Colony Survival news & patch notes

{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/28352917/a3b50928073a347862f93424779d9860e0c19bda.jpg A big new update is live on Steam right now! It should make the game a lot more accessible to new players, and it should speed up some of the slowest days of starting a new colony. There is a new tab next to the stockpile: “Quests”. These are missions that should guide you through the core of the game. They contain a goal and instructions on how to achieve it. When you’ve fulfilled its requirements, you can claim the reward of the Quest. The rewards are items like food, resources and some unique decorative objects. None of the old content is locked behind Quests. If you know how the game works, you can fully ignore Quests. It’s not a slow, mandatory tutorial. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/28352917/452fcc333019406d9b8c4db6226901391ca120ca.jpg 0.17 contains more noticeable changes. One of them concerns the Notifications menu. The old one was a work-in-progress disaster. It looks much better in 0.17, and it has been deeply connected to the regular first-person gameplay. When something significant happens, like the death of a colonist or a Quest being ready to complete, an icon will pop up in the top right corner of the screen. The message that notifies you of a colonist death also contains a button that allows you to visualize the death location. While we’re talking about the top right corner of the screen: the counters that tracked your ammo have been enhanced as well. They are now customizable! There’s a button for it in the Colony tab. You can decide which items you want to be tracked and displayed. The first ammo types are the default, but they can be removed, replaced or added to. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/28352917/a16b4223061628dc2dac1b1c95fc2f35594d1c48.jpg Multiplayer has been improved as well. Pressing ‘tab’ will bring up a list of currently online players. Requests like sharing a colony can be accepted via the Notifications menu. And servers will now connect to the server browser automatically, without any need for port forwarding or other modifications. Last but not least: click here to read more about the contest that is currently going on! Design Blueprints and share them in our Discord to win prizes. The deadline is Friday July 31, 23:59 Amsterdam time. Veel plezier met de nieuwe update, en succes met de Blueprints Contest! Reddit // Twitter // YouTube // Website // Discord

{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/28352917/b4c9e493d8df7bc07f6230fde45ff000604c0fcb.jpg The next update is 0.16.1, not 0.17. This means: no major changes to content, but a whole bunch of improvements to Quality of Life. Tweaks that make playing the game more convenient. The ugliest menu in the game was the Notifications tab. It was a chaotic, work-in-progress UI. It’s a lot more functional and pleasing to look at now! And it even has a connection “outside of the menu”: major events in-game, like a colonist being killed or Siege Mode triggering, will now generate an alarm-icon in the top-right of the screen, warning you about the event and connecting it to the Notifications tab. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/28352917/586897e8b85f48f2aab25c03325c8d0d45da5e97.jpg Colonist deaths will also spawn an in-game marker of the place where it happened for 60 seconds. They can be made visible again afterwards by going to the death-notification. From the very first version of CS, we’ve always had ammo-counters visible in the UI, helping you keep track of the stockpile of these important items. As more and more ammo types kept being added, it became a little confusing, and we could no longer display all relevant items. Well, the selection for which items get counted is now… your problem! The first three ammo types are shown, but they can be added to, removed and replaced by the player now. You can even track food items, building blocks or any other in-game item. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/28352917/ef025c3f14ecb0ad79efccc2a063ad17ab143bd0.jpg We’ve also added a “tab-menu”. Press tab, and you’ll see which players are currently online on the server. Which relates to the most technical task of all of them. A pretty serious refactor of the online infrastructure. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/28352917/191243311ecf82fed0f5b5136d78138bcdef13e7.png Hosting a server was always a little difficult in CS. Most people trying to do so from their own homes are behind a router with a shared IP that blocks incoming connections by default. That makes it really difficult to connect with others. The Steam-Friend-invite did work, so playing with Steam Friends was doable. Port forwarding would also solve the issue, but that’s a complicated procedure. Zun tweaked the multiplayer architecture, and we’re now running a cloud server that is automatically in touch with every CS server that people run. It feeds the server browser the correct information and makes it possible for people to connect without either being Steam Friends or figuring out port forwarding! Before releasing the update, we do want to connect this to the enhanced Notifications menu. Now that co-op servers can be listed in the server browser and joined more easily, hosts may want better control over who can and can't join. We're considering to add a whitelist mode where the host gets an in-game notification when someone wants to join, where they can then accept or reject them. So, most of the work on 0.16.1 is finished and we should be able to release it in the next few weeks! Bedankt voor het lezen :D Reddit // Twitter // YouTube // Website // Discord

