Introducing Hovercars, Space Elevators, Serpent isle, and more! Content Drop 1 has arrived!
Great news: Content Drop 1 is here!
And with it, Aven Colony is getting 11 new buildings, a new sandbox map ... and a whole new transportation system!
We're thrilled to introduce the newest addition to Aven Colony hovercars!
The new Hovercar Station building automatically links to any other Hovercar Stations you build nearby. Now, you can not only solve your colonists' commute problems, but you can do it in style, by giving them swanky levitating hovercar vehicles to fly all around the colony!
Content Drop 1 also brings a massive new Space Elevator.
While quite expensive, this elevator provides a literal stairway to heaven, connecting your colony all the way to outer space using a massive carbon nanotube cable. The elevator that rides it massively increases your colony's storage capacity while also docking directly with the orbiting Colony Ship to allow you to bring in large numbers of new colonists.
There's also a new tool to help your colony deal with plague spores: the Decontamination Unit! Just place one of these next to one or more tunnel tiles, and it will serve as a firewall, spraying a decontamination liquid that kills plague spore microbes and disinfects any infected colonists.
On top of all that, there are 8 new decoration buildings that help you make your colony even more beautiful while also improving morale.
Finally, this update also brings a brand new sandbox map: Serpent Isle! This is a beautiful desert island in the middle of Aven Prime's great northern sea, and is a uniquely challenging colony location due to its relatively low levels of geothermal vents and farmable cropland. Look closely and you can spot a number of creatures unique to this remote part of Aven Prime.
We also have a number of tuning tweaks and optimizations in this update.
As a quick note: please bear in mind that we have much more in store for Aven Colony.
As we go forward, we want to make sure that we focus our development on new maps, new buildings, and new gameplay modes that add as much value as possible. It should be clear from the new features listed above that everything we've added fills a gameplay hole or otherwise addresses key gameplay issues while also giving you tools to make your colonies look even cooler.
We have a BIG long-term vision for what Aven Colony can be, and we need your help to get it there. We are laser-focused on making sure that every new feature we add makes the game more fun, makes your colonies more beautiful, gives you more tools as a colony governor, and gets Aven Colony that much closer to where we see it in the future.
Here are the detailed descriptions for each new building and the full list of new features:
Hovercar Stations
Hovercar Stations allow rapid transit around the colony using levitating 1-passenger vehicles. A small number of Hovercar Stations can quickly integrate a large colony and allow you to safely place residential and work sites a good distance away from one another.
Each Hovercar Station can connect to up to 5 other Hovercar Stations around the colony, and colonists will use them to dramatically shorten their commute. Hovercar Stations also allow service buildings such as Retail Centers, VR Centers, and Hospitals to dramatically extend their range around the colony. Hovercars prefer to move over tunnels but can also move over empty areas, and can even support transporting colonists between completely disconnected parts of the colony. They can even travel over rivers and crater lakes.
Hovercar stations not only help you address Commute morale and keep residential structures separate from work sites, they also give a Commute morale bonus to the surrounding area.
Space Elevator
A Space Elevator is an enormous support structure for a carbon-nanotube-based wire that extends all the way up into orbit, close to the orbiting colony ship. Its massive size dwarfs all other colony structures, and it features an elevator that will gradually climb the giant cable all the way into space. Although a Space Elevator is very expensive and time-consuming to construct, it dramatically increases a colony's storage capacity and also supports immigration and emigration with higher capacity per trip than an Immigration Center.
Decontamination Unit
The Decontamination Unit is very useful for preventing the spread of the plague and plague spore microbes around the colony. It will automatically detect plague spore microbes and plague-infected colonists, and will quickly lower arms into up to 4 adjacent tunnels, spraying a special disinfectant spray that can cure colonists and destroy plague spore microbes that move past. This allows it to act as a very effective "firewall" if placed at key locations around the colony.
Decorations
A new set of 8 "Decorations" is available, including 4 enclosed "atrium" buildings that connect like tunnels, and 4 freestanding outdoor buildings that do not connect to the colony and do not consume power or allow colonists to walk through. These include fountains, obelisks, crystals, mini-parks, and more.
