https://youtu.be/KY6LGJQBI2I

The last blog ended with an open problem concerning the bottom of roofs. The response to roofs in general was very enthusiastic, but we also got a fair share of feedback surrounding that specific problem. We think we found a solution: multi-purpose crown moulding. It looks good in combination with roofs, but players are free to build without it, or to use it in other places!

0.9.0 added the “horizontal elevator” to the game. It deliberately wasn’t called “rail”, because it suffered from a bunch of constraints. It could only travel in a straight line. Moving to the left or to the right, or moving up or down, just wasn’t possible. That’s quite problematic.

With 0.9.2’s auto-adaptation system, Zun saw an opportunity to fix this! So the horizontal elevator has been upgraded to true rail. Rails that can navigate corners, and which can climb and descend hills. It’s very convenient - and fun!

We’re planning to release 0.9.2 in a few weeks. That release will be combined with a price hike. Colony Survival was released with limited content and features in 2017, for $20. In the past six years, the amount of content in the game has exploded. Sadly, inflation exploded too. When 0.9.2 is released, the price will rise to $25. If you were still on the fence in regards to Colony Survival, or if you’re planning to invite friends to your colony, this is the right moment to purchase a copy!




Do you want to test the new content? An open beta is available right now! Most of the new content is finished. A bunch of it is decorative: the roofs, flower boxes, street lanterns, doors, windows, pillars, stairs, crown moulding. Many of these have unique variants that are sensitive to their context. The doors and windows can be painted with special paint items.

All of these items should be unlockable without cheats, using the science system and a bunch of new recipes, at old jobs and a new one.

The rails mentioned above are available too, but they’re not totally finished yet. Auto-adaptation doesn’t work yet, so you'll have to manually choose between regular straight pieces, corner pieces, and up/down-pieces.

The update also contains some other changes. The UI has been adapted to be much more controller-friendly, but it's still pretty wonky in regards to the stockpile. The networking code has been improved. There are some optimizations that are mainly noticeable in enormous worlds or on low-level hardware.

If you’re playing the beta, please let us know your opinion! What works, what doesn’t? Is the place of the new content in the tech tree appropriate? Are the recipes reasonable? Are there unexpected problems? Have you got ideas for potential easy additions that would fit this update well? Share your thoughts in our Discord in the #openbeta channel, or in the comments!

To access the beta, right-click on Colony Survival in the Steam Library. Go to Properties, then Betas, and enter the password ForBlogReadersOnly. Select the 0.9.2 branch.



Bedankt voor het lezen :D

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I’ve been thinking about adding “proper” roofs since…. perhaps before the Steam release. It wasn’t possible to add in a practical manner before Zun developed the automatic-adaptation-system. When he started working on it this year, I made the first mockup, just to see what it would look like, roughly.


It was very simple: just one “side roof”. The screenshot already shows more complicated blocks: side roofs with a “front”. But on simple houses, you can get quite far with just side roofs!

But what if the width of your house is not an even number? Then this happens:


So we needed an extra shape: the “middle roof”. And of course, the middle roof also needs a variant with a “front”, one with a “back”, and one with both the front and the back in one block. Problem solved:


Which is nice when you’re building simple square houses. But with this “decorative update”, we want to encourage people to move away from those efficient but boring shapes. What if your house has a more complicated shape?


You lack certain roof shapes: “inside corners”. And at the top, the “middle roof” needs a 3-way corner. Well, we can make these too of course.


But the reverse problem quickly announces itself as well.


The solution: “outside corners”!


And of course, there’s another missing piece: 4-way corners for middle roofs! Here they are:


Are you starting to notice the pattern? Again, the reverse problem exists too. A 4-way corner is basically 4 inside corners. There’s also four outside corners occurring in one middle roof: a pyramid shape. We’ve added that one as well!


That’s not all the options. All of these shapes are available in blue too!


The largest concern still left for the roofs is the bottom side. They lack something like roof gutters. Perhaps we can expand the quarter block system to include corner variants and upside-down variants as if they're gutters.

Building and implementing all these shapes took quite some work. Making sure the right piece is automatically selected in all circumstances is complicated. When working on the automatic adaptation, Zun found a lot of edge cases. We even found some new ones while working on this blog. But we’ve been making a lot of progress and the new roof system is 98% functional now!

Last week, all these items were “cheat-items”, they had to be spawned with commands to be tested. This week, I’ve been working to integrate them into the “real” game. Figuring out where to place them in the tech tree, how to unlock them, to what (new?) jobs the recipes ought to belong, what the ingredients should be. That’s nearly finished as well.

We’ve still got to do some last implementation things, some fixing, some adding. The controller support also needs some more work. But the 0.9.1 release is coming into view! We haven’t yet had a Summer holiday, and we won’t be taking ours before the update is out. And I’d love to have some free weeks before the leaves fall off the trees :)

Bedankt voor het lezen!

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We’re participating in the Summer Sale, and that means that Colony Survival is currently 25% off!

