All mentioned changes concern the internal, unreleased dev build

Last Friday Blog mentioned the idea of ‘outposts’. This resulted in massive support: lots of you shared their enthusiasm! That was great to see, and it strengthens our dedication to this plan.

Since then, progress has been good. In the image above, a trap can be seen. Traps were very much work-in-progress two weeks ago, and they’re a lot more finished in our current internal dev build. They are properly reloaded by special colonists, and there are now also variants of traps that can drop items on monsters that pass below them. They’ve also received their own, new 3D model. We’re still planning to update it though.

Zun is now working on a new effect: slowdown. We’re planning to add traps that can drop caltrops, which would slow down monsters. This requires new info to be saved for each monster though. We’re also planning to have other things that can affect monsters for a longer time, like poison. Properly saving these statuses for each and every monster and sending them to each connected player in multiplayer requires a minor technical overhaul, which is happening right now.


A trap from below

The last two weeks also saw the addition of many new icons for 0.9.0-items, and 3D-models for new jobs. We’ve also redone certain old icons that didn’t fit the new style and standards. Here are two screenshots of some of the new content:




Another project was updating the ‘spreadsheet calculator’. Since 0.7.0, we’ve got an internal system that can ‘print’ a spreadsheet with all kinds of data, especially data regarding the total labor cost of items. How many seconds of work are required to make an anvil and all of its ingredients?

0.9.0 adds some major new changes to this process. Some items can’t simply be crafted by a colonist, and have to be purchased from the trader with currency. And the crafting time isn’t static: it decreases when you use better tools. This makes calculating the total cost of a product significantly more complex.

With the new spreadsheet calculator, we now have access to a lot of new data. We’re going to use it to rebalance the costs of in-game items. Until now, it has been the result of ‘guesswork’. That has resulted in some weird things. The Golden Shield costs a lot of time to craft, but it can be sold for 250 coins. But the calculator concluded that the ingredients of the Golden Shield cost 230 coins already! All the work crafting the shield and its ingredients are better spent crafting linen, which can be sold for more coins with less work. Weird things like that will be fixed.


One of the results of the calculator. Spot the problems!

Bedankt voor het lezen :D

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As promised last week, the dev build now has a functional Iron Age! Playtesting it has legitimately been a lot of fun. Currently, the Iron Age is also the first time players are able to unlock and use traps. We’re seriously considering introducing this new feature earlier in the game.

The Iron Age is now the most advanced age in 0.9.0. It’s the hardest to unlock, and producing enough iron to unlock traps and to craft a bunch of them is relatively difficult. I was surprised by the amount of miners and smelters I had to unlock. At first, I wanted to ‘fix’ that, to reduce the costs of the crafting recipes. But then I realized that this is exactly what we want to encourage. We want players to build big colonies and to recruit a large number of colonists, and these accomplishments should be meaningful.


With the Iron Age unlocked and many dozens of colonists working on trap-production, I now had an overcrowded fort with many beds crammed into underground rooms. I barely had space left above ground to place new jobs. But while looking at the surrounding area from the walls of my fort, I felt a strong desire to “make it habitable”. Why should I build such a crowded place for the colonists when there is so much empty space around me?

...because that’s how the game works. You’ve got one banner, and you stick with it until you’re pretty much at the endgame, and then you can start over in a very distant location. But then I remembered the server that I shared with Vobbert and Zun many years ago, in a certain other voxel game. We did explore that world and we spread out our buildings, but our settlements were all connected by roads and bridges and pretty much within viewing distance of other settlements. We didn’t concentrate everything in a 200x200 area (the current core CS gameplay), nor did we go 10 miles in a random direction and build a new settlement in a fully isolated area (what 0.7.0 adds to CS).



At the start of this year, we did consider making CS more like that, with multiple settlements relatively nearby. We considered semi-realistic logistics to be a core part of that, and we couldn’t think of a system that we could both A.) develop in an acceptable timescale, and B.) make fun and intuitive to use for players.