Serpent Isle
Serpent Isle is a brand new sandbox map. It is a desert island in the middle of Aven Prime's great northern sea. Its strategic location and its abundant metal and Zorium deposits make it worth colonizing; however, geothermal vents are scarce, and due to its sandy soil, the island has relatively few areas that are amenable to crop cultivation.
Additional Changes
Significantly modified temporal antialiasing to cause much less blurring, especially when close to buildings
Lots of optimizations that should significantly reduce the amount of hitching with large colonies and improve large-colony performance overall
Added a new "Decorations" submenu and moved the Park into this submenu (from "Services")
The "Spaceports" menu has been renamed to "Ships & Vehicles," and includes the new Hovercar Station
Made Vanaar and Sandy Gulch in the campaign slightly more difficult (this does not affect saved games, only new games on those maps)
Improved the look of the Employment overlay: now shows green arrows in most cases, or red if a worker's commute is causing a morale penalty. Also dramatically improved the look of this overlay. It also shows connections between hovercar garages in purple if any colonists use them in a commute.
Improved the Commute overlay: this now also shows the red lines from the Employment overlay
Improved the effect when you recycle a Prometheus Lander
Sending an expedition out to investigate a distress signal which later turns out to be rebels no longer leaves you with "{0}" and "{1}" in the next
Crowding morale should now be a slightly more serious problem at most difficulty settings -- but MUCH easier to addresss using hovercars!
The Morale graphs in the Statistics panel were 50% too small; they are now the proper size
The Bar & Grill now has a smaller morale effect in general and properly reduces the morale effect further at tier 1
The Earth History Center is now more expensive and has a reduced morale effect
The Park is now slightly more expensive to build
The VR Center's morale effect has been reduced slightly
Habitats and Skyscrapers now use slightly less power and a Tier-2 Skyscraper is slightly more expensive
Laser mines now use less power and no longer reduce air quality as much as they did previously
Fixed an issue where holding Ctrl to highlight buildings while dragging a building for placement could cause buildings to temporarily disappear when you released Ctrl
Creeps & tentacles now vanish properly the moment a building begins its destruction sequence
Added more specialized POI marker types for expeditions: rebels, splinter groups, creep nests, and plague nests
Fixed a rare stability issue
We hope you enjoy all the new features.
Finally, THANK YOU once again for being part of the Aven Colony community. Let us know your thoughts on all the new features in the forums!
Also, a final note for those of you playing on console. We're in regular contact with the console team at Team17 to make sure these changes do make it over to Xbox One and PlayStation 4. No specific ETA at this time but it will happen.
Thank you, and we're looking forward to getting you even more big improvements in Content Drop 2!
Paul Tozour and the Mothership Entertainment team
BIG things are coming soon to Aven Colony!
Hi everyone!
We're putting together an announcement about all the BIG new features coming soon in Content Drop 1 (... and the little ones, too!)
Stay tuned! The announcement should drop in the middle of the week, followed by Content Drop 1 not too long after that.
I think you'll be very happy with what we're adding to Aven Colony. Thank you for being part of the Aven Colony community and continuously helping us make Aven Colony even better.
-Paul
Notes on Farms and Greenhouses (or, why Farms are better than you might think!)
There are two car dealerships in your town. One sells a Ferrari with 660 horsepower for $400,000. The other is a Toyota dealership, which sells a 200-horsepower Camry for $25,000. Which is the better car?
This question has more than one answer.
If you don’t have $400,000 to buy a Ferrari, there’s no decision. The Camry is your only option.
If you’re a billionaire, the cost probably doesn’t matter to you, and the Ferrari is better.
But if you can afford both, then chances are you look at both and realize that the Camry asks you to pay $125 per horsepower, while the Ferrari is asking you to pay $606 per unit of horsepower.
Unless you’re very rich, the Camry is a better deal.
Not a better car, but a better deal.
So it is with the Farm and the Greenhouse.
In the past, there’s been some discussion comparing Farms and Greenhouses, and some have questioned whether Farms are worth building at all.
But just as with the Camry and the Ferrari, it all depends on context, as we explain below.
It’s true that a Tier 2 Greenhouse has higher overall output than a Tier 3 Farm in most cases. However, this comparison ignores its costs, and the costs usually matter.
