Hey there Catanians! 🐑

We would like to share some noteworthy progress we have made this year. The average playtime for our daily active Catanians has increased by over 20% since January, equating to an average of 53 minutes per day spent building settlements, trading resources, and dominating the board. Additionally, we have seen a 12% increase in our daily active user base, and we are incredibly grateful for your unwavering support and love for Catan Universe.

To ensure we continue providing you with the best possible gaming experience, we are putting together a community survey to gather your thoughts and suggestions. Our development team is also working diligently to address any existing issues and bugs before introducing new features.

Thank you for being a part of our amazing community of Catanians. Keep playing and trading! 🎲

Hi Catanians,
we are currently investigating the issues that occurred last night between 8:30 pm - 4:00 am [CET]. Right now all metrics are back to normal. Thank you very much for your feedback.

Hey Catanians! 👋

It's time for our weekly Dev update and we've been busy behind the scenes tackling some of the most pressing issues you've reported. We're happy to report that we've made great progress with host switching and AI stalls after a host switch. These changes are already looking good on our test servers. 💪

However, trade has been giving us some headaches, but we're working hard to get it sorted out. And thanks to the logging introduced with version 2.3.1, we've identified the issue for accounts that haven't been able to migrate yet. Turns out it's connected to faulty guilds/friend list entries.

We're committed to migrating all accounts completely, and so far over 1.4 million accounts have been successfully migrated to our new servers. Unfortunately, some of you ( 0.001%) have run into issues due to existing guild/friend lists. But don't worry, your data isn't lost, it's just having a little trouble getting written properly in the new database. If you're affected, please reach out to us directly and we'll do our best to help you out.

Stay tuned for more updates and keep the feedback coming! 🎲

https://discord.gg/catanuniverse

Hi Catanians,

Welcome to our latest Dev Update! We're excited to share our progress and plans with you.

Last Week (Feb 6th - Feb 12th):

We've been hard at work updating our app, and we're thrilled to announce that the 2.3.1 update is now available! This is the first step in improving your multiplayer experience, and you might already see feel the improvements. Plus, the best part - you won't have to type in your password every time you log in, thanks to our new "remember my password" feature.

This Week (Feb 13th - Feb 19th):

Now that 2.3.1 is live, we're turning our attention to step two of our multiplayer update. Our team is putting the finishing touches on server-based improvements to enhance the reliability of host switches, trades, and more. We'll let you know as soon as these changes go live.

We're always working to make your Catan experience the best it can be, so don't hesitate to share your feedback with us. Join our Discord feedback and discussion forum for the latest updates and to get in touch with our team.

https://discord.gg/catanuniverse

Thanks for being a part of the Catan universe!

Hey Catanians!

The new update is finally here! Make sure you're on version 2.3.1 by clicking on your avatar in the main menu.

Make sure to update to version 2.3.1 before starting any online matches!

No more frustration from entering your password over and over again! This update will remember it for you.

Spread the word to your fellow Catanians and update now! The online multiplayer will only get better once everyone has updated.


If you want to learn more or share your feedback with us best join our Discord server: https://discord.gg/catanuniverse

The App now remembers the users' password and will automatically log in after disconnects from the server or after the App was closed.
Further improvements to make sure reconnecting to the games is smoother than before.

In our 10th developer update, we want to highlight what you can expect from the upcoming client update for Catan Universe and we want to assist those who still have issues finding opponents in Automatches.


Last Week Jan 30th - Feb 5th

Based on our efforts to engage in direct chats with Catanians, we noticed that some of you still need help finding opponents in Automatches. The main reason seems to have been strict filter settings which didn't allow those Catanians to find opponents.

If you should also have issues finding opponents, please make sure to set the filters as it is seen in the screenshot below:





If the button next to Karma, Friends, or Guild is yellow, you have activated this filter. For example if the “Friends”-filter is active, auto-matchmaking will only match you with players from your friendlist! Tap or click on the buttons to deactivate those filters. Using the settings above will give you the best chances to find matches quickly, as this turns all filters off.


This Week Feb 6th - Feb 7th

Our team is currently putting the finishing touches on the next client update. This update will focus on how the clients can more reliably re-connect to our servers. It will also again remember the password properly when logging in. This means you won't have to enter your password again after closing the app or losing connection.
This client update is the next step to further increase stability in multiplayer, especially when it comes to connection losses and host switches. We are aware that we still have to do some more work there, but our team wants to put out this client update to resolve some of the issues now, while we continue working on the remaining ones on the server side. We will let you know once the update is available to download in the coming days.
Please do not hesitate to reach out to us on our discord server if you should face issues with the game: https://discord.gg/catanuniverse

Hi Catanians,

In this week's developer update, we want to focus on how you can reach out to us to get assistance. And shed some light on the issues we are currently facing which are hindering this week's release of a client update.

