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.
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!
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.
Early Access
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!
Updates & Worlds
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.
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.
Problems
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!
Mods
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!
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.
Outposts
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.
Threat
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.
A New World
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 & the Sacred Failsafe
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.
New Tech Tree
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!
Gliders & Elevators
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.
The Merchant & Colony Points
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?
Crafting Times & Tools
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.
”Harvesters” & “Sources”
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.
And much, much more…
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!
Last but not least
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.
Thanks to LadyKathleen for this beautiful castle inspired by the Mont-Saint-Michel!
Update 0.9.0 will probably be released publicly on December 22! We strive to combine that release with a minor discount. There will probably be another discount in January 2023. After those discounts, we’re strongly considering a price increase.
We’ve been hard at working adding a massive endgame to CS. A continuous problem in CS is the importance of the “next step”. If the endgame is outposts+gliders+the production of books of knowledge, then the “actual” end is a step before that. There needs to be something after outposts and gliders to actually make it worth producing and using them. Preferably, producing and using them at scale.
The first 0.9.0 beta release didn’t have that. So players unlocked these things, but didn’t really have an incentive to use them. The massive endgame that we’re currently adding to the beta aims to fix that. There should be plenty of in-game rewards that require setting up and expanding a big network of interconnected colonies and outposts. “Recruiting 1000 colonists” should no longer be a made up stretch goal for the intrinsically motivated player - the game should actually encourage and reward you all the way there.
We’ve tried to accomplish that by adding a bunch of early industrial content to the endgame. Complicated machines like printing presses, metal lathes and tabulating machines take a lot of colonists and unique resources to produce, and they are necessary to unlock the last in-game technologies, like grenade launchers and a steel glider which is launched into the air explosively.
More and stronger guards require strong monsters as opponents. It was noticeable during tests (and it’s obvious when you think about it) that, while the strongest types of monsters are always a small minority, they are the vast majority of monsters who survive deeper into your defences, making them the most likely target of traps. In the first beta, different types of monsters could only be distinguished by the colour of their eyes, which is hard to do and hard to remember. So, we’ve made unique models for different monster types. These models are much clearer at intuitively signalling different monster strengths.
I could write a lot more about all the new jobs, items, traps and weapons, but - the release is very close! We’ve still got a lot to do, and hopefully you’ll see everything with your own eyes in less than two weeks :)
The beta has been live for two months now. In the first month, we focused on polishing, fixing and streamlining the existing content of the beta. In the past month, we’ve worked hard to add a bunch of extra content. 0.9.0 is feeling a lot more complete now!
The most exciting new content, in my opinion, is gunpowder related. Gunpowder is now made at the alchemist, and requires sulfur, saltpeter and charcoal. Sulfur is mined in heaths and saltpeter can be made in composting bins. The first weapon that can be crafted with gunpowder is an explosive trap. It adds a new feature: area-of-effect damage. It’s triggered when a monster walks on top of it, and will hit all monsters who are within 2 blocks of distance. To make the explosion look more convincing, we decided to add force to the ragdolls of dying monsters. Other traps and guards now also apply force when they kill monsters, making the combat look more satisfying.
After Zun added support for area-of-effect weapons, he applied this effect to caltrop-traps as well. Further research leads to handcannons. These are primitive, handheld gunpowder weapons that do a lot of damage, but they can only hit monsters at a short range.
We’ve added another way to protect yourself from the monsters. It’s a “failsafe”. It has to be slowly charged over many days, and can then be used once to take out a lot of monsters simultaneously. It will also reduce the monster threat for the next night. It’s very useful as a way to save your colony when you make a mistake and monsters breach your defences.
The failsafe consumes “Sacred Points”, which are earned by distributing “Sacred Meals” to your colonists. These meals are made sacred when a colonist adds a candle to them at an altar. There are multiple tiers of meals, and we’ve reintroduced chickens and cabbages as a way to make advanced meals which earn more Sacred Points.
Another new item is the Astrolabe. Historically, it’s an astronomical instrument with many functions, one of which is determining your location. In Colony Survival, selecting an Astrolabe in your hotbar will display the location of nearby ‘unique biomes’: heaths, swamps and mountaintops with special ores. This makes it a lot easier to find and travel between them.