Let’s take a look at a sample map. We have four positions, A, B, C, and D, where we're considering placing food-producing buildings:
If you take a look at placing a Tier-3 Farm versus a Tier-2 Greenhouse at each of those positions (in the Greenhouse’s case, the upper-left corner of the GH would go at that tile), you get the following:
The Tier 2 Greenhouse costs 31 Nanites; the Farm costs only 18.
On a per-Nanite basis, the Farm is a much better way to spend your precious Nanites.
Of course, each building also has a power cost to keep it running:
The Greenhouse uses 8 power (at all tiers), and the Farm only uses 5 power (at all tiers). Here, too, a Tier-3 Farm easily beats a Tier-2 Greenhouse in terms of Barley produced per power cost.
The same applies across all crop types.
“Now wait,” you may be saying. “You’re not correcting for the fact that Farms produce nothing in Winter!”
And that’s true. But the same results hold even when you correct for seasonal productivity.
A Farm is productive 111 hours (3 seasons of 37 hours each) of the 167 hours in each Sol – or 66.5% of the sol. The Greenhouse is productive for those same 111 hours and has an additional 50% productivity during Winter, so it’s effectively active for 83.2% of the sol (111 hours + (56 / 2) hours, since Winter lasts 56 hours).
So, if you multiply the numbers in the right-side column for the Farm above by 0.665, and multiply the numbers for the Greenhouse by 0.832 … the same result still holds!
The Tier-3 Farm is STILL a more efficient use of Nanites and Power for any crop than a Tier-2 Greenhouse (I won't post the math here, but it's easy enough to do the math yourself if you don't believe me).
You can also look at it from the perspective of productivity for workers as well. In this case, the Greenhouse is slightly more efficient (in terms of food per worker) after correcting for seasonal productivity than a farm – but the difference is very slight, and arguaby not nearly as relevant as the power and nanite costs.
That's not to say the Farm is "better" in any absolute sense.
Just as with the car example, it’s usually the better deal, despite being less powerful in absolute terms.
Now, some people prefer the Greenhouse since it causes less inventory thrashing.
And that’s fine, and it can be a valid reason for choosing the Greenhouse in your case.
You might also feel that your colony is big and stable and you have plenty of power and Nanites, and it’s just simpler to place Greenhouses than Farms.
And that may be valid too – just as with the wealthy person buying the Ferrari.
But this should make it clear that the Farm is absolutely a good choice in many cases, and is often a better one. In most cases, a Farm at its higher tier is more efficient in terms of both Nanite and power costs than a max-tier Greenhouse.
(As a side note, the Farm has other advantages besides its higher efficiency: it has two smaller upgrade tiers rather than the one large upgrade tier of the Greenhouse, which gives you more flexibility in making decisions about when to upgrade. Also, it can move its farmed tiles, which means you can pave over some of the Farm's farmed tiles later on without having to recycle the Farm. Both of these give you additional flexibility in making decisions, and that flexibility absolutely adds some small amount of additional value to the Farm.)
Aven Colony is a city-builder that asks you to make careful decisions as you scale up your colony. In most cases, a building should be viewed not just in terms of its total output but in terms of its output relative to its cost to purchase it (Nanites) and the cost to maintain it (power usage) ... in the context of all the options it provides and your colony's current situation.
Also, in the long term, we're absolutely considering ading more types of food-producing buildings. We'd love to get your input as to what those should be! Please post your thoughts below.
Post-Launch Update #8 now live - optimizations for large colonies (1.0.20802)
Cerulean Vale colony courtesy of user Annothek
Hi everyone!
I'm happy to say that we've made huge progress toward Content Drop 1 over the last week, and we expect to deliver it sometime in the next 2-4 weeks for sure.
While working on all of those exciting as-yet-unannounced new features, we saw a few opportunities to improve performance and address some player feedback, and we felt we should put this update in your hands ASAP.