We’ve continued our work on the new decorative items. Most significantly, we’ve added the framework for the new “paint-feature”. Instead of cluttering your inventory with many colored variants of all “paintable items”, the stockpile will only contain the “basic” variant. You’ve got to grab and use colored paint items to paint those items in the color of your choice. Of course, there’s also a paint stripper item, for when you want to return to the unpainted variant.

This is now working in our unreleased dev-build. Windows and doors can be placed and then painted red, blue or green. It helps a lot to make buildings look more lively and unique!


Apart from that, we’ve added new lanterns which can be mounted on walls, ceilings and the ground. Roofs have been enhanced by adding a “middle roof” variant, solving a problem that happened when your roof had an uneven amount of blocks in its width.

Zun found a complex technical issue in the Steam networking part of Colony Survival. It was a rather persistent issue but he has managed to significantly improve it!

We’ve also had a little Summer holiday. I traveled to Berlin, trying to get some insight on how we can build large colonies/cities that are simultaneously beautiful, enjoyable and functional. I’ve discovered that I like subways/trains more than I thought! We've returned to work this week and are once again making good progress.


Bedankt voor het lezen :D

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In the past month, we’ve continued work on controller support and more decorative blocks. We’ve noticed that large collections of decorative blocks are common in many frequently used mods. We think it would be good to make the unmodded game a bit more like that.

One problematic thing in these mods is the abundance of… “variants”. Firstly, things come in multiple colors. Secondly, there are quite some mods that offer “combined shapes” - like fences that actually link up. Which does require players to have separate items like “fence start”, “fence middle”, “fence end”. If each of these parts has color variants as well, the inventory quickly becomes very cluttered.


To solve this problem, we’ve got paints and “adapting blocks”. Firstly, players will be able to make paint items, and they’ll have to use these items to “physically” paint blocks. This helps reduce all these items to one base color variant.

Secondly, Zun has made great progress on a system that automatically chooses the right 3D-model for the situation. Take for example the fence. A fence can be unconnected - basically making it a wooden pillar. It can be connected to 1, 2, 3 or 4 other fences horizontally. And if you stack the “unconnected fence” (the pillar) vertically, it adapts into a special pillar with unique pieces at the start and end. So we’ve got many different 3D-models for the fence, but only one will be available in the stockpile. That simultaneously helps solve the clutter-problem, and it makes these items a lot more usable!


A special problem was the window. One of the blocks we’re adding is a window frame, and this one will adapt to different window sizes as well. When designing the required 3D-models, I only thought about regular rectangular windows; 1x2, 2x4, 6x4.

But of course, players can build much more complicated window shapes. And in the process of building a large window, or when removing one piece from an existing large window, you also get quite weird, non-rectangular shapes.

Figuring out how to deal with these shapes and making them look relatively sensible and natural was a challenge, but Zun has solved it well! I haven’t been able to “break” the current system.


The new decorative blocks have no “functional” impact on gameplay. They are not required, they don’t make colonists happier or more productive. On one hand, they are merely tools for more artistic players. On the other hand, I do think they’ll influence less artistically inclined players as well. I’ve noticed that due to the new options, I look differently at my buildings. I’m more tempted to make them a bit unique, and I feel more immersed. We hope it’ll be a good step towards making CS feel more alive!

Bedankt voor het lezen :D

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In the past month, Zun has put a lot of effort into adding proper controller support to Colony Survival. For a longer time, it has been possible to access basic gameplay functionality with the Steam Controller or the Steam Deck, but it wasn’t up to standard. And playing the game with a regular Xbox/Playstation/Switch controller was pretty much impossible.

So we’ve been working to improve that situation. Rebinding jumping from space to “A” on your controller, or moving around from WASD to a thumbstick, is not that complicated. What is complicated, is replacing the mouse in the UI.

With a mouse, you just move the cursor to whatever place you need it to be and click to select it in one step. With a controller, you’ve got one button selected, and then you move that selection to another button right next to it. If there’s 10 buttons between the selected button and the intended button, you’ll need to repeat that 10 times.


Connections between buttons in the UI editor

Our interface wasn’t designed with that in mind. In some places, you have to move through dozens of other buttons to get where you want to be. For example, moving your selection through all of your savegames to get to the “play” button. That’s not very practical.

In some cases, Zun improved this situation by refactoring the layout of the UI into a more controller-friendly design. In other cases, this situation can be improved by adding button shortcuts. Instead of having to press the “Play” button in the UI, it could be enough to select a savegame and press for example “X” on the controller.



We’ll have to make those shortcuts visible in the UI, otherwise people don’t know they exist. That means we need support to display all the buttons on most controllers. And the ability to rebind all these buttons in the controls settings menu. By default, Unity doesn’t properly support that, but we’ve found a very useful asset that has helped us integrate all of that.

Good controller support is now roughly 70% finished and will be publicly released in the next update.


One of the unexpected results of the survey was a majority preference for us to focus on better building instead of better combat. So I’ve done a lot of investigating and experimenting to see how we could integrate that into the game.

We’ve looked at “building” from a bunch of angles. Better automated construction workers. Blueprints that allow you to copy and paste designs. New requirements for bed and jobs, to prevent massive caves filled with endless rows of beds and jobblocks, devoid of all light and privacy.

