A test-world for Zun's refactorings

A month ago, in the most recent Friday Blog, we wrote about new, rough plans for 0.9.0. Since then, we’ve been trying to turn these outlines into specific new crafting recipes and tech trees. While doing that, we ran into multiple problems - and we think we’ve solved them.


We’d like to implement Tool Usage for nearly all jobs - because IRL, nearly all jobs use tools. These generic (as in, all jobs use ‘tools’ but not specific pickaxes/axes/needles/hammers/screwdrivers etc) tools should come in multiple materials with different costs and benefits. Players would start with Stone Tools and would later develop Copper Tools, which are more complicated to make but yield higher productivity for jobs that use them. Bronze Tools require rare and expensive tin, but exceed Copper Tools in both productivity and durability. Iron Tools require more advanced tech to produce, but less expensive resources. The productivity would be near those of Bronze Tools, but without the durability. Last but not least, there are Steel Tools, an endgame achievement.

The difference in productivity should be significant to make developing these tools worthwhile. When you’re completely out of tools and workers have to work with their bare hands, productivity should decline dramatically. But how do we make this work at the start of the game? You don’t want to immediately starve to death a new player who doesn’t understand the tool mechanic yet. Nor should food be something that is very difficult to balance properly at the start of the game with low productivity, while it’s easy to create massive abundances a bit later on with more advanced tech.

Zun suggested a variable that is related to how important the tools are for the job. A miner or a blacksmith relies hard on their tools, but they’re much less significant for a berry gatherer. This should be reflected in the Tool Usage Percentage for that job. Let’s turn this into a specific example: (numbers aren’t definitive yet, just a hypothetical example)

No tools: 400% crafting time
Stone tools: 200%
Copper tools: 100%
Bronze tools: 50%
Iron tools: 55%
Steel tools: 33%

For a regular job with 100% TUP, this would be the full impact of using different tools. But a job with 50% TUP would see only half the impact of different tools, resulting in the following crafting times:

No tools: 250% crafting time
Stone tools: 150%
Copper tools: 100%
Bronze tools: 75%
Iron tools: 77.5%
Steel tools: 66%

TUP would also impact the durability of the tools. If tools are only "half as necessary", they'll last twice as long. Mainly early game jobs, and jobs that are crucial to survival of the colony like food jobs, will have a lower TUP. Other jobs might even have TUPs above 100%.

Of course, these numbers shouldn’t have to be calculated by players themselves: the UI should make this very clear. This does require some changes to the interface. For example, we've got to make it clear to players that they can investigate their miners by clicking on the jobs.


So we’d like to see a progression from primitive tools to advanced tools, through different eras and materials. What effort do players have to do to receive these new tools? Do they have to recruit lots of scientists, gather lots of different ingredients, earn large amounts of Colony Points? What is interesting gameplay, what is moderately historically realistic, what can we build in a reasonable amount of time?

Currently, a large part of the early to mid game relies on gathering a wide variety of ingredients. People need olive oil, wax, cabbages, buckets, fish, copper parts, iron rivets, and need to set up lots of different jobs, to unlock new jobs, which can be used to unlock other jobs. It can become quite confusing.

Another core pillar of Colony Survival until now has been the idea that you’re an isolated community on a deserted world. Everything you want to produce has to be made with resources and ingredients that you’ve gathered and crafted yourself.

We’re strongly considering changing both. The game should start earlier: in the Stone Age. Players should be able to set up a self-sustaining colony, but to progress, they have to trade with the wider (offscreen, probably) world. There’ll be a trader who is able to both buy and sell items. Instead of having to craft large amounts of diverse luxury goods for your own colonists, they’ll be exported. Instead of the luxury goods being “daily consumables” like candles and meals, they’ll be more durable and significant, like extensively decorated pottery, fancy textiles, artistic objects and expensive jewelry.

Exporting these items should earn you currency, which can be spent in many ways. The currency will probably replace Colony Points, allowing you to do all the Colony-Points-upgrades with currency. They could also be required in the tech tree, with certain unlocks requiring significant amounts of money. Last but not least, you can spend the currency at the trader to purchase rare items and resources like tin.