But… is semi-realistic logistics actually a core requirement for ‘outposts’ gameplay? Imagine you’re able to build outposts with their own ‘secondary banners’, their own jobs, their own colonists and their own beds, in viewing range of your first and main colony. A small village focused on mining next to the mountain, a fishing town next to the sea, a farming outpost in the middle of a plain. But the tech tree and stockpile are completely, automatically connected to your main colony. The iron ingots of the mining village are instantly usable at your main colony, and the same is true for the wheat harvest of the farming outpost. Sure, it wouldn’t be very realistic, but wouldn’t it be a lot more fun than being forced to stay within a small safe zone in a nearly infinite world, or to be forced to use complex, tedious trading/logistics UIs to connect multiple colonies?

We’ve discussed it and we’re highly enthusiastic about the “outpost-plan”. We’ve already got support for multiple colonies, so it wouldn’t require enormous amounts of development time. But we do expect the results of it to be pretty enormous. Using the resources of your main colony to transform an empty patch of nature into a new settlement seems like very fun and satisfying gameplay. We’ve noticed that a lot of longtime players already used mods or cheats to achieve something like this; they dislike being constrained to a relatively small area, and want to spread their mini-civilization over a larger area.



But we’re not instantly going to develop this feature, so this is your chance to give us your feedback! Are you highly enthusiastic about this, and do you totally not mind us expanding 0.9.0 a bit further with this? Do you believe this new feature won’t be very helpful? Or are you sick and tired of us constantly moving the goalposts and do you just want 0.9.0 to be released yesterday? Let us know and we’ll consider your input!

During the next week, we're probably busy working on refining the content that was recently added. The traps are still work-in-progress, and a part of the new 0.9.0 content is still lacking icons, models and balance.

Bedankt voor het lezen :D

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Image from Wikipedia

In our last blog, we suggested traps as the solution to a myriad of problems. The general response was enthusiastic, so we’ve been working on implementing it. Zun worked on the technical side of things, and things went very well there.

I had to work on integrating the new jobs and recipes properly in the 0.9.0 tech tree. And I struggled quite a bit with that. It felt like the keystone that completes an arch. We stacked up features on the left, we stacked up features on the right, and traps were the last feature needed to complete the system. And that last step is the most difficult one, because it has to make sure everything is properly ‘balanced’. An issue comparable to this one, 140 blogs ago. It took a while, but we’ve figured it out and things are moving forward again!

In the meanwhile, Zun tested prototype-traps. Here’s an image of such a trap defeating monsters!


Loaded traps are temporarily using the stove mesh, empty traps use the writer's desk mesh

We ran into a new technical problem that had some interesting visualizations. Blocks like crates and jobblocks have “access points”. These are places right next to the crate where colonists can stand to use these blocks. In 0.8.0, that’s only right next to the block.


...crates like here are visualized as…

....green = crate, red = “access point”

This is problematic for certain new traps. Some traps can only be aimed upwards, others can only be aimed downwards. It makes sense to reload these traps when standing on top of them, or below them. It also makes sense to integrate traps in walls at the height of the torso instead of on the floor - these should also be able to be reloaded by colonists standing next to them. So Zun improved the “access points system” to be able to deal with these new situations.



So we’ve now got an internal dev build with functional prototype traps, and a detailed path on how to integrate them in the tech tree. We expect to have pretty functional 0.9.0 gameplay, from the Stone Age to the Iron Age, by this time next week!

Bedankt voor het lezen :D

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We’ve been having a lot of debates about how to implement monster&guards in 0.9.0. We wanted more options, more variety and more challenge. We made some significant steps, for example by connecting the size of the monster threat to the tech tree as well, instead of solely to the amount of colonists. But now we had to turn our general ideas into specific guards/monsters/weapons/ammo, and that turned out to be pretty hard to do right.

We kept running into some problems:

• How do guards select which monsters they attack / prioritize? Do players have control over this?
  
• How do we prevent the gameplay from becoming repetitive “unlock stronger guard”-cycles?
  
• How do we give players a fail-safe system that saves the colony if guards can’t handle a new, stronger wave?
  
• How to differentiate heavy damage early game weapons from middle game medium damage weapons?
  
