper mined hundreds of miles south from where he lived.

Trade in Colony Survival should be relatively realistic, and should thus be based on similar considerations. Items should have default values, based on something like "expected labor time" and "expected utility". The delivery costs should be based on the length of the path and the weight of the item. Ötzi's axe has a high value and a relatively low weight, so even in Bronze Age circumstances it makes sense to trade it over a distance of hundreds of miles. But a low value, high weight item like wheat (one year of copper axes is still one axe; one year of wheat is a lot of wheat) won't be transported similar distances, not for the average man at least.

Bronze Age trade networks weren't set up by one Supreme Emperor who determined where every single item should go. Thousands of merchants existed, who throughout the centuries learned the best ways to deliver valuable items to the right consumers. So we believe the trade networks in Colony Survival shouldn't be based on a single players intuiting all the right choices either. Players should be helped by performing some basic calculations for them: "how valuable would it be to have item X here" and "how costly would it be to deliver item X here". If the delivery makes sense, it should happen, and otherwise it shouldn't. By default, a day's worth of food shouldn't cost two days worth of delivery time, that's not viable. To represent these values to players, it would be best to pick one way of representing it. This could be "Guilders". These would be closely connected to crafting time. Items that take a long time to craft are often more valuable than items that can be easily made.

• "Coppercolony" has produced a Copper Axe for 10 Guilders. Delivering it to "Craftercolony" costs 20 Guilders. It would be worth 50 Guilders there. Deliver it!
  
• "Farmcolony" has produced wheat for 3 Guilders. Delivering it to "Distant Exotic Colony" costs 50 Guilders. It would be worth 5 Guilders there. Don't do it!

If you're determined to make "unprofitable" deliveries happen, you could manually raise the price of the desired item. A better way would be to improve your logistics though, for example by digging a canal and creating a trade route for ships.

The Guilders aren't meant to create another level of complexity that has to be navigated by players. They are meant to take an intended level of complexity (realistic trade, with some possible deliveries being worthwhile and valuable but lots of other possible deliveries being a complete waste of colonist's scarce labor time) and to summarize that large set of data (production costs, delivery costs, ingredient value, end product value) and make it quickly and easily available for players, so they can more easily understand their colonies and make better choices.

There are loads of other things I'd love to say about 0.9.0, but this is already relatively complex. We hope we've explained ourselves better now. We'd love to know whether this is clearer, and what you think of these ideas. Let us know in the comments or on Discord!

Bedankt voor het lezen :D

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

We’re still working on the details of implementing ‘realistic logistics’. As explained in last week’s blog, I’ve been testing Kingdoms and Castles. When bigger population sizes and larger distances came into play, it became harder to understand and steer the production process. A handful of precise questions regularly appeared in my mind:

• Do my workers waste a large part of their working time walking from their homes to their jobs and back?
  
• Do my workers waste a lot of time idling at their job, because the required resources aren’t available?
  
• Do my workers waste a lot of energy hauling low-value resources from one side of the map to the other, while these resources could have better been produced or processed locally?

In essence, these are all questions of efficiency. And that’s kind of the point. With the introduction of realistic logistics, building an efficient, sensible layout for your colony becomes a lot more important. This should become a fun and engaging challenge, without being frustrating and tedious.

While the automatic transport system in Kingdoms and Castles is very fun, it becomes more unwieldy in the later stages. It still works relatively well in that game, but the planned logistics in CS will involve larger distances and more complex production chains, without the benefits of a clear top-down view. I was deeply concerned that similar automatic systems would become irritating and opaque in CS.

So I was trying to think of a system that would work well in our game. A clear, consistent system that would work for small and large colonies, on both small and long distances. One that would properly handle low-value and high-value items. Suddenly, I had an answer. Value! Money? Worth. Currency. Prices. Something in that direction. All the questions above are questions of value: is crafting time and transport time well spent?


A “Philippus goudgulden” from Dordrecht, source

Let’s describe an example. Imagine we’ve got “Guilders”, coincidentally the pre-Euro Dutch currency with medieval origins. Let’s say the average colonist works 300 seconds in a day and earns 30 Guilders with that labor. In this hypothetical example, a baker only needs wheat to bake bread. This costs the baker 20 seconds, which would translate to 2 Guilders of labor costs.

The baker is situated next to stockpile Food Corner. Wheat is available from three stockpiles. Ten pieces of wheat are carried by one deliverer.

• Stockpile Next To The Walls: 30 seconds of delivery time, and the wheat itself costs 5 Guilder.
  
• Stockpile Seaside: 150 seconds of delivery time, wheat costs 3 Guilder.
  
• Stockpile Very Fertile: 1000 seconds of delivery time, wheat costs 1 Guilder.

I've just written this example and have no ideas which stockpile is most cost-efficient, but some simple math should help us solve this problem.