Currently, the game doesn’t actually require you to recruit a lot of colonists and build a large colony, it just requires you to gather a bunch of diverse ingredients. Most players reach the musket-era-endgame somewhere between 80 and 150 colonists. We’d like to change that. You ought to need more colonists, but recruiting these colonists should be easier. The focus of the game should be more on the expansion and the actual colonists (building places to sleep, walls, new farms, managing new monster types) and less on balancing a whole bunch of different ingredients from different jobs at the cook.

With these changes, I believe we’ve got all the requirements to do a successful overhaul of the crafting recipes and the tech tree, resulting in a much more interesting and longer progression throughout the game. It’ll be quite different from what you’re used to though. Do you believe it’ll be a good thing? Let us know, in the comments here on Steam or on Discord!

Bedankt voor het lezen!

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

Built by JoeMan

In December, we released 0.8.0, which tried to improve some fundamental systems and fix some flaws. In January and February, we were making huge plans for 0.9.0. We wanted to take our time, add a lot of new content, and introduce awesome new features. We were considering to implement realistic logistics.

This would be a huge change and impact a lot of other systems. We were trying to think through the entire plan. For example: with realistic logistics between colonies, it’s important to spread out resources. It doesn’t make sense for all ores to be present at every location. So resources like iron ore should only appear in certain specific places.

But that means players need multiple colonies when they get into the Iron Age! That’s a lot earlier than currently is the case. So we’ll need to add a lot of pre-Iron Age gameplay to balance things out.

We also added things like support for longer crafting times, which requires a full overhaul of all the crafting recipes. Zun optimized the savegames, which also leads to the requirement for new worlds in 0.9.0 (Disclaimer: Old worlds will always be accessible in old branches / 0.9.0 is a long way out / a converter might appear!). The need for savegame continuity is pretty restricting, and without that need, we have a lot of extra possibilities. We want to use as many as possible of them, to make sure future updates don’t require another continuity-break.

At the end of March, I started moving. It was quite a lot of work, and due to some unforeseen problems I spent nearly two weeks without proper access to the internet. But things are working now :D Things are still a bit Early Access but I don’t mind that too much.

I’ve had a lot of time to think, and things seemed a bit… overwhelming. Update 0.9.0 had become a gigantic overhaul with loads of uncertain but interdependent features, and a three year workload. The plans certainly sounded awesome, but doing it all in one gigantic step started to seem impractical.

So we had a long discussion and decided to change our plans for 0.9.0. It’s still not 100% certain, there are plenty of details to work out, and we’re open to your input! But here are our rough plans.

Update 0.4.0 added a nice progression system. From inventing bronze to smelting iron to producing steel, slings > bows > crossbows > muskets, from slow weak monsters to fast strong monsters. It works very well, and it’s still the core of the game. 0.5.0 and 0.6.0 added ‘branches’ to this framework, and 0.7.0 added multiple colonies to the end of this system. But the ‘spine’ of the game is still the bronze/iron/steel thing (with the related monsters and weapons), added after a couple of months of development in 2017.



We’re considering to refactor that spine. To improve it and to extend it. To make it work with all the other features we’ve added since 2017, and the features we’re planning to add in 0.9.0 (and keeping in mind the features we’re hoping to add afterwards!).

We want to increase the timespan. We’d love to start in the Stone Age and have players invent and use copper tools as a serious improvement above stone tools. Tin should become a rare resource, and to start the Bronze Age, players would have to export luxury goods and import tin.

To decrease their dependence on expensive imports, players should have the ability to start using iron. We’ve done quite a bit of extra research into iron, and apparently, producing it is hard. Iron loves to bind with oxygen, so you’ve got to remove it from your iron ore and prevent the oxygen from returning again too soon (which is known as ‘rust’). To do so, you’ve got to mix it with carbon while heated, but heating the ore up increases iron’s susceptibility to binding with oxygen. Leave too much carbon in your iron and it’ll become brittle; leave too little carbon in your iron and it’ll become soft.

Correctly executing this process requires a lot of knowledge, the right tools, and a lot of good fuel. We’d love to implement this into the game more realistically. We’re considering having multiple ‘levels’ of iron and multiple methods of smelting iron. There could be simple but lengthy processes that result in weak, brittle tools and weapons, and more complicated methods that result in better tools and weapons.