Finding the perfect solution has been difficult though. Take those extra requirements for beds and jobs. If they’re simple, players will find them easy to ‘minmax’, and the new solution will be a repetitive chore as well. If they’re very complex, it becomes a completely different game with much more complicated colonists. Let us know if you’re interested in that!

We’re converging at a different solution: allowing players to build more beautiful colonies. How do we make that possible? How do we encourage that? I have to admit, this is not one of my strengths. I find it hard to build truly beautiful things, both in Colony Survival and in other games.

These are complex questions. It involves the very nature of beauty, in a way that transcends current fashion and localised preferences, and asks us to translate that to the constraints of our voxel game.


Wernigerode, Germany

Beauty in architecture is a subject I’ve long been interested in. Scott Alexander wrote a fascinating article about it that raises difficult questions. Last year, before the survey, I had already starting delving into the works of Christopher Alexander (not related to Scott), which strives to provide an answer to those questions.

Christopher Alexander writes a lot about dealing with constraints. Buildings face a lot of them. Take for example a home. It has to provide a place to cook, a place to sleep, a place to face the public world and meet strangers, a more intimate place to relax, a proper transition to the garden. It has to let in light without losing too much warmth. It has to deal with rain, with snow, with gravity.

Dealing with all these challenges properly in a consistent style while using natural materials seems to result in rather cosy places that humans like. But… our colonists are very simple. You don’t have to deal with rainwater, rotting wood, or gravity. Which results in the endless factory-caves being optimal.

So there doesn’t seem to be a perfect solution that automatically helps players build the beautiful towns of the past. But we’re working on the next best solution: give players more tools to achieve a semblance of that look, if they choose to do so.

Currently, players can pretty much only use 1x1x1 cubes. Build a wall of them and each block is identical to the next one. We want to add more detailed meshes that are more interactive. Think of pillars which automatically add a decorative top and bottom. Think of fences which connect to each other. Think of doors and window frames.


An experiment with pillars

These automatic connections between meshes are perhaps a good stepping stone towards more complicated mechanics and infrastructure in future updates: think of pipelines and electric grids.

To prevent red stone pillar / green stone pillar / blue wooden pillar / white wooden pillar from cluttering your stockpile, we’re considering a “paint feature”. Equip the red-paint-item to paint pillars/doors/fences red, and certain blocks as well.

Let us know how you feel about this! Which detailed decorations would you like to have? What features do you need to make more beautiful colonies? How would you feel about more complex colonists with more realistic needs - perhaps in a totally separate mode?

Bedankt voor het lezen :D

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Colony Survival is currently on sale! It's 20% off until 23 March. We also just released the first major update to 0.9: 0.9.1.

The major change in 0.9.1 concerns pathfinding and siege mode. In short: siege mode is properly functional again, and pathfinding should be better and faster. On to the long explanation!

The Old Situation Before 0.9.0

Paths for colonists and monsters are calculated in a special “Navigation World”. This world is made up out of Chunks that are 16 blocks wide, 16 blocks deep and 16 blocks tall. Many of these Chunks are underground and hold no space for NPCs to physically stand. When there are places for NPCs to be, these are designated and connected with each other in a special Navigation Mesh.

When a monster spawns far outside of a colony and has to find a path to the banner, he has to connect Navigation Meshes in many different Chunks. Sometimes, the path through a Chunk is a straight line through an empty field. Sometimes, the path through a Chunk is a complex maze with gates, barriers, stairs, bridges, tunnels and multiple different levels of height. NPCs only had access to a rough estimate of the time it would take to traverse a Chunk. This lack of information regularly caused them to make silly choices.

Before 0.9.0, monsters spawned from 8PM to 1AM. The monster spawning algorithm picked a random location outside of the safe zone and tried to find a path from there to the banner. If it succeeds, a monster is spawned there. If it fails, it does another attempt, and another, and another. After twenty attempts, the algorithm gives up and activates Siege Mode, which lasts until the end of the spawn period, 1AM.

In that period, food consumption would increase eightfold, but only in that period, leading to an increase of your daily food consumption by 160%.


"View of the world as seen by NPCs - just showing positions they can stand at. Color is approximated distance away from the banner.

The Situation in 0.9.0

In the recent big update, monsters only spawn between 8PM and 9PM. Siege mode lasts equally long, which means your daily food consumption only goes up by 32%.

We planned to have a proper Notification Menu, and in preparation for that, we removed the text message that informs you about the activation of Siege Mode. The audio effect could only be heard in the specific outpost/colony where Siege Mode was active. This made it very easy for players to be completely unaware that Siege Mode was even a thing. The effect on food was barely noticeable too.

0.9.1 Improvements

Each Navigation Mesh now contains a Signpost pointing in the direction of the banner. This makes it a lot easier for monsters to calculate the right path, which significantly improves performance when you’re dealing with large amounts of monsters. Without Signposts, pathfinding would “give up” when mazes became too long and complicated. With Signposts, 0.9.1 should support mazes that are functionally infinite.