We’ve also introduced “alarm bells”. You can place them on any block, and if a monster steps on top of it, a loud bell starts ringing, indicating the presence of monsters in a location determined by you. They make it a lot easier to notice problems in your defences before they become a big problem - and they give you some time to run to the failsafe and trigger it, if necessary.
This new beta content patch also contains a glassblower, which requires silica sand found in the heath, and potash for the composting bin. Glass can be used to make eyeglasses, which can be used by researchers, writers and scribes to speed up their work. It can also be used to craft a monocular. Select it in your hotbar to use it!
That summarises the biggest changes, but the patch contains a lot of other tweaks. Science which adds threat to the colony is a lot more noticeable now. The furnace and splitting stump have lost their texture-designs and are now 3D vertex colored meshes. Tin and gold appear deeper in the world. There are new jobs that make Science Chests and advanced job blocks. We’ve added a lot of new audio effects to jobs and traps. The compass now requires science and can only be crafted by colonists.
We’ve done some internal testing for the new content, and just today it was finished enough for the testers to try it. So this Friday Blog is simultaneously an announcement for the beta testers: your beta should receive an automatic update adding all of the content above right now! We’d love to know how unlocking and using the new content and features goes for you, so keep us updated in the #test-channels on Discord. Thanks for all of your effort, help and encouragement!
Friday Blog 223 - The Principles of the Farming Outpost
Three weeks ago, in the last Friday Blog, we were at 0.9.0.6v2. We’re still delivering frequent updates, and we made it all the way to 0.9.0.13! An example of the fixes contained in these updates is pictured below. The testers are finding numerous small problems and rough spots, and we’re dedicated to polishing 0.9.0 to a high standard. If you want to test 0.9.0 in a less polished state, feel free to join the beta following the instructions here.
Most of these updates contain a bunch of small tweaks and fixes, but no major changes to the content of the game. But last week, we released 0.9.0.10, which contained a lot of new building blocks.
0.9.0 was rebuilt from pretty much zero, and at first we were completely focused on testing new gameplay features. Tools; outposts; traps; the “glider-launcher”; elevators; currency & the merchant; the new world generation. All of the colonies we built were highly functional and not ‘decorative’. The testers rightfully complained that 0.9.0 lacked a varied selection of building materials.
So, I’ve spent some time developing a bunch of new textures and building blocks. Some are completely new, some are new textures for old blocks. Some of the textures we replaced were quickly made 5+ years ago, and we believe the new textures have a significantly higher quality.
The Principles of the Farming Outpost
After releasing 0.9.0.10, I did a full playthrough of the beta, in preparation for adding the last new content before publicly releasing 0.9.0. I really enjoyed myself, and one thing really stood out to me. It’s now guiding my plans for the final batch of content, and I’d like to share it with you.
For my main colony, I had chosen a spot right in between a tall mountain, a swamp and a heath. I later started outposts in all these areas. My network of little towns was growing smoothly, but I was consuming quite a lot of food. I had of course regularly expanded my food supply, but it seems I needed a big expansion - and I didn’t have a lot of convenient space for that.
Standing on top of my 100-block-tall gliderlauncher-tower, I surveyed the surroundings. I quickly noticed a large, flat spot of fertile land nearby. I filled my inventory with building materials, bought an Outpost Banner and glided to the new area. My other outposts were relatively small, but I wanted to build this one big. I started building an extensive castle with complex defenses, specifically designed to conveniently incorporate traps, and spaces for colonists to reload those traps. It was a lot stronger than necessary for the small number of farmers living there, but I used Threat Statues to lure more monsters that way.
The entire project of building my Farming Outpost felt engaging and rewarding. But it didn’t directly access any new content. Indirectly, it did support the expansion of my network of colonies, which was working towards new parts of the tech tree.
When did I quit my test? When I reached the end of the tech tree. I was still enjoying the process of growing my network of towns, but there was nothing left to grow for. And when that happens, the game quickly comes to an end.