The Beta is live right now! Precise instructions on how to join it appear later in this blog. The main content addition is the Oddity Press. It’s an automated crafter, like the Mill. The Mill makes essential items for the start of the game, and the Oddity Press does the opposite - most of its items utterly lack functionality, and are purely meant for decorative purposes. There’s one exception: there are two new beds. The first is the Luxury Bed. All our colonists are tall and they do not fit properly in a bed where the entire bed frame has to fit within two voxels, or two meters. The Luxury Bed remedies this. It’s a bit longer than two meters, and the remainder of the third voxel is filled with a personal chest for the colonist. We’ve also added a Bunk Bed. It stacks two beds, and they can be used by two different colonists simultaneously. Quite the opposite of the Luxury Bed! All the other content is decorative. Furniture, statues, and wall decorations. We did have to make some technical leaps to implement them though. Until 0.15, we had a clear distinction between textured voxel blocks and the vertex-painted mesh-objects that could be placed on them. In general, voxel blocks stack and the mesh-objects seldom did. You can’t place roofs on top of roofs, or job blocks on top of beds. For many of the new decorative items, this works differently. The tables and desks are deliberately one voxel tall. Both voxel blocks and other items can be placed on top of them. We’ve made “item piles” that deliberately fit into this new system. Groups of food items or trade-related items, etcetera, that can be placed on top of empty desks and tables, or anywhere else in your world. They make your colony look a lot more lively. This new content is the most visible change, but it’s not the only major one! We’ve upgraded from Unity 2023 LTS to Unity 6.3 LTS. We also switched to the Universal Render Pipeline. We needed to recalibrate a bunch of effects, but it should ultimately look very similar to 0.15. This allows us to make use of more recent and future upgrades to Unity. Last but not least: the animation system has been changed. Instead of making animations in Unity itself, they’re now made in Blender and imported directly into the game. This makes it easier to experiment and mod. In the future, more things will be animated, hopefully. If you want to playtest the Beta: right-click Colony Survival in your Steam Library, click Properties and go to Game Versions & Betas. Enter the access code thanksforyourfeedback. Select the 0.16 branch. What do you think about the new content? Are there any bugs and glitches? Did performance change? Are the recipes too costly? Do you have ideas for related content? Do you want to share screenshots? Please do, we’d love to know! Either leave your feedback in our Discord, or share it right here in the comments. Thanks for helping us test 0.16!

Pip

Pip was born in 2014 and adopted by my brother, mother and me. Her fur was described as “smoky blue” and always reflected light in unpredictable ways. She could look very dark in the shadows, or bright grey in the sun. She was a curious cat who could forget herself while focused on something else. Shortly after adopting her, we decided to name our company after both her and our older cat, Lizzy. The company became “Pipliz”. In the last couple of years, she lived with my brother. I’d see her at least every week, during our Monday afternoon work meetings. Earlier this year, she started showing symptoms of serious kidney failure. We tried medicine and a special diet, and it seemed to go well. We thought she had gone back to being her old, healthy, active self. Sadly, she rapidly lost weight and developed an infection that was hard to fight while suffering from kidney failure. The veterinarian concluded that euthanasia was the right decision. Pip was put to sleep on March 17. Her remains now rest in my brother’s garden. She is loved tremendously. Pip 23-04-2014 - 17-03-2026 Lizzy 22-03-2006 - 03-03-2022 Pip and Lizzy together, 2014 Pip in her final hour

{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/28352917/bdc80befc4a205844c56ace54a2b6ab0a3d3ceda.jpg All changes mentioned in this blog concern the internal dev build. Nothing has been released publicly yet. This month, work on the Oddity Press has continued. It works like the Mill: specific items will be produced there, over time, without a colonist present. But the Oddity Press will be unlocked later in the game, and it mainly produces decorative items. The Press is a moving object. The wheel rotates and the press itself goes up and down. All of that is currently functional in the dev build. And the actual production of decorative items is already happening as well! {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/28352917/8b7c3973081b78dd576faa9b97d9aec7fccaba37.png One of the new items is going to be a new, more decorated bed. This being a Dutch game, our colonists are tall. Current beds fit neatly within two voxels, but the colonists are squeezed into them, feet clipping through the bed frame. The new bed fixes this. It requires three voxels in length. The bed itself is significantly longer than two voxels, and the rest of the third voxel is taken up by a chest. This allows for more decoration on the bed, and a cozy fit for the colonist. We're planning to make the paint feature compatible with these beds. Painting them should result in different variants of the same type of bed. This “fancy bed” will be an extra option, and it does not replace the old, simple bed. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/28352917/460901d1314d54f42c912811fc7eff562731ff88.png We’re also working on a very functional new bed type: bunk beds! Place one item and two colonists can sleep there. These should be very useful for people who want to make optimal use of space. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/28352917/d95f20a709c3222fdf7d903b2bf131020028def3.png The first decorative furniture and “item-piles” have been added to the dev build. We added an empty desk and a little table. Both of these are exactly one voxel tall. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/28352917/0de77b4e00847962d42cdbf710b092e00234c009.jpg The “item-piles” are groups of small objects with different themes. They can be laid down upon voxels, but they can also be put on top of the new furniture. The desk is two voxels wide, and has two separate spots for these item-piles. But it’s not merely item-piles that can go on there! You can also stack furniture on top of other furniture, or build on them with regular voxels. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/28352917/41517a436ab66a63ae01b4c7659b64e7b27080f3.jpg All of this should help give players a lot more options to make their colonies and blueprints look much more alive and organic! Bedankt voor het lezen :D Reddit // Twitter // YouTube // Website // Discord