• If we provide more guard-options, how do we prevent the guard-menu from becoming too cluttered?

Just today, Zun suggested an idea that I had rejected in the past, but which does seem to solve quite a lot of the problems we encountered. Traps! Disclaimers: we’re not 100% sure about this, it’s a very new idea. We’re going to think about it during the weekend, and we’ll read your responses here under the blog, and we’re open to discuss it on Discord. No guarantees it'll get implemented! But it does seem rather promising at the moment.

Early game traps could be placeable items that get triggered when monsters pass over them. These could be "damage-weapons" like bombs, but also things like caltrops or poison devices, to slow monsters down or to damage them over time. We're considering a dedicated "trapman"-job - a colonist who maintains and re-arms the traps.

Later in the game, the trigger could be a separate item from the weapon, something like a pressure plate. You would be able to configure the pressure plate to only be sensitive towards certain enemies, and you'd have to connect it to a specific weapon.

Traps enable a lot of new strategies. For example, at the very start of your monster funnel, you could have traps that poison and slow down the strongest monsters. At the end of your funnel, right before your banner, you could place a bunch of explosives. If your guards fail to kill any monsters, they’ll be defeated by the bombs and you will be clearly notified that you’ll need to upgrade your defenses!

It solves the player-control-over-prioritization problem in a relatively intuitive way, it prevents the guard menu from becoming too cluttered - it would be helpful in a myriad of ways! But is it the right solution? Should we keep exploring alternatives? Should we release 0.9.0 without traps and without trying to find an elegant solution for the problems mentioned above? We’re probably going to make a definitive decision at the start of next week, so this is the right moment to give us some input. Let us know your opinion, it’s sincerely appreciated!

Bedankt voor het lezen :D

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After last week's blog, we received some PMs with some feedback. It was becoming quite confusing to follow what plans we're actually working on and what exactly is going to be in 0.9.0 and what not. Those same PMs were also curious about our plans after 0.9.0. If there’s broader interest, we’ll discuss that in next week’s blog. But in this blog: our plans for 0.9.0!

Disclaimer: to a degree, the development of CS remains a flexible process. While testplaying, unexpected issues pop up, and we’d rather fix that than release a problematic version earlier.


Our current dev build contains a new feature that supports tools. Tools are used by workers when producing items. Tools break after having been used for a while. Different tools have different effects on productivity and different durabilities. Examples are stone, copper, bronze, iron and steel tools.

Jobs have a “Tool Usage Percentage” (TUP) that determines how important tools are for them. Jobs like blacksmiths are more reliant on tools than berry gatherers. The productivity of jobs with a high TUP are more affected by different tool types. It takes longer for a tool to break at low TUP jobs.


In all previous versions, the spawned amount of monsters in the night was linked to the amount of colonists in your colony. This incentives people to play very efficiently and to recruit as few colonists as possible. To further stimulate growth and expansion, we wanted to decouple this ‘punishment’ from colony growth. Monsters are now coupled to major milestones in the tech tree.


We had little room to vary crafting times in previous builds. Crafting times varied per job, not per recipe: all recipes at one job shared the same crafting time. The crafting time was also limited to about 15 seconds maximum. Both have changed. One job can now simultaneously have long and short crafting times, and the crafting times can be minutes long. We’ve been using this to fix “workaround recipes”, recipes that include things like 15 copper nails and 20 linen to artificially boost crafting time.


In the past, players needed to recruit an actual scientist who worked “cycles” to unlock new things in the tech tree. The idea was to eventually have dozens of scientists working on Manhattan Projects. In practice, this didn’t happen. Quite often, there were significant delays between unlocks, where it makes sense to delete your Science Lab and the scientist-job, just to re-recruit 1 or 2 when needed. This isn’t fun gameplay.

In our dev build, science can be unlocked in the UI without a Science Lab or a scientist, provided that the right ingredients are present and all requirements are met. There are new jobs like the writer, who take quite some time to produce parchment scrolls. They partially replace the scientist.


From the beginning, we’ve had coins, but these coins were items like all others. They had to be crafted at a job, and the merchant job worked like any other job, while using coins as ingredients.