The final step could be steel - which requires very high temperatures or huge amounts of labor to achieve. Add some chromium to get stainless steel. The mass production of steel only became possible at the start of the Industrial Revolution.

Of course, each of these steps should have a purpose and not just be a messy crafting chain required to get to the endgame as soon as possible. We’re considering to add “Tools” as a crucial component of the game. Instead of just foresters and miners requiring a one-time specific tool, most jobs should use them. Instead of each job having their own specific requirement, the Tools would be more general. But Tools will have a trait ‘Durability’, and when it’s depleted, the tool breaks and the worker will require new tools. The tools should also impact productivity. That way, each tool can have their own unique set of benefits and drawbacks. Copper Tools could be cheap but with low durability. Bronze Tools could have high durability, a large boost to productivity, but cost a lot to produce. Primitive Iron Tools could have the same boost to productivity at a lower cost, but also with lower durability.

Now, we don’t just want to make the game more convoluted, with more steps and more requirements. The new crafting chain and the new tech tree should also lead to more possibilities! An underdeveloped aspect of the game, which players have often requested to be expanded, is the combat-side of the game. We’d love to add more monsters and more guards, with new abilities. How about ranged monsters? Guards with area-of-effect damage, and others with the ability to poison or slow down enemies? How about monsters that strengthen nearby monsters, and monsters that get harder to defeat the longer they live? That would make mazes less overpowered and allow for a more diverse array of strategies to be useful. We're also considering options to make some monsters more intelligent. They're harder to implement properly, but monsters that fill moats or scale walls would be very interesting.

Just as in 0.4.0, these things should be connected. Unlocking new materials requires expansion of the colony, new materials lead to new weapons, expansion of the colony leads to more and stronger monsters.



Compared to realistic logistics, these plans are a lot more achievable in less time, while we’re still very enthusiastic about the outcome. We think it would be a huge improvement above the current situation. Let us know your opinion and it’ll help us make a final decision!

The plans for realistic logistics aren’t completely scrapped. We do keep them in mind while working on 0.9.0 and make our choices appropriately. We’re pretty certain we want to make ores like tin scarce, requiring multiple colonies if you want to play without importing and exporting from (offscreen) ‘NPC colonies’. But logistics between multiple colonies were always intended as some kind of endgame, and we’d like to put a lot of effort into the early and midgame first.

TL;DR: I moved successfully, plans for 0.9.0 got extremely huge, considering a new plan for a refactored, improved and lengthened early-to-mid-game with more realistic metals and tools, and new weapons and monsters. Let us know what you think!

Bedankt voor het lezen!

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

For nearly two hundred weeks now, there has been a Friday Blog every week. We've enjoyed some short holidays, but always prepared a Friday Blog to post at the appropriate date. Sadly, we don't expect to reach the milestone of two hundred continuous, weekly Friday Blogs :(

But for a pretty fun reason! I'm moving to a new place next week. It requires quite a lot of preparation before the move, and I'll have to spend some time doing odd jobs at the new place and setting up a new home office. The Netherlands is still a high-COVID-area with a rather stringent lockdown, and that doesn’t make things any easier. It’ll take some weeks before I’m fully set up again.

Apart from that, there’s also been a significant shift in the update cycle. Since the release of 0.7.0 in 2019, we’ve strived to release an update every couple of months. These updates added Steam Workshop support, UI overhauls, the statistics menu, an inbuilt savegame converter, the ability to trash items, the compass, improved pathfinding, and many other features.

With 0.9.0, that will change. Instead of adding incremental features, we want to add significant new things to the gameplay. We would have loved to do that in a bunch of small updates instead of in one big overhaul that will take a long time to develop. But…

Everything is connected. Monsters are connected to guards. Guards are connected to the tech tree. The tech tree is connected to the ores. The ores are connected to the world generation. Changing the world generation invalidates old worlds and requires people to start new savegames.

Of course, we could do some simple changes to one of these aspects. Add a monster with more HP, and a guard that does more damage. We could have a release like that ready in a couple of days. But that wouldn’t be a substantial improvement, just an iteration of already existing content. There are plenty of impressive mods that have content way better than the simple changes above.