{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/28352917/3899240a7b241fc5786d8d37929214ae24bcb930.jpgCulling frozen right in front of Lagoon's castle - invisible terrain does not get rendered Colony Survival was a Daily Deal last Sunday. For an entire week, the game is 50% off! This is the moment to purchase the game for yourself, to recommend it to your friends - or to gift it to them! Until this update, the game rendered everything the camera pointed at. But of course, visually rendering things that are not visible is a waste of computing power and energy. So, if you can determine what is invisible to the player and skip that in the rendering process, you get serious optimization benefits. Except… that you kinda have to render the world to determine what is visible and what’s invisible. But, this “test render” doesn’t have to be as detailed as the render output you actually see as a player. You can skip textures and lighting, you can do it in a lower resolution, and you can even combine individual voxels into larger blocks in the distance, So this is what Zun has been working on these past few weeks. A quick “test render” determines what is invisible and excludes that from the “final render”, which is rendered in full resolution and detail. This process is called “culling”. Correctly implementing this without glitching was quite difficult. There are a lot of edge cases. What if a hill isn’t visible - but the shadow it casts is? Solutions had to be found for all these problems. And Zun succeeded in that! Culling seems to work in all situations. If you’re standing in an open field without player-built structures, it doesn’t have a very significant performance impact. But where fields of crops are hidden behind walls, castles or hills, or when you're inside underground colonies, or when walking through dense cities with twisty streets, there is a very serious performance improvement! {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/28352917/81d2450cf51387d07fbd4e22a8308e9d301ba118.jpgThe "Culling Texture" right in front of Lagoon's towers Optimization is always good, but this new feature is a necessary prerequisite before we can work on two other things we’d like to add in the future:

Cave generation. They cost performance compared to the flat, “2D” terrain we currently have, but now culling will make exploring and settling them actually less performance intensive than walking outdoors.

More meshes for wild plants and flowers, to make the world and terrain generation more interesting and diverse. They cost performance too, but if they’re culled when not visible, their impact is greatly reduced. These will not arrive in 0.15.2 though. That update, which will be released in a couple of weeks, will focus on the “Oddity Press”, which gives access to a lot of decorative content, and some UI enhancements. If you want to experiment with the details of culling, we have some tools available for that. Go to Gameplay Settings and enable developer buttons. Press F5 to display a performance graph. Press F6 to show dev features. There, you can enable and disable culling, show the “Culling Texture”, and freeze culling. Is this causing visual glitches or performance issues for you? Running into other problems? Please let us know in the comments or on Discord. Veel plezier met 0.15.1! Reddit // Twitter // YouTube // Website // Discord

{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/28352917/5a41a42506649fee61c32459fa974bc410dfe4d9.jpg Colony Survival is currently 25% off until 5 January! Welcome to the last blog of 2025! We want to start out with a heartfelt thank you to all our readers. To everybody who bought the game and has made it possible for us to be dedicated to this project full-time. To everybody who left feedback, wrote a Steam Review, recommended the game to friends, shared a blueprint, uploaded a world, created a mod. We literally could not have done this without you! We wish you all a very Merry Christmas and an amazing 2026. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S9mLnbCWU18 2025 saw a lot of work on polish, quality-of-life, accessibility and scaffolding that we can continue to build on for years to come. The year opened with a new collaboration with Allcorrect, which helped us translate the entire game into a bunch of major languages. We released 0.13, which added explosives and rubble that's visible every time you remove a block. 0.14 made paths relevant: blocks now affect the movement speed and pathfinding of colonists. It also gave colonists and monsters the ability to move diagonally. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QgYrI0gWX3g The biggest update of the year was released less than a month ago: 0.15. It added the top-down view and blueprints. We have many plans to expand on this in the future! {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/28352917/1419dfca157b7236cd845f21c012dc50e37888b3.png We’ve already started working on 0.15.1. The main gameplay addition will be the “Oddity Press”. It will work in a similar way as the windmill: it can craft items without a colonist being present. But where the windmill is aimed at producing functional blocks for the early game, the Oddity Press is aimed at totally non-functional items. It will produce tables, chairs, desks, decorative items and furniture without any clear gameplay advantage, but that will be crucial to anyone trying to build a lively, immersive world. The most popular mods are focused on delivering such items to players, and it’s still a very common request by players. With the new blueprint systems, it has become a lot easier to spread such decorations throughout the world. We’re planning to organize another builder’s contest, focused on blueprints. But we will wait until the Oddity Press is finished and available to all! {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/28352917/a285b3fc0a7509d93f6fad30b0427a060d05ffdb.png Zun’s working on occlusion culling. Currently, all objects in the direction the camera aims at are rendered. But a bunch of these are often not actually visible to the player, like farms hidden behind buildings or hills. If you can figure out which of these are invisible before the scene is rendered, then you can just skip these objects completely. This has large performance benefits - especially for underground colonies. Such techniques are essential if you want to render large, complex cave systems. Currently, the world generation doesn't render caves - but we’re definitely hoping to add them later! Sadly, caves won’t be a 2026 Q1 thing. But the Oddity Press and new builder’s contest are definitely planned for that :D Hele Fijne Kerstdagen en een Gelukkig Nieuwjaar! Reddit // Twitter // YouTube // Website // Discord