Changes in this update:
There should now be much less 'lag' when placing or recycling buildings in very large colonies
Optimized loading; some saved games with extremely large colonies (such as the one shown above) now load anywhere from 2x to 8x faster
Fixed an issue with the Farm / Greenhouse productivity values not being shown properly if you dragged it outside the colony
Added a read-only key binding to the key bindings list: "Hide Interface" (Ctrl-Alt-X) -- this is useful for taking screenshots. It's always been there but not all users were aware of it
Fixed an issue that could cause the "Not All Citizens Relocated" notification to pop up twice in a row for the same residential structure
Fixed a very rare stability issue related to Expedition Centers
Fixed a issue that would sometimes show a medal in the main menu for levels that had been lost; these should only show up for missions that have been won
Thank you for being a part of the Aven Colony community! Your infectious enthusiasm keeps us going.
Hang tight; we've got some really exciting new content on the way, including Content Drop 1 and further updates after that.
We're also working closely with our partners at Team17 to finalize our development roadmap and we'll be sharing it with you as soon as we can.
-Paul Tozour and the Mothership Entertainment Team
Post-Launch Update #7 now live - tweaks & optimizations (1.0.20712)
Hi everyone!
As we work toward the upcoming Content Drop 1 (due sometime in the next 3-5 weeks), we saw a few opportunities to improve performance and address some player feedback.
We felt it better to update the game ASAP with these changes so that you could start seeing the benefits immediately rather than asking you to wait for Content Drop 1.
Changes:
Performance improvements when a large colony is infected by the plague
Improved rendering performance when looking towards the horizon
Notifications about plague spores, plague infections, and creep spores will no longer accumulate as multiple notifications unless they occur in disparate parts of a colony
Increased the maximum warning time interval for many notification types
Tweaks to prevent Commissioner Veronika from issuing warnings too frequently in some rare cases
Fixed a rare issue where certain plague spores could be hidden behind the ocean in Kelori Strand at certain camera angles
Lots of improvements to plague infection spreading to make it more consistent and scale with the difficulty setting; plague will now spread more slowly at easier difficulty settings and more quickly at harder settings (controlled by the Environment Events setting in sandbox games)
The food rate-of-change indicator now properly accounts for manufactured foods
Thank you for being a part of the Aven Colony community. Hang tight; we've got some really exciting new content on the way!
-Paul Tozour and the Mothership Entertainment Team
Post-Launch Updates #5 and #6 now live - tweaks and tuning changes (1.0.20618)
Hi everyone!
Post-launch update #5 is now live. This update includes tons of tweaking and tuning, much of it based on player feedback.
Keep in mind, we're simultaneously working toward Content Drop 1, which will add several new buildings to the game. We're dying to announce it! Stay tuned ... we expect Content Drop 1 sometime in the next 3-6 weeks.
Improvements:
Sandbox missions now have trade contracts to trade Gold for Nanites and Zorium.
Campaign missions now include a progress bar showing mission completion in the "Info" pane of the Colony Control Panel
Tons of fixes to text in French, German, Spanish, Chinese, Italian, and Russian
Lots of UI layout fixes to localized text
Fixed an exploit where it was possible to protect a colony from plague spores by placing inactive, disconnected Intake Fans around it
Fixed an issue where Mines would have higher productivity after loading from a saved game
Fixed bug where expedition vessel colors could be mismatched after loading from a saved game
The starting Construction Drone Station in sandbox Tenari Glacier can now be recycled
Increased Farm productivity and decreased Greenhouse productivity for all tiers (roughly +3% for Farms and -3% for Greenhouses)
Greenhouses now cost 1 more Nanite
Laser Mines are now 2 Nanites cheaper
Laser Mines now only waste 40% of minerals, not 50% -- localization adjustments needed!
All deposits can now be mined faster -- 5% faster for Iron and Copper, 20% faster for Potash, and 10% faster for all others
Nanite Processors are now 5% more productive
Lightning Towers now convert roughly 15% less electricity to stored power in Energy Batteries
All colony boosts now consume stored power in Energy Batteries roughly 10% more quickly
Morale should be very slightly lower at normal difficulty (and difficulty settings near normal) for medium and large colonies
Additional changes in update #6:
Adding path points to an expedition vessel that already has a path will no longer reset the current path
Fixed a rare issue with plague spore microbes sometimes disappearing depending on the camera position
Various additional UI fixes for localization
Thank you for being part of the Aven Colony community and helping us continually make Aven Colony even better.