So an interesting, serious update should do more than that, it should add exciting new features. These new features take more time to develop. And when you change one system, you’ll have to look at all connected systems as well. When you eventually get to the point where new savegames are required, it becomes very important to add as many of the other changes you’re interested in that also require new worlds.

Eventually, it leads to massive plans that will overhaul a large part of the game. We would have loved to choose “good, fast and cheap (we’re a small company and can't hire 200 programmers and 3D artists)”, but as they say, you can only pick two. We’ll have to settle for good and ‘cheap’. So 0.9.0 will take a while, and there will be a decent amount of weeks with relatively boring “refactored a system” and “changes some JSONs” style updates. We’re planning to skip the Friday Blog in some of these weeks, and only post when there’s something relatively significant to share, preferably something with a visual impact.

Of course, we’re always available on Discord, and we’ll probably make a separate channel there for “mini-blogs”, small updates on what we’re doing. Let us know what you think of this choice, and we’ll calibrate the amount of blogs based on that!

Bedankt voor het lezen :D

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

Last week, we wrote about a new problem we encountered. With the plans for more spread out resources, it would make sense to make bronze more realistic. In real life, tin is actually a very rare resource. But if players require a second colony to produce bronze, those second colonies will be necessary very early in the game. That will be pretty difficult and confusing! We asked for help and received a lot of replies. They were very useful, especially this one from EZJ:

Bronze age trade wasn't one person organizing multiple colonies and trading between them. Maybe adding small NPC colonies that can trade rare resources in the early game before you can start expanding and getting those resources yourself?

That does make sense. Most bronze-smelters, historically, would not have personally set up a tin outpost, they would have bought some from a trader. In 0.1.0, purchasing flax seeds with gold coins was a fundamental element of the game. It was a bit confusing because it worked like very other crafter, and it could benefit from a better interface. But having a good way to buy "outside goods" (and to sell to "outsiders"!) would be beneficial in many ways. It could be a way to give players access to more resources that aren't available in the first colony, at a cost. And it could incentivize players to produce certain goods on a large scale.

We were already considering "MonsterForts", which would be custom built fortresses in other dimensions. With the other-dimension feature added, it would be relatively easy to add "friendly" fortresses as well. These could pretty much be NPC colonies! Perhaps you'd need to visit them to set up trade. NPC colonies have consistently been a very popular request, but we found it hard to imagine ways to add them, and to make them useful. We might be close to solving those problems!

But eventually, players want to move beyond purchasing exotic resources, and they actually want to go out in the world and find these ores. How do players recognize them on the surface? Zun suggested that we might add caves and put the ores there. That could be a solution! Another idea is to generate deserted mining towns on the surface of significant ore deposits. It would work, but it would simultaneously imply that you live in some kind of post-apocalyptic scenario. That would be interesting, lore-wise.



So, if bronze is rather difficult to produce in real life because tin is so scarce, what stops people from immediately moving to iron production? In-game, we could just require players to produce a lot of bronze to unlock iron, but we'd rather make it a bit more realistic. What exactly is difficult about iron production?

Apparently, the temperature required to smelt iron is a lot higher, and reaching a temperature that is twice as high requires more than just a double amount of fuel. It requires different fuels and different furnaces.

It's not just that. Iron ore is generally pretty unpure and needs to be refined before it's properly usable. If all these processes are done well, you get strong iron that doesn't rust quickly. But that's hard to do. Most early iron was probably brittle and rusted easily. It took a lot of experimenting to get it right.

We're unsure about the best way to translate these realities into interesting gameplay. We've been thinking about having dynamic tools for jobs: for example, foresters could use different axes, with better axes being more durable and allowing for faster logging. Perhaps there'll be a similar thing for smelting, with 'dynamic' fuels, allowing players to choose different options for different results. But it's complicated and we haven't fully decided on one solution yet. If there are any experts on metallurgy, we'd love to have your help :D

Bedankt voor het lezen!

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

Last week, we wrote about the addition of longer crafting times to the dev build. This allows us to refactor crafting times. The total cost of daily necessities like food and ammo can’t change significantly (one day of food and ammo can’t cost two days of crafting). But permanent improvements like job blocks can be changed to be significantly more expensive in terms of crafting time. Currently, job blocks often have trivial crafting requirements and are made in seconds. Completing a job block should become more of a valuable accomplishment, especially the more advanced ones.