{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/28352917/d2bd8b49ecbfb879c27a32de510e06e000f47eaa.jpg https://youtu.be/QgYrI0gWX3g For a quick and clear overview of all new features, read Blog 261 Ladies and gentlemen - welcome to a new era. After more than a decade of development, this first-person strategy game finally acquired an (optional!) new perspective, the traditional view for strategy games: top-down. This changes everything. Think about real life. What jobs match strategy games the best? Architects and generals. But their main design work doesn’t happen on the frontline or in the middle of a construction site. It happens at a headquarters or office, standing next to a big table filled with maps, or a desk full of blueprints. This helps them to get an overview and see the whole picture, to make adjustments in a dozen different spots without physically travelling to a dozen different spots. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/28352917/8a8438a3e582d6a72284ac77ecc7edd3b2d8a6f2.jpg Colony Survival faced a bottleneck. We couldn’t make the game much more complex without making it too annoying and frustrating to deal with for a lot of players. But with the top-down view, we’re giving maps to generals and clear blueprints to architects. Things become easier to comprehend and to manage - which gives us new room for added complexity. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/28352917/f4ad33b6b40df281d000164220b331fa46bca6a2.jpg To start using the top-down view, complete the brand-new option in the tech tree: the Overseer’s Desk. It’s a desk full of maps and blueprints that can be used to activate the top-down view. The buttons on the right allow you to adjust the view. The house icon activates X-Ray Vision, which filters out all blocks above a certain height. When it’s on, the blue arrows can be used to adjust that height. The lightbulb toggles the lamp on your cursor on and off. The icon with the monster allows you to see the area where monsters spawn. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/28352917/ba81a5c6cb65405b0f9c24b564ec7aeb423a3851.jpg The buttons at the bottom give you access to the command tool, the banner tool, and the tools related to blueprints. The one on the left is the “Scanner Tool” - it allows you to select a building in your world and turn it into a blueprint that can be used again and again. On the right is the “Placer Tool”. It opens your list of blueprints, and allows you to select them and put them into your world. The “Import Blueprint” button is greyed out by default, but lights up when you’ve copied a string of characters that works as a blueprint. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/28352917/249ff0fbdc71d0460718493c0411e676a52247b8.jpg To generate these blueprint-codes yourself, just press the “share” button. We’ve already got a channel on our Discord called Blueprints Collection, which is full of codes generated by beta testers. Feel free to share your best blueprints there, with some screenshots! Or grab the ones that others have produced. If you'd really like to avoid Discord, there's also a Steam Forum with the same purpose. Blueprints work just like other construction areas. Place job spots around the area, and construction workers will come to build the blueprint block by block. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/28352917/06a1a0a5f35ad8060eee0920f0a168a162dd34e4.jpg We'll highlight two specific blueprints. The first one is Darkwind Gatehouse by Acapla. It can be seen in the image above. It's part of a set of blueprints related to walls, and they all fit together. The blueprint-code is: 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 {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/28352917/b8788689822d51ef82051c1e51c449b7b8d87bb4.jpg In contrast to the traditional and rustic Darkwind Gatehouse is the Piedmeutian Style Low-Income Housing Unit. Do you need a convenient rectangle to house your colonists or shelter your jobblocks? Build one of these - or a dozen! Credits go to the designer, Fenn. 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 {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/28352917/e0a49ce6c5b59e01855425c72970756e3f493e41.jpg Apart from the top-down view and blueprints, 0.15 has also replaced the old meshes for the merchant hub, grocery store, tool shop and sacred failsafe with new ones. The new ones are a lot more detailed, and larger too. Wherever you’ve placed them already in your world, the old ones will remain. But as soon as you remove them and add them to your inventory, they will be converted to the new mesh! Some other items, like wheat and berry bushes, have also received a fresh coat of paint. Talking about painting - the paint system has been expanded! Fences, pillars and architraves are now paintable. Painted planks have also received an upgrade. Last but certainly not least - plaster is back in the game! Enjoy 0.15, and let us know how you feel about these changes :D We'll read all the comments here and we're monitoring Discord actively. Thank you beta testers! Reddit // Twitter // YouTube // Website // Discord

