In the past weeks, we've built the first prototype with actual 0.9.0 content. In the past, we did alter some systems, but we kept 0.8.0 content. The new prototype has lost pretty much all 0.8.0 jobs, items and science. We're starting from the ground up! The tech tree is getting completely reworked, and so are the jobs and items. Of course, a decent chunk of 0.8.0 items are coming back, but often in different places, with different recipes.

For four years, we've been building on the foundation of 0.1.0. Now, we're completely restructuring the game while taking into account all the lessons we've learned since the first release. We've listened to your comments, we've played and tested and experimented, we've thought and debated, and now we're implementing those new ideas.

Playing the prototype has been a genuinely exciting experience. In our opinion, things work a lot better than they did. The most noticeable change at the moment is the longer crafting time. Combined with the new tech tree, it really changes the way the game feels.

In the past, crafting an item often took only a handful of seconds. Beds, weapons, new jobblocks: most were done in 3-7 seconds. Fifteen seconds at the maximum. Crafting times were the same for all items at one job. Core items like planks could be made instantly by the player. This was a fundamental restraint, and we tried to work around it by requiring a bunch of random ingredients for many items. Beeswax, olive oil, copper nails, iron rivets. A lot of time was spent figuring out which random item was missing and setting up the production chain required for it.

This has been dramatically streamlined. Recipes are clearer and more straightforward, but require significantly more crafting time. Instead of random items being the bottleneck, you’re now facing “labor constraints” way more often. You want more crafters, more miners, etcetera. Players themselves can craft barely any items. You’ve got to expand your colony faster now, and we’ve made that a bit more fast-paced to counter the more punishing crafting times.



Of course, there’s an alternative to boost your production! Tools have also been implemented. You start out without tools, and gradually work your way up, from stone tools through copper tools to bronze tools. Each comes with a significant boost in production speed, but unlocking them is gradually more challenging.

We’ve discussed plans for more public betas as well. We’re hoping to be able to open up 0.9.0 to those who’ve tested previous updates in roughly one to three months. New testers will be able to sign up one to two months later!

Bedankt voor het lezen :D

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Cloudville / Wolkenhausen by JoeMan

This month, we've been working on implementing the plans described in the previous Friday Blogs. We've now got an internal dev-build with a system for consumable tools, used by jobs.

Colony Survival 0.9.0 is going to be bigger and deeper than ever before. It will change how you were used to playing the game. There will be new systems that will hopefully be interesting and engaging for many dozens of hours of playtime. But how are we going to introduce all these changes and new mechanics, in a way that is both clear and exciting, for new players and long time fans alike?

We tried to accomplish this by refactoring the tech tree and by changing which items are fundamental and how they are produced. But while trying to do that, we noticed that we couldn’t accomplish it in a way that felt successful. With “successful” meaning that it will smoothly lead players towards the midgame and further. We’ve often seen examples of players getting stuck in the early game, and we want to prevent that as much as possible. Without dumbing the game down, of course :)

So we’ve made a decision. 0.9.0 will include The Mission System. That means there will be a set of Missions that encourage you to, and reward you for, accomplishing certain goals. These goals will vary from setting up a self-sustaining colony, advancing to the bronze/iron age, reaching a 1000 colonists and other important stepping stones / milestones.

Experienced players can ignore the Missions if they want to. They shouldn’t interfere with your plans, you won’t be forced to repeat the same boring, artificial procedures every time. But they’ll give new players some direction, and instructions on how to accomplish the most important steps. We really believe this will make the game a lot more accessible and fun.



While discussing the details of the Mission System, we ran into a new problem. Should Missions auto-complete when requirements are met? Or should players have to press “Complete” themselves, like Science currently requires? Whatever we choose, it’s important to notify players when requirements are met. Currently, we’ve got a system that feeds one-line warning messages to the chatbox, but that’s not very sophisticated.

For loads of purposes, it would be useful to have a better Message System. Better, more detailed messages that are more easily seen and retrieved. Messages about Missions and Sciences that are ready to complete. Messages about harmed and killed colonists, messages about food and ammo running out, perhaps even Daily Reports. With bigger and more complex colonies, getting proper feedback of its functioning is crucial.

So, we’ve decided to implement a seriously improved Message System into 0.9.0 as well. Zun has been making good progress there! Lots of it doesn’t have a nice UI yet, but we’ll show more in future Friday Blogs.

Bedankt voor het lezen :D

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Mask of Agamemnon, Greece, 1600BC. All images in this blog are sourced from Wikipedia.