And these were the forces I was wrestling with. How do we… 1.) Extend the tech tree in a way that keeps players engaged as long as possible 2.) Do that in a way which doesn’t feel like repetitive padding, as uninspired busywork 3.) Develop that relatively quickly, without extending the beta for many months
That’s quite hard to optimize for! Adding a late-game tech that requires players to recruit 10.000 new colonists is easy but no fun. Thinking of amazing features that would be loads of fun to explore, but that require many, many months of development time is easy as well. Finding a solution that combines the best of both worlds without the drawbacks is hard - but I think we did it.
So the last couple of days, I’ve started working on the last batch of 0.9.0 content. It will introduce new content and features, like a failsafe machine that gives you one last chance if your colony is overwhelmed by monsters. Handcannons and explosive traps. A glider launched with gunpowder, so it doesn’t need a 100 block tall tower. A “people mover” (the horizontal elevator from here).
We'll also reintroduce some old content, like beekeepers, chicken and cabbage farmers, and musket guards.
But unlocking these endgame techs will require you to scale up. To extend your main colony and to found new outposts. To coordinate many hundreds of colonists. 0.9.0 currently doesn’t have “science bags”, but I’m working on an updated version of that idea.
0.9.0 currently has a separate menu for “points upgrades”. This menu contains upgrades that can be boosted again and again, like the colonist cap and the banner range. We’ve got an idea to quickly convert that to full “repetitive science” - upgrades that cost more than mere currency, but that could also consume for example the enhanced science bags.
We’re planning to subtly and smoothly integrate these systems. At the start of the game, when you’ve got a very small colony, unlocking things in the tech tree is cheap and only requires a few relevant items. In the midgame, these costs expand and add requirements like medium amounts of colony points/currency. That’s roughly where the current content ends.
Unlocking tech in the endgame gradually becomes more and more expensive. It’ll require large amounts of currency and “science chests”. There’ll be multiple kinds of science chests, filled with more and more costly items. These same costs can also be used for the “repetitive science”, to purchase “perpetual upgrades” for your colony.
The goal is to offer a smooth transition into the “postgame”. At a certain moment, you’ll have unlocked the entire tech tree, and you’ve received access to all jobs, items and weapons. Currently, the only goal left at that moment is earning currency for the points upgrades. In the intended postgame, your entire colony will still be useful. All your copper miners, hemp farmers, writers, researchers, chicken farmers and blacksmiths should be necessary to produce massive amounts of science chests, and throughout the endgame you should’ve been subtly encouraged to focus on that kind of production. Expansion is still rewarding, encouraging you to actually produce and use the technology at the end of the tech tree, at scale.
We’ve noticed a minor problem in the beta where people don’t actually use the tech at the end of the tech tree. They unlock elevators and gliders, but then the tech tree ends so they stop scaling up and don’t actually use those things. We think we’ve now got clear plans which can be developed relatively easily and that should fix this problem.
We’ll continue working on the endgame/postgame content and hope to be able to show and test a lot of it in a few weeks. When it’s tested and polished, 0.9.0 is ready for a full release!
In Dutch, we’ve got a saying de laatste loodjes wegen het zwaarst. It literally means “the last pieces of lead weigh the heaviest”, and apparently, English has a similar saying in “the last mile is the longest one”. It’s completely true, and we understand that some players are getting tired of waiting for the update. We’d like to remind them that they can join the beta, and we hope all of you will enjoy 0.9.0 when it’s completely done. We really believe it’s by far the best version of CS!
Friday Blog 222 - State of the Beta + The New Terrain Generation
Over the past two weeks, we’ve selected 122 people from the #beta-applications channel on Discord and gave them access to the beta branch of the game. On top of that, we also added the Testers-group which were selected in a similar process for the 0.7.0-test a while ago. We’ve received enormous amounts of feedback, from one-sentence descriptions notifying us of tiny errors in item descriptions, to long posts with deep analyses of what works and what doesn’t. Thanks a lot to everybody who applies, tests and shares feedback! It is very valuable.
This has already led to six (technically seven) new versions being released, ranging from 0.9.0.0 to 0.9.0.6v2. In the image above is a small sample of the improvements in these builds.
I was a bit scared that the beta would lead to quite a lot of negative responses. For example, people not liking certain changes, and people being confused by new mechanics. But in general, the response has been very positive! Most testers seem to like the changes and believe they are improvements.