The Signposts are recalculated every 20 to 30 seconds. Monsters only spawn in Chunks with Signposts outside the safe zone. If these are not available, there is no path to the banner, no monsters will be spawned and Siege Mode is activated. This can now happen 24/7! Closing your gates in the middle of the day will result in Siege Mode.

It will last until Signposts are available outside the safe zone again. As long as Siege Mode is active, 1 meal will be lost from the stockpile per hour for every 5 Threat related to that outpost or colony. The text message for Siege Mode has returned, and the audio signal is now ‘global’ and can be heard everywhere. Siege Mode should be a lot more obvious now, both the warning and the consequences.

NPCs now also know how long it will take to traverse a Chunk, instead of relying on a rough estimate. This should make their pathfinding choices more sensible.


Top-down view of the Sign Posts. The white blocks are a path around a colony wall to the banner.

Miscellaneous

The horizontal and vertical elevators were very slow. Their speed has been boosted to make them more relevant. The vertical elevator has been upgraded from 18km/h to 54km/h, and the horizontal version increased from 22km/h to 90km/h (that last number is the speed limit of the glider).

Colonists spawned with an empty stomach and immediately tried to collect a meal. They now arrive fully satiated.

Trade rules could not be removed. Now, that’s possible.

Clay is available at the builder.

32-bit Windows is causing issues, so support for it has ended from 0.9.1 onwards. Those on 32-bit systems can continue to play 0.9.0 via the beta branches.

And some other minor fixes and optimisations, available in the in-game changelog!

EDIT 23:18 Amsterdam time: The update has been reverted until further notice. The monsterspawning algorithm spawns monsters in safe zones in a significant amount of worlds. We're trying to find and fix the issue.
EDIT 00:04 : Update 0.9.1 is live again! The problem above should be fixed now.

Bedankt voor het lezen :D

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Two weeks ago, we've asked you to participate in our survey. Over 600 people did so! Thanks a lot for your effort, it's very helpful. We promised to share the results, so here they are!

We hope to learn something from this survey that would help us improve the game for both existing and future players. We think we can do that, but of course, there is a selection bias. Survey respondents are mostly people who already own the game and follow these blogs because they like the game. That's not a perfectly representative sample of either existing or future potential players, so these answers do require some interpretation.



Those who participated in the survey started playing the game at moments quite evenly distributed along the CS timeline. It's great to see so many people still with us from the original release date!

Many of these people have played the game for over 100 hours, which we are quite impressed by. The options for 0-30 hours are barely used. Nearly three-quarters of the surveyed players have played for over 50 hours.



The "achievement decline" is quite gradual, which is good in my opinion. There is a "gap" between starting outposts and using the glider launcher though. I think it wasn't that pronounced when only the first 30-80 people had answered the survey. Do we need a more accessible form of transport before glider launchers?

1 in 5 players has written a Steam Review. One third will never do so. Nearly half says they will do so in the future. Steam Reviews are much appreciated :)


Important sentences that were cut off: "I have participated in the 0.9.0 Beta" / "Videos on YouTube" / "Streams on Twitch"

It's interesting to notice that the most popular thing in this list is watching Colony Survival on YouTube. More than half of you have played CS in co-op with a friend, while less than 1 in 5 have joined a public multiplayer server. Nearly half of the surveyed players have used the Steam Workshop to download a mod, texture or world, which is a lot more popular than I expected!

Nearly half of you have joined our Discord, but less than half of that group is verified, which means the majority has never left a message on that Discord server. Another noticeable thing is the fact that less than 1 in 5 have participated in the beta - at a certain moment I was convinced that anybody semi-interested in 0.9.0 had joined it!



According to your judgement, 0.9.0 raised the game from a 7.3 to a 8.6. We're very happy with these numbers :)



Staying in Early Access for another couple of years is clearly the most popular option, but "5" is the third most popular option - indicating quite a lot of "neutrality". The option to leave Early Access a lot sooner is met with that same neutrality - "5" is the most popular option here.


1 = Complete disagreement, 5 = Complete agreement

Apparently, one of your main causes for enjoying Early Access is more and better updates. Influencing development is less important.

The majority of you doesn't think we necessarily need to stay in Early Access any longer because CS is not yet ready to be a "full release title". But a not insignificant group of 44.2% does advice us to improve the game more before leaving EA, and we'll definitely attempt that.


1 = Complete disagreement, 5 = Complete agreement

87.1% of our players doesn't believe we've been in Early Access for too long. I feel we can interpret these results as a vote of confidence. We don't have to stay in EA much longer, it's fine if we leave it, but it's also fine to stay there for a longer period.

Most of you don't view EA as a bad excuse to have low quality elements in games.


1 = Complete disagreement, 5 = Complete agreement

You've all got quite positive impressions of Early Access! You're not that worried about savegames breaking, and only 1 in 5 believes the label is unpopular and limits the growth and popularity of Colony Survival.

Of course, there's some bias in this answer. People who do have very negative opinions about Early Access, don't purchase and follow Early Access games! Now the question is, how many Steam users agree with you? If 4 out of 5 Steam users do dislike Early Access, that's a lot of players we're missing.