• Next To The Walls: 30 seconds of delivery time for 10 wheat = 3 seconds per wheat = 0.3 Guilders of delivery cost (10 seconds of labor for 1 Guilder) = 0.3 Guilder delivery cost + 5 Guilder wheat cost = 5.3 Guilder total cost
  
• Seaside: 1.5 Guilder delivery cost + 3 Guilder wheat cost = 4.5 Guilder total cost
  
• Very Fertile: 10 Guilder + 1 Guilder = 11 Guilder total cost.

It seems obvious that stockpile Seaside is the most optimal choice. But we’ve haven’t looked at the full picture yet. You, the player, could hand out “contracts”. Imagine you’d pay 7.5 Guilder for one bread. With Seaside wheat (4.5 Guilder) plus the costs of the time of the baker (2 Guilder), the colony would have 6.5 Guilder costs for 7.5 Guilder worth of bread. One Guilder of “profit” for every bread!

But with Next To The Walls wheat, the cost increases to 7.3 Guilder, removing nearly all profits. Last and least, with Very Fertile wheat, there isn’t even a profit: 13 Guilder of costs for every bread.

Next To The Walls wheat should only be used as a last resort, and it doesn’t make any sense to haul Very Fertile wheat across the map. Perhaps making bread at all doesn’t make a lot of sense: what if in a similar timespan, Luxury Meals can be made, worth 20 Guilder for only 5 Guilders of cost? 15 Guilders of profit makes 1 Guilder of profit look a lot less attractive.

On the other hand, the results could be easily changed by some actions from the player. The “contract” for bread could be upped to 15 Guilders per bread, suddenly making even the Very Fertile wheat profitable. Raising the price of a contract would simultaneously raise the price of that product when it's used as an ingredient by colonists. This explains the differences in the price for wheat between the stockpiles from the example.

The player could also improve the transport route from stockpile Very Fertile to stockpile Food Corner, with roads and bridges, a shipping route or rails. If this reduces the transport costs far enough, Very Fertile wheat would become the optimal choice.



The idea isn’t to force players to do all of these calculations. The costs should relate to sensible, in-game things. Everybody understands that placing smelters who need ores close to miners of these ores, reduces the delivery costs of these ores. It makes sense that delivering heavy items is more expensive than delivering small, light items.

The colonists themselves should take the value of the products they are crafting, and the costs of ingredients and delivery, into account when making their choices. This will automatically focus them on doing efficient things, and will stop them from dragging resources across the map without serious benefits. The “Guilder-value” of your actions should be clearly communicated to players, without making managing a spreadsheet the core of your activities.

We hope we can accomplish this, and love to have your opinion and input! To test our ideas, Zun has been building a simple 2D simulation. Last week, I asked whether you wanted to see some footage of the simulation, and there was definitely some interest. I made two short GIFs to showcase its features:
A steady network in action
Setting up a network

Bedankt voor het lezen :D

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

Last week, we've shared the results of our survey in regards to implementing realistic logistics. The response was overwhelmingly positive! We’ve also read all the comments on the blogs, and the discussions on our Discord server. There are some opponents, there is some hesitation, but the general mood seems to be one of excitement! We’re very seriously considering implementing realistic logistics.

While the concept allows for a lot of extra features, it’s not without its issues. Making the system completely automatic means you’ve got little control over where items go. Making the system completely manual will be very tedious, and difficult for newcomers. It’ll have to be a mix of automation and manual input, but making this system fun and intuitive to use is quite the challenge.

There are many different kinds of logistics the system has to facilitate. The easy cases to solve are small colonies with clear ‘directions’. Miners produce ores which have to go towards the smelters. Farmers produce crops which have to go towards bakers and cooks.

But this quickly becomes more complicated. Smelters, bakers and cooks all need firewood. What if they’re not all in the same location? What if one group consumes much more firewood than the others?

How about jobs, like the workbench, that create a lot of items with loads of different ingredients? And how do we handle long distance trade? Is there one system for item transport, or are there different systems for logistics within a colony versus logistics between colonies?

Some things we’re strongly considering to combine with realistic logistics are:


Our current (0.8.1, before realistic logistics) design idea is different useful areas, separated by “useless” terrain.

New World --- Ocean --- “Default Terrain / Spawn” --- Steppe --- Far East

The idea is to start a relatively self-sufficient colony in each unique area, and use it to get all the crops, jobs and ores that are unique to that area.

With the realistic logistics, we’re thinking of a wholly different system. Ores, and other useful things like fertile land (with hopefully a sensible system that makes different pieces of land optimal for different crops), should be spread throughout the world - but not all in the same location. Perhaps your main colony is near a source of fertile land and iron. You’ve got a fishing outpost on the shore, and a mining outpost in the mountains to gather gold and coal. Deep in the woods, you’ve got a small colony that gathers wood and saltpeter.