It is Blog 200 :D Since the previous blog at the start of June, we've passed June 16th, marking the "4th birthday" of Colony Survival's release on Steam. Coincidentally, we’ve also achieved a high amount of consensus on the details of 0.9.0 and are ready to work them out into an actual overhaul, into new crafting recipes, new jobs, new items, new guards, new monsters and a new tech tree.

Let’s start by returning to a core problem of ours: how do we create satisfying gameplay for Colony Survival? We all want to build a colony that “does something”, that improves, that overcomes obstacles, that solves a problem. At its core, our mechanics support that very well. Start with 10 colonists with primitive items, jobs and tools, expand to 100 colonists with advanced items, jobs and tools, and your colony is much more capable of doing whatever it does.

That cycle can repeat again to 250 colonists, and 500 colonists, etcetera. But what challenge stays interesting that entire time? A problem that is solved by going from 10 to 100 colonists does not motivate you to expand to 250 colonists.

We tried to solve that by creating “persistent challenges”. The amount of monsters attracted by your colony grows as you expand your colony. The requirements to keep your colonists happy got higher and higher as you recruited more colonists

But instead of motivating people to keep growing, these challenges actually punished people for growing, and they heavily incentivized efficiency and min-maxing. That’s why 0.8.0 replaced Happiness with Colony Points. Instead of pushing people to keep up with the daily demands of solving “persistent challenges”, we’d like to reward people for building something, for growing their colony and becoming more and more capable and effective.

For the last months, we’ve been pondering and debating how we can realistically implement this shift in philosophy into the game in a practical manner, in a way that makes the game more fun for beginners and more engaging for long-term players, in a way that refreshes the game for people who have gotten tired of it, without alienating those who have gotten used to the way the game works. Satisfying all these demands is hard, but we think we have found a solution.

We will extend the timeline of the game, deep into human prehistory. We’ll start in the Stone Age, and gradually evolve towards the Industrial Revolution. During the last month, we’ve investigated this historical development, looking for crucial technologies and interesting jobs and items.

The “luxury items” for the Happiness feature were mostly meant to be “daily items” like food and candles. They were crafted quickly, but relied on a combination of many different items. The new “luxury items'' will mostly be meant for export. They don’t have to be consumed daily, and with the support for extended crafting times per recipe in 0.9.0, their production can take longer. They will rely significantly less on a complex mix of ingredients. We’ve searched through history for interesting “luxury items” according to these new guidelines, and we were surprised to find many interesting artifacts that demonstrated the existence of complex technologies and high artistic ability deep into prehistoric times.


Trundholm sun chariot, Denmark, 1400BC

So, the products themselves should be more satisfying to craft. The reason to craft them too: instead of ‘having’ to satisfy the happiness demands of your colonists, you’re earning Colony Currency, which can be used in many different ways between which you, the player, can choose. And the tech tree itself will be significantly longer, and require a significantly more developed colony to complete.

We’ve also talked about the monster threat. We’re committed to adding more types of weapons and monsters. We’d like to see stronger monsters, monsters that can fight back with ranged attacks, monsters that, on death, explode into poison clouds that make monsters stronger while they harms colonists. And we’d like to see guards that can do area-of-effect damage, guards with highly powerful but short range equipment, “sniper guards”, guards with projectiles that do damage over time.

But we have decided on a change that is perhaps more impactful. We’re now pretty much certain that we want to mostly decouple the amount of monsters that assaults your colony from the amount of colonists in that colony, and recouple it to your progress in the tech tree. That should be another strong incentive in favor of rapidly growing your colony, instead of an incentive that hinders growth and favors carefully min-maxing your way forward. Of course, careful gameplay should stay important and success there ought to be rewarded! There will be new vital choices that players will have to make, and where carefulness is fundamental.


Strettweg Cult Wagon, Austria, 600BC

We’ve received some disappointed replies asking about our plans for realistic logistics. We’re sad to say they’ve been postponed/cancelled. We were very serious about them at the start of 2021, but when working out these plans we ran into trouble. It required lots of new features and adjustments, which would cost a lot of development time, and the benefits started to pale, compared to the costs. We believe the new plans are easier to implement, but with improvements to the gameplay through the entire game, instead of only during the endgame.

We hope to start implementing new items and jobs in the next couple of weeks, and hope we’ll be able to show progress there in the next blog!

Bedankt voor het lezen :D

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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!

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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!

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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

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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!

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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

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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!

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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!

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