{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/28352917/6d8a670832daa52312bc75d3d06a3a47af0701a3.jpg Update 0.15 is available for a public test right now! The core new feature is the top-down perspective. Unlock the Overseer’s Desk in the tech tree, place it in your colony, and click on it to switch to this perspective. From the top-down view, you get access to the new Blueprints feature. There is a “Scanner” which allows you to select and save parts of your world. Right next to it is a “Placer” that opens a list of all saved blueprints that you can place back into your colony. A placed blueprint will start a construction project, and you need to assign construction workers to build the project. Blueprints can also be exported to codes, or imported from them. This allows you to easily share buildings between worlds, with friends or with strangers. To help navigate indoor and underground spaces from this new perspective, we’ve also added X-Ray vision as a toggleable option. When activated, it will make everything above the height of the Overseer’s Desk invisible. But it also comes with buttons that allow you to increase or decrease the height of this “slice”. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/28352917/a382d3b8aa7338f3ac8228a8f957ff7e98bad251.jpg Like the mill we added last year, the Overseer’s Desk is a lot larger than one voxel. We like the consequences of that size, both visually and in terms of gameplay. So we’ve redesigned a bunch of meshes with this new philosophy. The merchant hub, grocery store, tool shop and sacred failsafe were all tiny and bland. They are now much larger and more lively and unique. This will not affect these blocks when they are pre-existing in your world, but each one placed while playing 0.15 will have the new shape. That’s not the only visual change! The paint system has been expanded. Pillars, architraves, fences and planks are now all paintable. The berry bush switched from a textured voxel to a 3D mesh. Wheat and barley have new meshes. And last but not least: plaster has made it back into the game! {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/28352917/7fb748b9ff4e4bdec296c054b90932c645b80e6d.jpg All these features should be working. The main things that are lacking are translations and controller support. But of course, we can’t test the blueprints and the X-Ray vision in all circumstances. And that’s why we need you! Have fun trying out all the new features of 0.15, and if you notice anything weird, let us know. We’ll be monitoring all channels, but Discord and the comments under this blog get checked most frequently. And apart from bug reports, general feedback about the update is also appreciated! To get access to the beta: - Right-click Colony Survival in your Steam Library, choose “Properties” - Go the “Betas” tab, enter the code pleaseshareyourfeedback - Select the 0.15.0 branch The game will show the version number in the bottom-right corner in the main menu. Have fun, and pleaseshareyourfeedback :D Reddit // Twitter // YouTube // Website // Discord

{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/28352917/fcfedc078e211074247bc6aa02169c77f3bb2734.jpg All the progress talked about in this blog concerns the unreleased development branch and is not publicly available yet In the last blog we announced “world slicing”, the ability to “cut the roof off” and see inside of buildings at the level of the “top-down trigger”. It’s a fun experiment, but because it’s just on one level, it’s not very practical. Many buildings have floors on wildly different levels, and it also makes it hard to see into underground spaces. Zun has added a major improvement to this feature: you can now determine the height at which the world is “sliced open”! It’s a radical new way of looking at your colony. Previously invisible things become very visible. I’m certain this will affect how players build their worlds and I’m looking forward to seeing that impact. Screenshots in this blog should give you an idea of how it currently looks in-game. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/28352917/33d87d734ba68946b4862f34e4c050d974ce2d91.jpg And as you can see in these screenshots, the UI is a bit mediocre and work-in-progress. We still have to work on this before we can release the top-down feature. The UI in general is a bit of a struggle for us. To make multiplayer functional, there has to be coordination between the “client” running on your local desktop and a server that can be anywhere in the world. Our singleplayer and multiplayer modes work nearly identically, so when you’re playing offline, there is still a server-client split. Both run separately on your local machine. This makes development of certain features, like UI, more difficult than developing for a purely local, undivided, singleplayer game. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/28352917/7d9889c73954904f39db3d7271566e977b92e190.jpg We also have extensive mod support built into the game. This means that a mod can tell the game to render special buttons and menus for that mod. Taking all of this together means that developing our UI is more complicated than it seems at first glance. This is one of the reasons why our UI is fairly barebones and primitive in general. We didn’t like engaging with the UI system, and often chose to add new UI elements in a janky manner. Which just made it even harder to engage with in the future. The new top-down view both requires UI elements, and gives us a lot of opportunities for new ways of engaging with the world. But our “technical debt” is catching up with us. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/28352917/35c9aaabf1a7cb5189a6423a46e2681a0b509e4b.jpg So we’re planning to release the top-down view with slightly less features than hoped for, and our next big project is refactoring our UI system. Making it work more elegantly behind the scenes, and improving the in-game appearance as well. The goal is that it should be easier to add new, functional, good-looking UI systems when the refactor is done. Another technical obstacle that Zun worked on this month: rotating and mirroring blueprints. They’re pretty essential features, and fairly easy to get to work for most blocks, but of course, there are extremely tedious edge cases. In recent years we’ve added pretty complex “adaptive” blocks like the dynamic quarterblocks and crown moulding. Making sure that all their variants are rotated and mirrored correctly was quite the struggle! But Zun did manage to make it work. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/28352917/aaff8bf2b4afcefee613632d24cb9412313b3c5d.jpg While Zun has been fighting these complex technical problems, I was working on replacing more old meshes. The primitive, small mesh for the sacred failsafe has been replaced by the massive statue of a divine protector. And berry bushes, previously a square block with textures, has now gotten its own 3D vertex-painted mesh, like many jobblocks and other objects in the game. The new mesh of the berry bushes randomly rotates to make fields of them look more organic. Personally, I was surprised by how well it looked! We’re thinking of designing more plants in this style, and making them part of the world generation. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/28352917/3ee789bb67dd18c4ab7e39f5be666244986e03f5.jpg Bedankt voor het lezen :D Reddit // Twitter // YouTube // Website // Discord