Instead of the current “magic”, completely UI-based trading, trade should involve physical connections between the colonies. It would be good if you could build actual roads that speed up the colonist walking speed. To indicate trade routes, you could need to build milestones next to the road. For shipping routes, there would be buoys. There would be a primitive map that indicates the location of colonies, major stockpiles and the trade routes between them.


Currently, lots of items require specific and detailed ingredients. Bows need bow strings, there aren’t merely iron ingots but also wrought iron and iron rivets, lots of things require not merely copper but also copper nails and/or copper tools, etcetera, etcetera. Because of current technical limitations, we can’t let item crafting take more than 15 seconds, so we used these ingredients to allow us to let certain items take a more sensible amount of crafting time.

We intend to remove these technical limitations, and that could also allow us to remove these “cluttering” ingredients. Things would “merely” require ingredients like wood/copper/iron, not specific processed versions of it. That would make implementing a realistic stockpile with logistics easier as well.

This would temporarily reduce item variety, but this would rise again with later updates that add for example industrial content. But these items would work in a similar fashion, with "rubber" being "rubber" and not "rubber piece", "rubber ring", etcetera.



To work out these ideas, we’ve been doing a lot of research and discussion. Zun has been working on a simple 2D simulation that allows us to test some of our ideas. We can include some moving footage in the next blog if there’s interest! I’ve been testing Kingdoms and Castles on the recommendation of Vobbert and multiple players. That game already includes realistic logistics. It’s a lovely game that works brilliantly, and their system works mostly automatically. I did notice that logistics became a bit unwieldy at high colonist numbers, and when I started building more distant outposts. Job prioritization became a lot harder as well. It’s still properly manageable in Kingdoms and Castles, but their maps are a bit smaller, and it’s a lot easier to keep a proper overview with their top-down perspective. We think Kingdoms-and-Castles-style-logistics will be pretty confusing in Colony Survival, especially when you’re dealing with a larger variety of items over a longer distance.

We're still discussing and testing different ideas, and if anybody can recommend specific systems, we'd love to hear it!

Bedankt voor het lezen :D

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

Holy cow, last week's survey resulted in a lot of participation and discussion! The blog now has nearly 100 comments, and the survey is at 888 responses. All of this has been very insightful, so thanks a lot! Like always, we'll share all the results with you.

Nearly all questions asked participants to rate something from 1 to 7, with 1 being "awful" and 7 being "great". The first question was:


A vast majority of players rates this change positively, and out of this majority, a large share has picked "7", the most positive option available. This is great to hear, and it's making us more confident in implementing this change.



To prevent disappointing players who don't like realistic logistics, we've proposed having two different systems in-game. This was rated rather negatively. In the comments, multiple people suggested making logistics a "toggleable" option. This will probably be difficult to develop, but there might be a great alternative. If logistics gets implemented, we need to assign each item a weight or volume. Hopefully, we could relatively easily make an alternate option where all items have significantly less weight, making them a lot easier to transport.



The alternative, not implementing logistics in Colony Survival (1), is even more impopular. Good news: we're probably not going to do what this question proposes, and we're very strongly considering to start working on realisitc logistics in CS(1) soon!



We're back to more popular proposals! This seems to be a very viable option.


Yet implementing realistic logistics everywhere gets an even better response. There's one drawback: it's a bit more polarized, with more very excited voters, and simultaneously more participants who rate this suggestion "awful". The amount of votes for "1" went from 27 to 37.



Monsters portals get a more muted response. It's still generally positive, but significantly less compared to the two previous questions. We get it, it's a bit of a strange workaround. We've got some new ideas, but we're not exactly sure how to implement them. Still, we think it would be great if players could use a lot more area in the world, without having to place guards absolutely everywhere.



Delivery men get a "regular positive" response. Not extremely excited, but not seriously conflicted either.



This was the one exception in the entire survey. Instead of 1 to 7 being 'awful' to 'great', the options here were 1 to 5, representing "Automatically" to "Player controlled". The most popular response is right in the middle, which makes sense. Many systems in the game currently work relatively autonomously, but with the option for the player to intervene. Outside of the most popular response, most participants favor automation above explicit player control.

The last five questions have been combined in one chart. They all ask the same question, about five different subjects.


Up till these questions, no proposal got even close to 400 votes for option 7. But here, both (automated, transport) "trains" and "ships" received 502 votes! It's great to see this amount of enthusiasm :D Conveyor belts and zeppelins received the most "conflicted" response, although it's still largely positive. Ships got the most appreciation. We think this has to do with "timeline issues"; people who feel that more modern tech doesn't fit Colony Survival. A topic for another blog :D

Bedankt voor het lezen!

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

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