In our current dev build, this has changed significantly. The Colony Points from 0.8.0 are now ‘Colony Currency’. Instead of automatically distributing luxury goods to colonists for points, they now have to be sold at the trader. The trader has its own unique interface, where things can be sold and purchased instantly, in large quantities if so desired.


To make the best use of all of these new features, we’re seriously refactoring the content of the game. Colonies grow bigger, quicker and we’ve added more jobs and items to make earlier ages feel worthwhile. This includes items like the tools and leather.




We haven’t moved past the Bronze Age, so things like iron smelting, crossbows and muskets are not in the game yet. We’d rather not release 0.9.0 while having removed such significant content. We’re planning to add more ages, which will include a lot of the content from previous versions.


Most of the Stone Age to Bronze Age content has icons, but the models for new job blocks have not been made yet. Content in ‘coming ages’ lacks both icons and models.


We’re planning to add new guards and monsters. Not merely variations on current features, but new mechanics like area of effect damage and ranged monsters as well. We’re still debating if and how we should implement armored guards. We’re also considering adding new 3D models for the colonists, guards and monsters.


New features like the traders and the tools have a rudimentary UI so we can test them, but not yet a ‘decent’ UI that is ready for release. Of course, we want to change that.


With monsters not being linked to colonists anymore, a successful monster attack that wipes out half of your colony doesn’t proportionally diminish monster attacks in the next night. We’re planning a mode that costs a lot of Colony Currency and that removes your ability to unlock new tech which allows you to rebuild your colony while monster attacks are seriously diminished.


Update 0.9.0 is the largest overhaul in years, and completely restructures a lot of content. We’ve already refactored savegame structure for this update. Old worlds will not be compatible with 0.9.0. Disclaimer: We use the Steam Beta Branches to make major previous versions available, allowing you to replay older worlds! Nothing is lost.

There are things we can’t improve, fix or refactor without breaking savegames, but of course, we want to do that as rarely as possible. Now that we’ve made this choice, we want to combine this with other world-breaking changes, like new terrain generation.

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These are the main features we have implemented or are planning to implement for 0.9.0. There’ll probably be some minor changes, and we always encounter small unexpected issues, but the main structure of 0.9.0 is clear to us. We hope it’s clear for all of you as well now! We’d love to hear your opinion. If you want to hear what happened to earlier plans unmentioned now (like logistics), or what our other plans are post 0.9.0, or our opinion on specific proposals - let us know in the comments or on Discord!

Bedankt voor het lezen :D

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The overhaul of the tech tree is going well. The internal dev build is continuously getting new jobs and content. The past weeks saw the addition of new things like leather, animal carcasses, parchment scrolls, cooked meat and bronze tools. Testing these things is a lot of fun! It generally works as intended and requires only minor amounts of refinement.

But this week, we did discover that the early game does require a significant amount of reworking. We scaled down the monster threat at the beginning, and slowed down quite a lot of jobs. This works really well when you’ve reached 30+ colonists, but the start can be pretty annoying. This has multiple causes:

• Science progress relies on things like wheat and flax - requiring you to wait on your newly unlocked jobs for 48 or 24 hours
  
• Expansion of your colony requires items like beds, stone tools and crates, which all take longer to craft than they did in 0.8.0
  
• Your crafters still use stone tools, which seriously slows down your crafting
  
• You’re not attacked by any, or by barely any, monsters, making the nights pretty pointless
  
• There’s a serious lack of building materials, so you can’t start working on walls, towers and buildings

We’re working to fix this. Some essential items can be crafted quicker now. We’re working on new building blocks that can be produced on a large scale at the start of the game. Some other content and unlocks are being moved to the early game as well. The monster system is getting an overhaul, and there’ll be a significant amount of them at the start.

There’s something else that might be a bit repetitive to those who’ve read all previous blogs, but it was really noticeable to me this week. The biggest thing I personally was missing in Colony Survival was something I could really put my teeth into. I would hop from a relatively minor project to another relatively minor project - and then I had finished the tech tree. I would’ve built a big fort, I would have 350 colonists, I would’ve 50 builders & diggers available who could terraform the world into any shape I desired - but no grand purpose to put all of that to use.