Currently, most job blocks can be made by the colonist operating the workbench, and by the player. The player has 0 crafting time. Nobody is going to wait 120 seconds for a new furnace if such an alternative is available. Should we remove a lot of recipes currently available for “player crafting”? Should there be an alternative “job block crafter” that takes a lot of recipes from the workbench?

Because we can increase the crafting time, we can remove some “ingredient items”. Instead of a job block taking 8 seconds to craft + copper nails/tools/parts that require 22 seconds to craft, the job block itself can just take 30 seconds + “pure” copper. But the workbench currently mostly makes these ingredient items and job blocks. Is it wise to remove all of these from the workbench?

While redesigning the crafting recipes and ingredients like this, it’s smart to keep our planned changes to resource distribution in mind. We’ve been thinking of the details there more clearly this week. When we started Colony Survival, we were thinking about roughly the Viking Era, 700-1000AD. With later updates, we added things like crossbows and the printing press, extending the timeline to ~1600AD.

Now that we’re thinking about making trade between colonies a more important part of the gameplay, we’ve tried to figure out when this became important in real life. It turns out long distance trade is already crucial when you’re producing bronze, because tin is a very rare resource. But civilizations started smelting bronze in 2000BC, nearly 3000 years before the start of CS’s current timeline!

Bronze is one of the earliest unlocks in CS. We don’t want second colonies to become important so soon in the gameplay. Do we “skip” it? Do we think of an unrealistic alternative (like tin being available everywhere)? Or do we extend the timeline to significantly before 2000BC, adding gameplay, progress and unlocks to the Stone Age? But which interesting, significant progression happened in the Stone Age, that we can utilize in Colony Survival? Domestication and selective breeding of crops and livestock seemed to have important consequences, but we can’t easily put that into the game.

We haven’t drawn any definitive conclusions yet, so let us know your opinion! How far back in time should CS start? How realistic should things be? Leave a comment here on Steam, or share your opinion on Discord!

Bedankt voor het lezen :D

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

Zun has mostly finished his work on the savegames. Previously, they were .JSON files. In some cases, they were prone to getting corrupted. They also required autosaves to save the data of all players who have been connected to the server, even if only a small minority of them have been connected since the last autosave.

The new savegames use SQLite. It should be quicker and more reliable. The problem above with the autosaves is solved as well!

This does have one serious drawback. Our dev-build of 0.9.0 already expects SQL saves and is incompatible with older savegames. No worries about your current worlds: they'll always be playable by using the 0.8.0 branch, and it'll take a long time before 0.9.0 is ready for release. But this does mean we can't easily release the new savegames as a 0.8.X patch. We could write a converter, but this takes a decent amount of time, and we'd rather invest that time in awesome features for 0.9.0. The new terrain generation and totally overhauled job/recipe structure will require new worlds anyway.

Another change that was completed this week is longer crafting times. In the past, all NPC actions were practically limited at a maximum of 15 seconds. This boundary has been removed. Previously, we worked around that boundary by making complex recipes that required many ingredients. Now that the limit is gone, we want to refactor these recipes. Intermediate steps like copper nails could be removed, with items just requiring "copper" and slightly longer crafting times.

Previously, crafting times were determined by the job block. Recipes at the tailor all take an equal amount of time. This can be changed as well now. Crafters can make both quick recipes take that only 1-5 seconds, and recipes that take for example 30 to 120 seconds. We want to use this new ability to make certain items take significantly longer to craft. Things like ammo should stay relatively similar, but items like weapons, which permanently improve your colony (instead of being "daily costs"), should take more effort from your colonists to produce. This ought to make them feel more valuable, and it allows us to add new features that allow players to reduce that crafting time again. For example, by crafting advanced tools for crafters to use, or by spending Colony Points to upgrade crafters.

Next Up: Overhauling the Crafting Recipes + Working on Trade Routes!

Bedankt voor het lezen!

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

As explained in the last couple of blogs, adding realistic logistics between your main colony and its outposts will be a massive overhaul. There's a large amount of interdependency and edge cases. We're now 99% certain that we want to do this.