-Paul
Aven Colony 1.0.20472 is now live, including the achievement browser, notification fixes, plasma turret fixes, & more!
Hi everyone!
Here we go with update #4. As with the previous 3 updates since launch, this update is a patch that brings lots of bug fixes and a few key features.
Most importantly, we've improved plasma turrets to make their shots far more effective, added an in-game achievement browser (shown above), fixed localization issues, and added several features to make alert notifications less annoying.
We've also overhauled the icons in the campaign mission list that show the difficulty at which you completed the mission:
However, we're simultaneously working toward Content Drop 1, which will add several new buildings to the game.
We're dying to announce it! Stay tuned ... we expect Content Drop 1 sometime in the next 3-6 weeks.
We're also hard at work with our partners at Team17 to give you a roadmap that will shed some light on what we're planning over the next few months that will incorporate all your feedback to make Aven Colony even better.
Changes in this update:
Added an achievement browser off the main menu. Although Steam shows which achievements you've completed, this browser allows you to see your progress toward completing any achievement -- and also shows off the shiny gold achievement medals we created for PS4 and Xbox One!
Tons of fixes to localized text and UI
Major improvements to plasma turret shots: shots are now faster, have larger collision spheres, and have better logic to help them hit creep spores and plague spores
Re-added the "defeat" stinger music that's supposed to play when you lose the game and the defeat splash pops up
Vastly improved the art for the mission completion badges in the campaign mission list; also added tooltips for these
Alert notifications now beep much less often: they now must wait a minimum of 40 seconds (of real-time) between playing alert beeps for subsequent notifications of the same type
Added a "mute" button to the upper-right corner of all notifications that can automatically pop up. If you get annoyed by a notification popping up too often, just mute the notification and all subsequent notifications of that type will no longer pop up automatically
Fixed a bug where placing multiple buildings using the SHIFT key wouldn't show radii for buildings that completed construction during placement (lightning towers, drone stations, plasma turrets)
Plague spore microbes: fixed a logic flaw that often prevented microbes from turning left/right in tunnels when they should have been able to, which prevented them from spreading as far through a colony as intended
Clicking on a citizen's portrait in the selection pane will now center the camera on them
Added a bit of disclaimer text to Vanaar and Sandy Gulch to make clear that they're easier than subsequent missions
The nanite indicator tooltip now states when you're manufacturing Consumer Goods. Users sometimes get confused or discouraged by the consistent nanite drain that Consumer Goods manufacturing can cause; this should help make clearer what's happening and what you need to do to fix it
Thank you for being part of the Aven Colony community and helping us continually make Aven Colony even better.
-Paul
Aven Colony 1.0.20363 is now live!
Hi everyone!
It's only been one week since launch, but we've just set our third post-launch update live. Today's update brings lots of bug fixes for localization, game loading, lots of little tuning tweaks, and more!
Again, please bear in mind that while we're fixing bugs, we're also hard at work on upcoming free content drops that will add new features and content to the game. We'll add that content to the game as soon as it's ready, and we're dying to announce it!
Changes in this update:
Fixed an issue where in some cases, the Load Game dialog wouldn't show all of your saved games
Fixed a few issues with auto-save saving locally when "Save to Steam cloud" was set
Lots of bug fixes to localized text
Fixed an issue with the language sometimes being set to German when you clicked on a social button on the main menu
Revamped the "ring" that's drawn when placing Construction Drone Stations (or when you press the "Show Range" button), making them much more visible, especially against arctic backgrounds
The Resources overlay now shows the "unexploited" icon for Cargo Pods you haven't yet gathered, making them much easier to find
Construction drones: fixed a very rare issue where construction drones could work extremely slowly when recycling their own drone stations, making them appear to be stuck
You can no longer recycle or implode your only Construction Drone Station
Retail Centers now consume Holo-Units/Service Robots 25% more slowly in large colonies (colonies with 500+ colonists)
Trade missions for Holo-Units/Service Robots now return 10 more of that resource each in exchange for each batch of 15 Nanites
Fixed an extremely rare bug with inventory not properly updating that could occur when you were low on food, water, and Nanites simultaneously
Thank you for being part of the Aven Colony community, and for working with us to continually improve Aven Colony.