Insert Thanos-perfectly-balanced meme

The current price seems to be perfectly "in the middle". Nearly equally sized groups think the price is a bit cheap / a bit expensive.

Raising the price to €25 is still seen as perfectly reasonable or even cheap by a majority of surveyed players. 1 in 3 players does believe it's a bit much though. It's a tough dilemma: losing significant amounts of revenue because we're pricing the game too cheap is suboptimal, but losing revenue and potential players because the game is too expensive might be even worse.

We're strongly considering a 0.9.1 update which contains some new content and that finally raises the price to €/$25.



There is a jetpack mod by Kenovis on the Workshop that allows players to re-activate personal flight without breaking achievements, at a significant in-game resource cost. We really like the idea, but it "just" uses the "flight cheat", it doesn't feel like a true jetpack.

We thought the jetpack would be popular because many people miss the personal-flying-without-breaking-achievements feature. It is popular, the majority rates it quite highly, but there's also a lot of voters rating it 1-5. It's the least popular idea in this part of the survey.

Boats in general score a lot better, but one specific young British man decided to artificially add 1000 fake votes, to indicate his disagreement with boats. To deter future tampering with surveys, his country has been ejected from the EU.



Blueprint builders are very popular. Portals/dimensions less so, but 10/10 is still the most popular options.



Inbetween those two options in terms of popularity are pipes/cables/conveyor belts. We're thinking about how to implement those!



One of the biggest problems I experienced during my own playthroughs of 0.9.0 was the invisible slow destruction of distant outposts. I expected the outposts-UI option to be more popular than the other options, but the reverse happened. The differences are small though.


1 = Content, 5 = Polish

A majority wants us to focus on polish this Winter, and on new content the rest of the year. That makes sense!


1 = Combat, 5 = Building
1 = More complexity, 5 = Quantity

You clearly voted to be more interested in better building than better combat! I hadn't expected that and since noticing these results I've been thinking a lot about how to accomplish that. That subject deserves at least a full Friday Blog!

More complex and detailed colonists were also less popular than I expected. But that's good - adding more detail there would be hard to do in Colony Survival I!


1 = Tutorials, 5 = Content
1 = 100% focus on singleplayer, 5 = Put some effort in the experience on public servers

A large majority would like to see us focus on content instead of tutorials. I do understand this, but we've got to keep in mind that surveyed players already own and play the game. Perhaps potential new players are hesitant because of the lack of proper tutorials, and solving that issue would be very worthwhile?

Only a small minority wants us to put some effort in improving the experience on public servers. I think we can conclude this mustn't receive a very high priority on our to-do-list :)

So, these were all the answers to all the questions in the survey. Were their any answers that surprised you? Are there things you'd like to add or explain? Let us know in the comments or on Discord!

Bedankt voor het lezen :D

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Enter the Survey here!

Until Monday, we’re participating in the Steam Base Builder Fest. Get the game now for -25%. This will be the lowest price for a long time!

After the sale, we’ll certainly adjust the price in some relatively minor currencies like the Argentine peso. Some nations have suffered major inflation, and we have not adjusted to that since 2017. This causes the price of the game to be totally out of sync with the €/$ 20 price tag.

We’re still planning to raise that €/$ price tag as well. We’ll probably combine that raise with the release of 0.9.1.


Colony Survival has been in Early Access for 5.5 years now. In that time, we’ve released a large amount of updates, adding loads of new content and features. It’s a completely different game now, compared to 0.1 in June 2017.

To us, Early Access basically means “Work In Progress”. Which is slightly annoying to players because it causes minor inconveniences, but it is simultaneously beneficial: it means the game is getting bigger and better. We’ve personally purchased a bunch of Early Access games, and we've never really longed for that Early Access phase to conclude. The end of Early Access often means the end of (major / free) development. As long as the devs can and want to work on their game, Early Access is fine with us.

The release of update 0.9.0 broke old worlds. This was fundamentally unavoidable: there was no way you were going to practically continue your old colony with the new tech tree and changed mechanics, even if we’d put effort in technically enabling that. Choosing to break old worlds allowed us to overhaul the game in better and more significant ways.

We would not dare do something like that if we were not in Early Access. After the full release, an overhaul like 0.9.0 would be impossible. It would limit future potential.

But, Early Access has a different meaning to different people. “Open world survival crafting indie game in Early Access” is quite the meme. To some people, Early Access means “shoddy, bug-filled game that hasn’t reached its goals and the quality of a full release game”. Seen in that light, we don’t think the Early Access label does justice to Colony Survival.

Leaving Early Access would probably allow us to reach new audiences. It would also be a good moment to look at things like console ports.

We’re a bit conflicted. Staying in Early Access has benefits and drawbacks; leaving Early Access has benefits and drawbacks. We would love to have your opinion! What do you think? Detailed responses are certainly welcome in the comments and Discord, but for added convenience, we’ve also created a survey which adds a bunch of other questions. Please participate in the survey here!