Last Week Jan 23rd - Jan 29th

Our dev team is closing in on the underlying issue of the host switching system, which causes many of the issues in multiplayer you experience once one player leaves a match. In short, the host of a game is making sure the game is progressing in order. If there is an issue with the host switch, you can see games getting stalled or the A.I. not responding. This also can affect the display of trades or the ability to trade in the game.

To resolve these issues, the host switch is getting rewritten to work properly with the new backend in several edge-case scenarios. This also affects the clients' behavior when it comes to reconnecting to games in general, an issue that we’ve been working on optimizing in the last weeks. Both topics are interconnected and depend heavily on each other.

This Week Jan 30th - Feb 5th

Right now it is our plan to create a combination of improvements we mentioned above to have a more substantial impact on your experience with online games. Unfortunately, this means that we will need more time before we can release since as described above there are a lot of dependencies and even more test cases to go through. As we tested, we still found issues, e.g. when the turn timer runs out while a player is reconnecting to a game, and we will address these first before the release.

We increased our efforts to get in touch with our Catanians directly on Discord to help out with individual issues. We want to encourage everyone to reach out to us there and we will do our best to resolve issues and collect feedback via this channel. We want to thank any Catanian who already made use of our Discord Server to get in touch with us since your feedback already is helping us immensely.

https://discord.gg/catanuniverse

Hi Catanians,

In this is weekly development update VIII we will update you on the state of the next update and what we are further working on.

Last week, Jan 16th. - Jan. 22nd
We released a backend update to tackle some custom match and account migration issues on January 17th. After checking the extended logs, we can see that this resolved some of the related issues. Nevertheless, we will need to address others in another backend update as well as in the client update shortly.
The client update has made good progress, as we could mark several key issues with reconnection as resolved internally. However, we will need at least one additional internal test-build to fix remaining edge-cases before we can publish.

This week, Jan 23rd - Jan. 29th
We continue QA focus on the next internal version of the client update for internal testing.
While QA and the development team are working on this, we have identified several key issues that we will address next. As we cannot reproduce some of these issues here, we kindly ask those affected for additional info via our Discord channel:

- Game closing/freezing for some players after placing the first settlement of a game:
We cannot reproduce this here, but some players reported that clearing their cache (on PC) resolved the issue for them. If this is related to corrupt cached data, re-installing the app on mobile should resolve this as well. We would appreciate if affected users could let us know if this is the case.

- Custom Match Issue “Could not create lobby due to an error”
The backend updated resolved a custom match issue that caused players not being displayed in the custom match lobby properly. However, some accounts get the error message above immediately when selecting custom match mode. We are actively investigating this issue. As of now, we believe it is tied to account migration. You can tell us on discord, if your account is also affected by this problem.

- Some accounts still could not migrate to the new backend
We will add further logging in the next backend update to get to the root of this complex issue. We have several leads on this and will continue refining the migration process until this is resolved for all. In the meantime if you are affected, please contact our support team and we will try to find an alternative solution for you!

Hi Catanains,

In this is weekly development update VII we have some news to share on a backend update we just deployed on January 17th and how the next client update is progressing.

Last week, Jan 9th. - Jan. 15th
As we outlined, our QA team tested the changes made to the clients and backend in an internal test. Our focus of this update is reconnect-handling when one or more of the clients disconnect, as issues here can cause consequential errors. We saw significant improvements in this regard, but identified a related mobile caching issue that we need to tackle at the same time. Therefore, we need to build a new client update for internal testing first.

We also revisited account migration and tested a fix, which should help most of the remaining accounts to finally migrate to our new database properly. We furthermore added additional logging to this system to catch remaining issues.

On top of this, our team investigated and identified certain account status settings that affected matchmaking issues for Auto- and Custom-Matches. A backend fix for this was tested and released.

This week, Jan 16th- Jan. 22nd
We continued testing the backend update for account migration optimization and additional logging as well as matchmaking fixes on Monday. Feedback from our users confirmed our suspicion that the matchmaking issue in custom matches WAS related to player avatar customization. Thank you for your detailed feedback!

This backend updated was rolled out this Tuesday afternoon (CET), January 17th.
Focus for the rest of his week is to finalize the next internal version of the client update for internal testing. As soon as we can confirm it is all working as intended, we can schedule a release as soon as possible.