These new features are still in development and not yet released. The world in the screenshots was built by Lagoon. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/28352917/d89bc64529ee47bdda58ebdd82b4309a1d79deed.jpg In the past month, we continued our work on the top-down view feature. We added a “worldslicing” feature, where everything above the height of the “topdown trigger” turns invisible. It's practical to be able see inside houses, but it's essential if you want to use the topdown view in underground situations! {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/28352917/132b5309bbbecfaa3615ae2cec1f0e969cd39993.jpg Last month’s blog and video caused some confusion, because buildings were copy-pasted instantly. Of course, that was not the intention. Since then, that has been fixed as well: blueprinted buildings are built gradually by colonists, like all other construction projects they can work on. Blueprint saving was quite wonky at the time of the last blog. The blueprint was gone after reloading the world, and stuff like texts on signs or crafting configurations on jobblocks were never saved at all. All of that now works as it should. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/28352917/4bee58dab611e04fe98337286fc6cd94fbe779e7.jpg Making blueprints work smoothly with the Steam Workshop is not something that we can get to work before we release the feature, but Zun found an alternative way to share your blueprints! As can be seen in the screenshot, each blueprint now generates a unique code that can be shared between players. This means that in the near future, you’ll be able to find great buildings on for example our Discord, the Steam Forums, the wiki or our subreddit and add them to your own colonies! {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/28352917/d324fe4dc8e2b56bdd86bfbdf10282d59e4c1618.jpg In last month’s video you could see that the “topdown trigger” looked like a regular crate. It now has a proper mesh! Since we added the mill last year, objects that are larger than a voxel work much better. We’ve used that for the topdown trigger. What’s a sensible way to indicate an object that turns your perspective to a top-down view? We were inspired by architects and designers studying maps and drafting blueprints. We’ve represented that by building a big desk with a chair. We’re very happy with how it turned out! {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/28352917/983415957a9e79a9775df2868ba53d9f8992c8d8.jpg Now liberated from one-voxel constraints, we redid some older meshes. The merchant hub, grocery store and tool shop were fairly uninspired and bland. They were significantly enlarged and gained a lot more personality! They all received a kind of “market stand” look. Wide and deep tables displaying many items, with a rain cover. The items on display are related to the type of shop it is. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/28352917/cc567cc955fa822af7377a5edc3e7bf4597c1c33.png These will totally replace their much smaller ancestors. They won't be automatically replaced in existing savegames and the older variants will keep doing their work. But destroy them, and you will receive the new, larger version. The new mesh does not have large consequences for the market stand. That object is only useful to the player, and most colonies have no more than one or two. But tool shops and grocery stores are useful to colonists, and many players have placed them at every job cluster. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/28352917/c8a76220344e39d3f90227f0d3e48d487b1e2704.jpg In quite a lot of these situations, the new mesh doesn’t fit physically, or it looks out of place because it’s indoors. It will be less aesthetic and less efficient to put the new larger shops at every corner. Hopefully, this cuts down on repetitive “shopmaxxing” and leads to slightly more refined designs, with little central places where colonists from multiple job clusters regularly gather to collect new tools and meals! {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/28352917/3c301703320bd081bf02f87d2be8f4e5b44a3c51.jpg How do you feel about all these changes? Let us know here in the comments or on Discord! Reddit // Twitter // YouTube // Website // Discord