We’ve spent the past few weeks as a semi-holiday. On one hand, we’ve taken some time off and worked on some non-CS stuff. On the other hand, we did keep a close eye on all your feedback and bug reports. We did release some minor patches to fix some smaller problems. We made some improvements to the Thai, Spanish and Japanese localization. We tweaked the glider mechanics. Performance of guards has been optimized. For full changelogs, check the in-game info menu or #small-patch-changelogs on Discord.

Every Friday Blog contains a bunch of screenshots. The Steam Storepage is filled with screenshots, and we’re going to work on trailers reflecting the new content soon. We’d love to feature your worlds! If you’ve made something beautiful and want to help us, please put it on the Steam Workshop with some screenshots and a description! We regularly look for new worlds there.

We’re not just looking for massive statues and temples: “practical” worlds reflecting how players actually build and what is useful to complete the tech tree are very welcome too!

We'll share the results of the survey in a couple of weeks.

Bedankt voor het lezen :D

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Happy New Year, or as they say in the north of the Netherlands, veul hail en zeeg’n!

The release of 0.9.0 went very well. A bunch of existing players returned to the new update, and another group decided to purchase the game for the very first time. It’s great to see all this activity. We’ve received an enormous amount of feedback, screenshots, videos and mods and we try to see and read all of it.

Our primary goals of the update seem to have been accomplished. Outposts work. They are used much more frequently than the previous multiple-colonies system. Instead of complaints about how tedious they are, we’re now receiving complaints that outposts might be overpowered! We believe it’s good that outposts are slightly overpowered - we want to reward players for expanding, building and travelling.

Most players seem to agree that 0.9.0 has more content and is engaging for a significantly longer time than previous versions. We can follow your progress by looking at the achievement statistics, and that progress is steady. There doesn’t seem to be one specific unintuitive part of the tech tree that causes a sudden drop-off of players.




Of course, no big change is without drawbacks and issues. On the day of the release, the old achievements were removed and replaced with 50 new ones. Some people were very attached to their old achievements and did not like that. Sorry!

The new achievements didn’t work perfectly. A part of them didn’t unlock. This should be fixed by now, although you do have to open the statistics board and check the right pages to unlock the statistics achievements. We're working on a patch to make that easier.

The poison guard seemed to be broken at the moment of release. This has been fixed as well. In total, we released three patches with miscellaneous fixes and improvements - see #small-patch-changelogs in Discord or the in-game info-menu for a complete list.

Some people have criticised the cost of items, like building materials, in the early game, combined with the fact that you can’t make things like planks yourself anymore. We understand their reasons, but we ultimately believe this is for the best. It does make it more rewarding to grow and improve your colony.

There is another point of criticism though which is very valid, but also applies to previous versions of CS. There is a long article on the Steam Forums titled Building in the Colony is Pointless. It has started a deep debate there. I do believe Profugo Barbatus describes a significant issue here, but I find it hard to come up with good solutions. How do we make constructing interesting, complex, unique and beautiful buildings more rewarding? Feel free to leave your suggestions in that thread, here in the comments and/or on Discord!




Already, a bunch of mods for 0.9.0 have been released. I haven’t tested all of them yet, but I did test the chisel mod and it is amazing! It works a lot more intuitively than I had expected, and it really opens up a lot of building possibilities. I’ve seen talented people build truly beautiful architecture with it. Download it here!

Not everybody can develop mods, but everybody can build things, and it’s easy to share your world on the Steam Workshop. We’re planning to film a new trailer for CS, and shoot new promotional screenshots, in the next weeks and months. We’d love to use a bunch of different worlds for that. We’ve already seen loads of amazing screenshots made in 0.9.0, and we’d love to walk through these worlds for ourselves! So please, if you have an interesting world and want to share it with the rest of us, please put it on the Workshop!

Bedankt voor het lezen :D

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We just uploaded 0.9.0 to the main Colony Survival branch! It should be available to download and play right now. If it isn’t, you might want to verify the integrity of game files.

We've released this update a couple of hours before a discount, so if you're here very quickly and you still need to purchase the game, it's in your best interest to wait a moment :) We're planning to give a similar discount somewhere in January. Afterwards, we're probably going to raise the price of the game.

This is the largest update we’ve ever released. It totally overhauls the game. The tech tree has been rebuilt from scratch, and the terrain generation has been drastically enhanced and changed. This means that you will have to start a new savegame. Pre-0.9.0 worlds are incompatible with 0.9.0. This does not mean your pre-0.9.0 worlds are lost though. Right-click Colony Survival in the Steam Library, click properties and go to the “betas” tab. Here, you will be able to select older versions of the game, suited to the older world you’d like to revisit.

0.9.0 contains a gigantic amount of new content. New features, new jobs, new weapons, new monsters, new building blocks and new science. Grenade launchers, steel gliders that are launched into the sky with explosives, glassblowers, threat banners, elevators, tools, traps. We’ve adopted new design philosophies which change some of the fundamentals of how the game is played. All old achievements have been removed and replaced with 50 new ones - and these ones shouldn’t be unlockable with cheats! We’d like to explain the biggest changes one by one.

