This week, we've continued work on the new content in the Far East. Last week, all NPCs were still wearing pink and they lacked a lot of icons. That has changed, nearly all icons are done. Kaolinite is now present in the ground. Photoshop is acting up though, and it's brightening the color of the stone around the ore. We're still looking for a fix.
We had planned to add content to the New World and Tropics as well, this week. But we're having a hard time selecting appropriate items.
Colony Survival is definitely not a hardcore realistic 100% accurate historical simulation. But when thinking of new jobs and new items, we do try to keep real life and history in mind. Both of us love Factorio, and while that's partly because of the brilliant gameplay mechanics, I believe the feeling of producing realistic items and learning something about how they're made is crucial as well. To me, gathering copper ore and oil and producing plastics and solar panels is more fun and interesting than gathering a generic fantasy resource and using a made up mechanism to craft it into a cliché magical item. It's also easier to remember recipes and ingredients if they make sense in real life. (Not trying to insult fantasy - huge fan of Lord of the Rings here!)
The central area, the temperate biome where every player spawns in Colony Survival, is obviously inspired by Europe and European history. We want to have a different continent in every direction. The east is inspired by Asia, the south by Africa, the west by America and the north by the Arctic.
Doing it like this divides the map into 9 blocks. What to do with the center and the blocks above, below and to the sides of it is obvious. Deciding to make the north-west and north-east "Arctic" just like the mid-north was an easy decision: Alaska, northern Scandinavia and Siberia are pretty similar visually.
But what to do with the south-west and the south-east? The south-west contains South-America, and the south-east Indonesia and Australia. Indonesia is home to a lot of spices and other resources that were very popular with merchants. South-America is the origin of important crops like cotton and cacao. We don't want to force people to start six different colonies, but we don't want to overlook these regions and crops either.
What we're very probably going to do, is consider all three southern regions (south-west, south, south-east) as "tropics", but lock certain crops behind items from for example the New World. Imagine a New World Science Bag that requires potatoes, tomatoes and corn, which can be used in the Tropics to unlock cotton and cacao.
So, problem #1 is probably solved. Problem 2: manufacturing. The three-sector model divides the economy into, surprise, three sectors. The primary sector is extraction of raw materials, the secondary sector is manufacturing and the third is services. We don't want to merely add new resources like crops and ores, we'd like to add some secondary sector jobs as well. In the Far East, it's the production of silk and porcelain. Historically, these were important products with a big impact on world history, see for example the Silk Road.
But what products were made in the secondary sector in America/Africa during the Medieval and pre-Industrial Period, and traded around the world in significant numbers? There was a lot of trade with these areas in the 16th/17th/18th century, but mainly for raw materials and crops like gold, coffee beans, sugar and cotton. The contrast with the Far East makes sense. During this time period, Europe and China were both densely populated and contained many large cities with complex economies. But North America and large portions of Africa were much more sparsely populated, mainly by hunter-gatherers. While there were certainly cities with a secondary sector in (South) America and Africa, they mainly focused on items that are already in-game, like food and weapons. There doesn't seem to be a unique one-on-one equivalent of silk/porcelain in pre-Industrial North-America / Africa.
One option for a unique 'happiness item' from the tropics with realistic roots is jewelry. There seem to have been pretty advanced smiths in historical Africa, and it makes sense to make the tropics the source of for example diamonds and perhaps rubies. These could be used to make valuable jewelry with a large happiness boost. A possibility for the New World could be cotton, and processing it into different textiles.
We're giving this subject a lot of thought, because we want all regions to have unique, fun, semi-realistic and coherent tech trees. So if you've got any ideas for materials/crops/secondary sector jobs in the tropic and New World regions of Colony Survival, please share them here or on Discord this weekend! We'll be adding content in these regions next week.