{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/28352917/00c1d27a06b5dc7e85210086976fa33edc4db8a4.jpg We made good progress with the top-down view this month! This short video shows what it currently looks like in the internal development build. Watch it here: https://youtu.be/OCcjfFNz_ZM It's all work-in-progress, so it will look different when it's publicly released. The interface is very basic. And when you place a blueprint of a building, it's constructed instantly. Of course, that's not the intention. The video demonstrates the new features, currently called the "scanner" and "placer". The scanner allows you to select a part of the world and save it as a blueprint. The placer allows you to select a blueprint and place it in the world. The core of the feature is currently working, but there's still a lot to do before we can release it. For example, at the moment blueprints disappear when you return to the main menu and then reload the world. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/28352917/723e4d325e5758b54beeda0ba6540beee5848a7b.jpg The video mentions the orthographic perspective, but it's hard to explain without images. So here are two screenshots from Blender to illustrate the difference! First, a regular perspective, as used by your own eyes and current first-person Colony Survival: {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/28352917/b4b4da28b3affb503c3b141e4d2cd033b0ced6c6.png Secondly, the orthographic perspective: {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/28352917/5065fdbc0de5ddcd87d39943397bbbb34fd6ea8c.png All the cubes are the same size. In a regular perspective, distant cubes appear smaller. In the orthographic perpsective, all cubes appear the exact same size. Lots of top-down strategy games use this perspective, and we tried to make it work for Colony Survival as well. Our game engine, Unity, has a special option for it, but it changes so much in the way things are rendered that we ended up with a lot of visual glitches. Instead of trying to patch them all, we chose a very similar solution: use the equivalent of a telescope. A really powerful telescope has a visual result that is very close to an orthographic perspective! The top-down perspective looks and feels visually distinct from regular gameplay, and I love how it’s turning out. We’ll keep working on it and hope to release it publicly later this year! Bedankt voor het lezen :D {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/28352917/304ec687343e9b51036ebb6ba6d792f29e5953c3.jpg Reddit // Twitter // YouTube // Website // Discord

{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/28352917/7f7161bc5597a39789b0a97983e3ed98a01393fd.jpg Colony Survival is part of the Summer Sale and currently 30% off! For years, players have been asking for a blueprint builder or “copy-paste builder”. A way to select an area of the world - a building, a palace, a tower - and to let your colonists build a copy of it in some other place of the world. One of the very first mods actually contained such functionality. I totally understood the appeal, but I worried deeply about the implementation. Designing proper interfaces to intuitively handle complex RTS-functions from a first-person perspective is a hard task. How do you make sure to select exactly your structure, but nothing extra? And how do you place it in the world? How do you visualize to players that it’s rotated in the right direction? How do you align it to the ground, how do you determine the exact height? How do you deal with clipping through the terrain, how do you prevent the new structure from floating above the ground? The first time we worried about such issues was nearly a decade ago. The game was in a much more barebones condition, and we lacked quality-of-life features like the green preview that we currently have. But even with those additions, a simple implementation of the copy-paste builder would quickly become very frustrating, glitching and janky, in my opinion. There is an addition that I believe would help tremendously: a decent top-down view. The position itself, high up in the sky, should help with the selection and placement of large structures. But there’s something else. While playing from a first-person perspective, the mouse moves the camera and it’s an essential way of moving through the world. But that also means you can’t separately move around a cursor. A cursor with which you could hover over elements in the world and interact with buttons and other UI elements on the screen. In traditional RTS’s, these are crucial ways of interacting with the world and managing your civilization. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/28352917/e57cf47f3e2f2ca99a3d4a68dbc84c8afccbef64.jpg We discussed it and agreed about this! So we’re currently working on building a top-down view for Colony Survival. It won’t be the new default way of playing the game. It’ll have to be entered by interacting with an in-world block while playing from the first-person perspective. We believe this addition will unlock a whole lot of new potential for the game. In the top-down view, it’ll be a lot easier to communicate information towards the player, and interacting with the world will be a lot more intuitive. This makes it possible for us to add new more complex gameplay mechanics to the game without overwhelming players. We’re excited for those new possibilities! Developing the new top-down view requires a lot of complicated coding without a lot of visual results. That’s why most screenshots in this blog showcase another thing we’re working on: more paint options! The paint mechanic allowed for items like doors and window frames to be painted, but objects like pillars were unpaintable. We’re fixing that! {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/28352917/42ab9047c799e177821d0d3e032ed6b6cad467bb.jpg