Of course we are very happy with this - but, it has introduced a new problem. 0.7.0 and 0.8.0 both had the endgame including the distant biomes that require loads of travelling and complicated trading rules. Lots of players skipped this content because it wasn’t rewarding enough. 0.9.0 solves this problem, but it does mean loads of people now actually finish the game, or at least reach the end of the tech tree. And now these people are clamouring for more content!
The current 0.9.0 beta doesn’t contain matchlock guns or printing presses, and we would love to reintroduce these items. We already had rough plans on how to do that, but hadn’t implemented them yet. We’re calibrating our plans based on the beta feedback, and we’ll re-implement that content and other era-appropriate items. We hope this will result in a satisfying endgame for 0.9.0!
The beta will become more open once that content is finished. If you can’t wait, feel free to apply to the beta via the instructions in the previous blog! If your application is more than three days old and you haven’t been selected, and you very much want to participate, you’re allowed to send in a new application. Please check whether you followed the instructions carefully.
New Terrain Generation
Two blogs ago, we revealed the very first pictures of the new terrain. One blog ago, we started the beta. In between, we made a lot of changes to the terrain generation, and we haven't shared that yet! So here is a overview of some of the major new features in the terrain.
Firstly, Zun got rivers to work, so the world will be crisscrossed by them. They allow players to build a colony next to water, but without being bound to the sea and certain lakes. They also make it much easier to explore the terrain without getting lost.
Randomly throughout the world, heaths will spawn. Technically, these are inspired by the anthropogenic heaths that are quite common in the Netherlands and nearby countries. These heaths offer access to unique resources. You’ll either have to purchase them manually using the new currency at the merchant, or gather them by building an outpost in a heath.
Another unique “mini-biome” scattered throughout the world are marshes. These wet areas offer access to unique resources in the same way as heaths.
Tall mountains topped with snow indicate the presence of ores like tin and gold, which can only be found in those locations - or again, at the merchant. Thus, gathering all of the jobs and items in 0.9.0 requires a main colony and three outposts. As explained in a previous blog, the outposts work quite different from the multiple-colonies-system added in 0.7.0. You don’t need to travel many kilometers of empty terrain to get to the unique biomes in 0.9.0, and the exchange of resources goes automatically, without requiring players to set up tedious trading rules in a primitive UI. This makes managing multiple colonies (/outposts) a much more intuitive and rewarding task.
Last but not least, the world now contains some rare mammoth trees! They help a lot, functioning as beacons that make it easier to orient yourself.
Finally, the day we've been looking forward to for so long has arrived! We’re starting the 0.9.0 Beta Program today.
The Beta is going to be a process with multiple stages. We’re constantly adding new content and tweaks, and we want to continuously add “fresh” testers to see how the game is functioning for a first-time player at that moment.
The current beta version is still work-in-progress, and not everything is properly explained or polished. The first testers need to be experienced enough to handle that. For that first group, we’re going to be quite selective. We’re looking for people who are serious and who are great communicators.
As the Beta Program continues and the beta version gets updated and improved, we’re going to add larger and larger groups of testers. Eventually, every application that meets the minimum requirements will be approved.
Here is how to apply:
A.) Join our Discord server B.) Go to the #beta-applications channel in the “Welcome” category C.) Post a message that answers the questions below. Remember, we care a lot more about honesty and communication skills than “high numbers”! The goal of the Beta is finding ”useful criticism”, not flattery ;) <*> Since what moment (year or update), roughly, have you played Colony Survival? Since release, since update 0.4.0, since 2019? <*> How many hours of play time do you have on Steam? <*> Roughly how many colonists does your biggest colony have? <*> Name one of your favourite gameplay mechanics in a game that is not Colony Survival, and explain why you like it. <*> Name a big frustration you’ve encountered in any video game, and explain why it bothers you. <*> Which skills/experiences/personality traits of yours make you especially suited to be a beta tester for 0.9.0? D.) Wait until you’re granted the 090 Tester role E.) Once you’ve received it, you’ll be able to see #test-instructions in the Perpetual Testing Initiative category. That channel contains all the information you need to download the beta branch and start testing!