The rough order looks like this:

1. Longer Crafting Times: Crafting should be able to take longer than 15 seconds, and different items should be able to have different crafting times at the same jobblock. These old limitations led to certain choices like complex recipes and separate jobs. That will have to be refactored.
   
   
2. Improving the Trade Feature: There should be actual, physical paths linking colonies, marked by milestones or buoys. These should determine the cost and waiting time for trading items.
   
   
3. The Outpost System: Currently, starting a second colony is an end-game feature that requires difficult-to-unlock Colony Starter Kits. These later colonies pretty much stand alone as sepate places with their own tech tree. In 0.9.0, it should be way easier to start new outposts, like a mining town. They should be more connected, all being part of the same civilization/empire. It will be easiest to set up a capital that is supplied by its outposts, but you should be able to develop these outposts as well.
   
   
4. New Terrain Generation: At the moment, useful terrain features like ores and the ability to grow certain crops are spread out like tiles on a chessboard. There's a large square on the map called "Far East" were porcelain can be found and rice can be grown, and another large square for diamonds and sugar cane. These large squares are separated by large areas of uselessness: desert, steppe, ocean.
   
   These ores and the ability to (efficiently) grow certain crops should be spread out more organically. You shouldn't have to traverse large deserts or steppes for your first outpost. It should be a more natural expansion, fueled by the desire to gain "that resource just over there". This requires a new world with updated terrain generation.
   
   
5. We should investigate whether it's annoying to fight monsters everywhere in this system. If so, that should be fixed.
   
   
6. Jobs should be more sensible and "upgradeable". Jobs like berry farmers should benefit from having larger areas. Jobs like wheat farmers could have similar yields on smaller areas if they use items like fertilizer. It would be nice if jobs like flax farmers have better yields if a beekeeper is nearby. Smelters should be able to use different fuels, and crafters should be able to use better tools for improved crafting times.

We haven't decided on all details yet. Will there truly be no realistics logistics within colonies? Will certain item types be constrained to "special" stockpiles - weapons and ammo can only be stored in armories, wheat in granaries, etcetera? We're still debating these issues.

While we were making plans for the future, Zun has still been working on and releasing small patches for 0.8.1. The full details can be seen in #small-patch-changelogs on Discord, but here are the last three updates:



Developing 0.9.0 will be a large project that's going to take a relatively long time. We do believe it's a good idea. The plans will make way better use of the large world. The game is able to support tens of thousands of colonists, but only rewards recruiting a couple of hundred. That's a lot of unused potential that 0.9.0 should take advantage of. We could've chosen a different direction, or focused on smaller updates, but we think this path ultimately will result in a better game, compared to the alternative paths.

Zun has already started working on a savegame overhaul for 0.9.0, and we're expecting to start working on actual new features very soon!

Op hoop van zegen!

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

When we started working on the first prototype for Colony Survival eight years ago, we didn’t have a detailed plan worked out. Zun made a voxel engine, and I’d loved to see walking, working, living inhabitants in that world.

When Colony Survival was released into Early Access, nearly four years ago, it wasn’t much more than that. A voxel world where farmers, miners, guards and crafters could be recruited and set to work. But it didn’t have a real purpose. We just tried to copy some elements from history and the real world into a simulation. Do history and the real world have a purpose?

Complex philosophical considerations about the nature of reality aside, the history of human civilization does seem to have resulted in something. We’ve gained a lot of knowledge about biology, chemistry, physics, engineering, electronics and a lot of other domains. We’re constantly using that knowledge to build tools and machines. These items help us gain further knowledge, and they provide us with wealth, comfort and security. This cycle seems to have happened continuously, from the invention of writing and the wheel to the realization of flatscreens and bluetooth.

But these innovations seem to happen relatively spontaneously, without much top-down steering. Johannes Gutenberg wasn’t commanded by the king to invent the printing press. It seems his family was involved with mints and goldsmiths, acquiring knowledge and skill in metal working there.

When Charles Babbage built the first mechanical computer, he wasn’t following anybody’s orders. He inherited an estate, making him independently wealthy. He had a strong interest in mathematics, and partnered with Joseph Clement who could use advanced machine tools.

These inventors worked independently, but they did consciously try to produce the machines they invented. That isn’t even always the case. When Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin, the first antibiotic, he wasn’t even looking for anything like that. He was investigating bacteria, and accidentally contaminated one of his experiments with a fungus. That fungus turned out to be penicillium, one that produces penicillin.