-Paul
Aven Colony 1.0.20273 is now live!
Hi everyone -- as mentioned in our update just 2 days ago, we've already received a ton of feedback from all of you - thanks a lot for that! We know what you love, and we know what you want us to improve, and we'll use this to make the game even better for everyone.
It's only 4 days after launch, but we're pushing as hard as we can to get as many fixes and improvements in your hands as quickly as we can, and I hope our updates demonstrate that.
Today's update improves performance in addition to some other fixes. This should be particularly noticeable for very large colonies. Although many people experienced no significant performance problems, for those who did, this update should help. In one extremely large colony that a customer kindly sent our way, frame rate improved by roughly 60% when running the game at 8x speed.
We've also fixed an issue with Hover Guardians and also made sure that Nanites will push food or water out of inventory when storage is full. This helps ensure that if you run into a storage crisis, your Nanite income doesn't get choked off by the storage limit, and you can use your Nanite income to help resolve the situation. Please note this is only the first of several planned imrovements to the inventory and resource conversion systems.
Again, please bear in mind that we've got some exciting plans for upcoming free content drops that will add new features and content to the game. Rest assured also that we'll keep collecting any feedback, and tweak and tune the game wherever we can.
Changes in this update:
Upgraded the colony's storage systems to prioritize Nanites over food and water (whichever is higher) as long as you need the nanites more than the food or water.
Optimized Dispensaries, which were slowing down the game when there were many Dispensaries distributing many enhancers.
Optimized achievement updating to consume much less CPU.
Optimized colonists looking around for new jobs, which was consuming more CPU in large colonies than intended.
Improved Razer keyboard support to highlight the active overlay
Improvements to menu layout in the main menu - it now changes its position based on the current resolution aspect ratio
Fixed an issue with the Hover Guardian robot where it wouldn't properly obey the game speed in some states
Tenari Glacier (campaign): the starting Construction Drone Station, Intake Fan, and Geothermal Generator can now be recycled after you've completed the mission objectives that require you to repair and/or upgrade them. Note that if playing from a saved game, you may need to restart this mission for the change to take effect
Thank you for being part of the Aven Colony community, and for working with us to continually improve the Aven Colony experience.
-Paul
Aven Colony update notes: 1.0.20217
Hi everyone!
We launched Aven Colony just two days ago, and have already received a ton of feedback from all of you - thanks a lot for that! We know what you love, and we know what you wish was better, and we'll use this to make the game even better for everyone.
The first post-launch update is out TODAY and adds in-game language selection along with a slew of bug fixes. Keep reporting any pesky bugs you might find, and we'll keep squashing them. The only thing worse than alien bugs are game bugs, so thanks again for bringing those to our attention.
We've got some exciting plans for upcoming free content drops that will add new features and content to the game, but rest assured we'll keep collecting any feedback, and tweak and tune the game where we can.
To change your language in-game, just go to the Options menu, then select the new "Languages" tab at the bottom:
Changes in this update:
Added a Language panel to the Options tab to let you select your language at runtime rather than using the current language in Windows
Fixed a very rare stability issue related to defeating Hover Guardian robots in the late campaign or in sandbox missions
Made "Steam Cloud Saves" text also grey out if Steam Cloud isn't available
Increased the shadow distance to cover some cases where shadows weren't long enough
Lots of improvements to localized text, especially Russian and German
Fixes to ensure that colonists now say things like "This situation is terrifying!" much less often, and only in dangerous situations
Fixed some issues with the layout of the main menu was suboptimal at some resolutions. We're still aware of some issues with the in-game UI at 1600x1200 and are working to resolve those
Consumer Goods production is now turned off when you run out of Nanites. We are working on a solution to allow Mills and Chemical Plants to generate resources in limited quantities rather than just turning production on or off, but in the meantime, this should help mitigate issues with players running out of Nanites due to Consumer Goods production being left on and chewing through Nanites.
Consumer Goods are now generated much more slowly
Reduced bird squawking volume
Thank you for being part of the Aven Colony community.