Before we go into details, I'd like to give one piece of advice to people who are going to jump right into the update: Colony Survival is not an idle game. When certain things feel slow, that's an incentive to expand and recruit more colonists, not an incentive to wait. We've done our best to ensure that all jobs are valuable 'to the end' - we hope you won't ever regret scaling up and setting up a big new production chain.




Back in 2018-2019, we worked on 0.7.0 for over a year. The core of the update was “multiple colonies”: one player could start multiple colonies in the same world. It was probably the most badly implemented feature in the entire game.

• Second colonies had some unique benefits, but they were only available if you travelled a massive distance to “other biomes”, like the Tropics and the Far East.
  
• The only ways to get there were by foot, which was very tedious, or by glider, which required players to launch themselves in some kind of strange and confusing VTOL way
  
• If players wanted to share items between their colonies, they had to use a complicated and slow trading interface
  
• The only unique benefits of second colonies were new luxury items, which you didn’t really need and didn’t give access to special or interesting new content

This had the consequence that the vast majority of the playerbase never used the multiple-colonies-feature. It’s just too confusing, too boring, and not rewarding enough.

We think we fixed all of these issues with the new “outposts” feature.

• The unique biomes now have semi-randomized locations in the “main” world. You don’t need to leave a big ‘spawn-biome’ to find them - they are much closer and all around you.
  
• Gliders have been changed a lot to make them more convenient and fun to use.
  
• Outposts automatically share their stockpile and science with the main colony and other outposts. No more tedious trading interface.
  
• Outposts are required to gather unique resources that can only be grown or mined in heaths, swamps, on top of mountains and below mammoth trees. These resources are required to get access to a lot of the mid- to late-game features and technology, making outposts an integral part of the game.

Now, multiple colonies(/outposts) can finally be used practically. Do you spot a fertile, flat field on the other side of the river? Build an outpost there, put down some farms and your main colony instantly has a much-needed boost of food. The world around you has become much more useful, and there is so much more to build than in 0.8.




In all previous versions of CS, the amount of colonists determined the amount of monsters that assaults your fortress. This has been changed radically; it’s now one of the least important things. The amount of monsters is now linked to your “Threat Level”. Some scientific unlocks in the tech tree add large amounts of Threat. Certain blocks, like lockboxes that increase the storage of Colony Points, also add to your Threat Level.

Colonists do add some Threat, but it’s relatively low compared to these others. We believe this makes the game much more fun to play. It has become less important to optimise the efficiency of every individual colonist, and more important to just… grow. There is no more risk of a vicious cycle where guards and ammo-crafters are a main cause of the very monsters they are fighting.

When you build an outpost, Threat Level is assigned to it proportional to the amount of colonists there. When you’ve got 90 colonists in your main colony and 10 in the outpost, the outpost ought to receive roughly 10% of the Threat Level. It’s possible to change this distribution though. You can unlock Threat Banners, and placing them in your colony basically makes them act like “fake colonists”, increasing the share of Threat that is assigned to that colony (or outpost). This allows you to build dedicated ‘superfortresses’ that lure monsters away from other colonies.




The previous world was designed to be “globally” interesting, to have very different locations somewhere. The new world is designed to be “locally” interesting, to have variety and unique features in the more practical distances that most players actually travel. We’ve added rivers and enhanced mountains. Places which host unique resources should be easily identifiable. Swamps are filled with tiny streams and ponds. Heaths have patches of sand and purple vegetation




Traps are static blocks that apply an effect to monsters either in front, on top or below them. Most traps do damage, but there are also traps that slow or completely freeze monster movement. Traps can only be reloaded during the day by a trapfixer, so you need to build them in a way that makes them accessible to colonists.

Sometimes, things go wrong. You run out of copper ingots, your ammo storage is depleted and monsters walk right into your colony. How do you save yourself? With the Sacred Failsafe! At Sacred Altars, colonists can turn regular meals into Sacred Meals. When they’re consumed, you earn Sacred Points. You’re supposed to gradually build them up in many days, and to use them at the Sacred Failsafe when monsters breach your defences. The Failsafe will then do large amounts of damage to all monsters in the world, starting with the monsters it’s physically closest to.




Since we added the tech tree in 0.3.0, we’ve mostly been building on top of it. This is the first time we’ve completely overhauled it. The intention is to make players feel like they are really starting in the Stone Age, with stone tools and mudbricks. You need to expand and improve to unlock metals and all kinds of other technologies. Via the Bronze Age and the Iron Age, players journey to more modern times, with unlocks like printing presses, muskets and tabulating machines. This journey adds all kinds of new jobs, like tanners, alchemists, glassblowers, composters, lathe operators and scribes.

At the end of the tech tree, there is “Prestige Science”. It doesn’t have a true functional benefit, but it demands you scale up your production massively. Unlocking tiers of Prestige Science also adds a large amount of Threat, requiring you to upgrade your defences. Of course, you are rewarded with achievements for completing these tiers. Achievement progress is tracked publicly and we are keeping a close eye on it!