How do you add such innovations to a strategy game like Colony Survival? Telling a colonist “go invent penicillin now” is deeply unrealistic. But having it appear completely randomly would be strange and unsatisfying as well. The true “road towards inventions” seems to be like this. Make sure you’ve got a civilization of many, many millions. Most of these people will not directly work on inventions, but they’re vital to keep that gigantic civilization running on a day to day basis. Tens of thousands of people will have a combination of education, technical skills and some wealth. A part of that group will experiment and try to innovate. Some will fail, some will discover gradual improvements, and others will successfully invent new machines and theories that revolutionize the world, like the printing press and the theory of evolution.

With the Happiness System and the Colony Points System, we tried to add some of these ‘costs’ to Colony Survival. You can’t innovate “directly”, you’ve got to sustain a large semi-civilized group of people, which requires a relatively large and advanced economy. Feed thousands of goldsmiths for many generations, and finally, one will invent the printing press.

With that mindset, I thought about realistic logistics between many colonies. I wanted it to be a complex economy with many advanced colonies that all contain educated, skilled workers who can contribute to technological innovations. This requires a very complex trade network, with an enormous amount of connections between colonies. Setting up all these connections manually would be extremely tedious and unpractical, so that's why I thought about automated systems that utilize things like currency.

But we’re developing a game that should be fun to play, not a historical simulation that should be completely accurate. And thus, last week, we decided to take a different approach: one massive, advanced capital that is supplied by many outposts. This simplifies the required logistics, and makes it much more approachable for the player.

What should the purpose of this capital be? Just to make its inhabitants very wealthy and comfortable while exploiting the outposts? That would be pretty harsh. Solely to make technological progress, which can be used to… make even more progress? That’s not very sustainable and a bit pointless as well.


A B-25 assembly line at North American Aviation's Inglewood, California, plant. 1942. Source.

So, we’ve looked at historical top-down regimes. Ancient Egypt, where the faraos commanded tens of thousands of people to build the pyramids. The Roman Empire, where one city exploited three continents, which funded massive armies. The Soviet Union, which built many rockets and won all the first steps of the Space Race.

Some megaprojects like the ones above would be great, to give purpose to your capital and its network of outposts. Of these projects, we’ve mainly discussed “massive armies” this week. We’re pretty excited about that idea! That could be an interesting gameplay mechanic which consumes gigantic amounts of resources. In real life, situations like World War I & II are also deeply connected to technological progress, but in a more “intended” way than the “spontaneous” inventions mentioned above. Consider the Manhattan Project which produced the first nuclear weapons, or the German Wunderwaffe.

We’re considering adding a list of “MonsterForts”. These would be in a different dimension, which has to be accessed by some kind of portal or teleporter. The player would have to recruit, arm and train large amounts of soldiers in the capital, and would be able to send these to attack the MonsterForts. There, the reverse of the “night-gameplay” would happen. Monsters would have defenders on the walls, and a long line of colonist-soldiers would swarm the gates, trying to survive the hostile projectiles and to destroy the “MonsterBanner”. Destroying a number of these MonsterForts would be required to continue progressing.


Women are trained as engine mechanics in thorough Douglas training methods, at the Douglas Aircraft Company in Long Beach, California, in October of 1942. Source.

Providing these soldiers with weapons, armor and other tools and equipment will require the efforts of your entire empire. Hundreds of miners, smelters, smiths and engineers will have to work. A large amount of foresters and woodcutters is necessary to supply them with fuel. Many farmers are needed to produce enough food. The armies can evolve throughout time, from simple spearmen, to fully armored knights, to riflemen.

This idea is still work-in-progress, and might be unceremoniously discarded like the Guilders-idea was. We've still got specific issues to work out (Can you build/destroy blocks near the MonsterForts? What will the reward be?) and alternatives to consider. It'll require a months-long process to set up support for alternative dimensions.

But we believe this will be a rewarding goal for both Colony Survival in general, and the system of outposts and realistic logistics in specific. Ultimately, you’re the judge of that. Let us know in the comments or on Discord how you feel about these ideas!

Bedankt voor het lezen :D

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

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