0.7.0 was supposed to fix that with the New-Colonies-In-Other-Biomes idea. It works, but not in the satisfying way we hoped for. Your old colony makes a glider and a Colony Starter Kit, and that’s it. Then you pretty much start over from scratch, with slightly different content. It’s not a grand purpose for your original colony.

While playing the 0.9.0 dev build, I've gotten convinced that we’ll finally manage to implement that purpose successfully. Things feel more “weighty”. Items like leather and linen take a decent amount of time to craft, making them feel more valuable and incentivizing you to expand and put more workers in these jobs. I was at 50 colonists when I unlocked copper! Simultaneously, reaching 50 colonists is a lot less punishing, because colonists attract a lot less monsters in 0.9.0 (with ‘monster attraction’ being partially shifted to tech unlocks) and them not requiring luxury items anymore. You’re also not forced to work through production chains that require a lot of random items any longer.

I’m really looking forward to building out the tech tree, right into the early modern period. It would be amazing to be able to properly reward players for building a city with 1000 colonists. Not just with an achievement, but with the gameplay actually requiring it and continuously rewarding you with new tech, new weapons and new jobs. That would truly be the grand purpose I’ve been looking for for years now!

Bedankt voor het lezen :D

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This week, we’ve added more items, jobs and science to our internal dev build. Apart from that, we’ve also added the fundamentals of a pretty radical overhaul to gameplay: in 0.9.0, the monster threat will be mostly connected to your scientific/technological progress!

In all previous versions, the monster threat was solely connected to the amount of colonists you had recruited. Of course, this is a strong incentive to minimize the amount of colonists. In 0.9.0, we deliberately want to encourage rapid and sustained colony growth. To achieve this, increases in monster threat level will be mostly connected to scientific unlocks. There will be a number of key milestones like ushering in the bronze age or the iron age. In the science menu, these milestones display how much “monster threat” they add. In the top-right corner of the UI, the currently accumulated monster threat level is shown.

We’ve been testing this system this week, and are happy with the results! It encourages a different style of gameplay. Instead of doing small improvements to your defenses every couple of nights, you’re now really preparing for a big event. Another benefit is that it allows us to “determine the pace” better. In previous versions, inefficient players were punished pretty harshly. They needed more colonists, which attracted more monsters, which required more defenses and guards and ammo. Vice versa, very efficient players could reach the endgame with a pretty small number of colonists.

In 0.9.0, we can easily finetune the threat. If we want to add an end game milestone that attracts extreme numbers of monsters, requiring extensive defensive preparations, we can do so. Things like that weren’t possible before, and we’re looking forward to using these new abilities to their fullest amount.


In last week’s blog, we wrote that we were starting from the ground up and totally reworking the tech tree, items and jobs. That resulted in some very concerned comments - you’ve already been working on this game for 4+ years and now you’re going to start over?!

As soon as I read these comments, I realized that I hadn’t properly explained the situation. It’s not very intuitive. Technically, Colony Survival is a complex mixture of homemade systems and predefined standards. It’s not always obvious how much effort it costs to change something. It’s like replacing the same spelling error you’ve made 150 times in a 300 page text. That takes forever when you’re dealing with handwritten notes, but it happens with the press of a button in the case of a digital text.

In some aspects, Colony Survival is a lot easier to change, adjust and improve than people think. In other aspects, changes are a lot harder to pull off. Our systems have been designed in a way that allows us (and modders!) to easily change things like crafting recipes (per job) and the tech tree. The main difficulty there is not weeks or months of difficult programming, but having a good idea for improved gameplay.

Those are the kind of things that are getting reworked from the ground up now. It should result in an entirely new and improved gameplay experience, but the “development cost” is relatively minimal. Most technical systems are working fine and we’re leaving them intact. A lot of old items and jobs are coming back in 0.9.0 as well - often with a twist. Problems like cooked fish not being a meal anymore will be fixed. We understand the concerns, but nobody has to worry that we’re pointlessly redoing all the systems in the game :)

Bedankt voor het lezen!

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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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