0.7.0 added gliders. To fly the glider, you first had to make it go straight up in the air like a helicopter, and then you had to switch to flying forward. This was strange and not intuitive and required complicated controls. I didn’t use them a lot, and a lot of players needed external help to understand them.

They now work completely differently. You no longer place gliders, you place glider-launchers. Every time you click on the glider-launcher, you are launched forward from that position in a new glider. The glider is now truly a glider; it no longer has an ‘engine’. You’ll need to place the glider-launcher on top of a tower or mountain to make the best use of it. After you’ve unlocked steel & gunpowder, you can research steel gliders. These are launched explosively, allowing them to gain a lot of altitude on their own.

These aren’t the only form of player transport. We’ve also added elevators and horizontal elevators, allowing you to build shafts and rails in straight lines and to automatically travel from A to B.




In 0.7.0, you had to distribute luxury items to your colonists to ensure their happiness. This system contained complicated math and weird equilibriums, and we changed it in 0.8.0. There, you earned Colony Points by distributing those luxury items. It was less focused on punishment, and more on earning rewards. But the distribution happened automatically, making it feel quite out of control.

In 0.9.0, you earn Colony Points by deliberately selling items at the merchant. These Points can then be used in a myriad of ways. You can purchase items at the merchant as well. Resources from other biomes will be necessary before you can unlock Outposts, and in that period, their only source is the merchant. The Points are also deeply integrated into the tech tree, and you’ll often need a significant amount of them. Last but not least, we’ve still got the Point Upgrades from 0.8. Raising the colonist capacity limit and the banner safe zone range requires increasing amounts of Points.

The merchant offers a lot of flexibility to players. You are free to choose in what way you will earn Colony Points, and how to spend them. Will you be very self-reliant and immediately build outposts everywhere? Or will you exchange your own luxury goods for resources like tin and zinc?




In previous versions of CS, colonists couldn’t save their “crafting progress”. They had to finish the item they were making, or the ore they were mining, or start over completely. This meant practically that we were limited to ~15 second crafting times.

To make things more expensive in terms of labour time, we added lots of small parts like copper nails and iron rivets. To craft one advanced item, you’d need a lot of these smaller parts. This made it a lot harder to keep track of production chains.

We’ve removed this limitation. Colonists can now work for 180 seconds on a 300-second recipe, go to bed, and finish the remaining 120 seconds of work in the morning. We’ve used this to remove pointless ingredients and streamline the production chain. It makes sense for certain items, like crossbow and printing presses, to take more than 15 seconds of work. Long crafting times can be annoying at the start, so we’ve kept them fairly short there. But in the late game, when you’re commanding many hundreds of colonists, it helps to keep recipes sensible and to keep a clear overview of your production. It’s also an extra incentive to expand.

Tools are a way to speed up these longer crafting times. Tool use is not universal though. Some colonists can’t use tools, others can’t craft without tools. Some jobs need special tools. The default tool type has tiers going from stone to steel. Each tier has a unique durability, cost and crafting speed. Some jobs can use all the tiers, some only use the first tiers, others only the final tiers. Colonists need to visit the tool shop to grab new tools. At this tool shop, you can set different limits determining how many tools colonists should leave in the stockpile.




We’ve added a new type of job. A “harvester” jobblock recruits the colonist, and that colonist has to visit nearby “sources” for his work. We’ve currently got a scribe visiting scrolls shelves, a researcher visiting bookcases, and a farmer visiting wisteria plants. Instead of rows of colonists working at rows of jobblocks, you’ll now have to build custom libraries! The sources automatically regenerate over time. A ratio of 1 harvester to 10 sources ensures a sustainable long term balance.


We’ve added and changed too much to describe all of it here. There are now monoculars which actually make you zoom in when you equip them in the hotbar. When you do the same with astrolabes, they point you to nearby biomes. 0.9.0 has guards that do poison damage, and weapons with area-of-effect damage. Try the game to encounter all new content and other differences!


Over three months ago, we started the beta of 0.9.0. Roughly 300 players volunteered. We've received enormous amounts of feedback and used it to shape 0.9.0 as best as we could. We're grateful to everybody who participated.
Thanks to Lady Kathleen who made the world which is the new main menu background.
Thanks to Kenovis, who has worked hard to update mods for 0.9.0 - I really recommend the chisel mod! Thanks to Aanze, Toran, Krydax and Cramm and all the others who left their detailed feedback in #test-long-impressions.
Thanks to Meowzers, who pushed 0.9.0 to its limits by building massive colonies with many thousands of colonists - he is single-handedly responsible for the 500-in-game-days achievement.
Thanks to Vobbert for his years of testing, advising and moderating.
Thanks to Boneidle, PatateNouille, Ardandal and Zeta-Primette for their longtime participation in the Discord.
Thanks to Chicago for all the encouragement he gave us, and thanks to Bog for keeping our egos in check!
Finally, thanks to the near 300 others that we sadly can't all name, but whose help has been very valuable.

This is a big moment for Colony Survival. We hope the update provides you with many hours of entertainment. We're looking forward to hearing from you - on Discord, here in the comments and on the Steam Forum. We'd love to see the worlds you've made.

Veel plezier in 0.9.0!

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