Anniversary & Early Access

This month, on the 16th of June, we celebrated the fact that the Steam release happened eight years ago, in 2017. This means that we’ve both been working on the game full-time for that period. We’re very grateful that your sustained support has been making that possible! A lot has changed in that period. The game has radically changed and grown, and our own personal lives also look completely different. We’d love to discuss “Early Access” with you. It’s a conflicting label. We were born in an era where you still had to go to a shop to buy a physical disc. That meant that a game was fairly static: it was the data on the disc, it was a definitive release happening at a specific moment in time. Of course, developers often kept playing with the same formula, but that meant you had to buy a sequel one or two years later. Sequels that sometimes radically improved the formula, but that more often than not were simple reskins. The same gameplay mechanics, but with some new items and enemies. With digital distribution, it’s possible to keep working on the same game after release. To enhance it, optimize it, add more features, more content. For years. Or decades. Some fairly successful games have pioneered this. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/28352917/81bc73c317f2142ff4f3c807b632051b221d2c2c.jpg It’s what we are doing. It has been years since we broke savegame compatibility, but we can imagine that that happens again. Not with the next top-down view and blueprint builder update - much further in the future. But fully exploiting all the new possibilities of the top-down view might require a new style of world generation and a tech tree that is so fundamentally different that it is not compatible with old savegames. That’s why we’re sticking with the Early Access label. Because we believe it’s wrong to break savegames in a game without that label. But there’s a decent percentage of players who think Early Access means unoptimized buggy jank. Some even believe that it’s Steam that does a quality check before you can leave Early Access - and that being in Early Access means you don’t pass that quality check. That’s not how it works. So we feel like we’re stuck between two suboptimal situations. Keeping the Early Access label means a significant percentage of potential players will instantly think bad of the game. But if we remove the label, we feel obligated to keep savegames compatible into eternity - which means that fundamental changes to things like world generation and the tech tree become impossible. Maybe we need a new label? Something like “Perpetual Development”? We’d love to know your opinion about this dilemma! And about the new top-down view and blueprint builders of course :) Bedankt voor het lezen! Reddit // Twitter // YouTube // Website // Discord

{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/28352917/6f0de6f5e4e0ace3f0548352e22656b19b731684.jpg The newest update is live right now and contains a massive overhaul of NPC movement and pathfinding. In all previous versions, NPCs were rigidly constrained to the voxel grid. They could only move in straight lines to the blocks directly next to theirs. 0.14.0 changes that. NPCs are now able to move diagonally! This is true for both colonists and monsters. Before 0.14.0, NPCs didn’t really care where they walked. Grass or an actual floor, dry land or water - they were equally quick on all terrains, and had zero preferences. This has changed too! All NPCs now strive to avoid water. Colonists prefer walking on proper paths and get a minor speed boost there, while they are slightly slower on blocks like grass and sand. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/28352917/f618cd0c75fcaf36e3d3262dc5602a94c62e7036.jpg Monsters can’t open doors anymore - but have learned to destroy them. They have a bit of a dislike for doing that, making colonists behind doors safer in a lot of situations. But block the path towards the banner with a door, and they’ll have no problem smashing them to pieces! Previously, colonists could walk through beds without a problem - that prevented a lot of pathfinding issues. Beds are not total blockers in 0.14.0, but they do slow down colonist movement quite dramatically. “Bed seas” are not an optimal solution anymore! Apart from those major changes to pathfinding and movement, there are some smaller changes. The “old” quarterblocks can now be placed with the same system as the newer dynamic quarterblocks, allowing for example vertical placement on walls. Other “dynamic” blocks that adjust their shape based on context, like rails, torches and street lanterns, will now show a green placement preview, like static objects had been doing for a while. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/28352917/264e913cd963c3b0d2066173af3394e427879924.jpg There is a pretty long list of minor fixes and changes. Some destruction particles have been adjusted, some text issues have been improved, a ragdoll bug was patched. For the full list, see the in-game changelog! If you encounter any issues, or would otherwise like to share your opinion, please let us know! We’re very active on Discord and will certainly monitor the Steam comments on this blog. Veel plezier met update 0.14.0! {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/28352917/73a23c3074c51137f5903a83dcdd624debb9522b.jpg Reddit // Twitter // YouTube // Website // Discord

{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/28352917/7b2d7cad38fa6ac47646210efb5bde8cad076ecf.jpg The new update is live on Steam! The biggest changes are “rubble” and bombs. When you or a colonist destroys a block, small chunks of rubble will appear and fall to the ground. Bombs take advantage of this new system by instantly removing large amounts of blocks and blasting the rubble away. There’s also a complex fuse system that allows you to detonate the bombs remotely. The fuse system supports junctions, “elevators” to go up a level and special fuse blocks that introduce a delay to the system. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S9mLnbCWU18 You don’t have to wait until you’ve unlocked and produced gunpowder to try the new system. Fairly early in the game, you can unlock them in the merchant, where they can be purchased for Colony Points. (Which is the currency you earn in-game, not some microtransaction nonsense) The rubble system automatically limits the amount of rubble generated when large amounts of blocks disappear simultaneously. It's also affected by the "particle effects" setting, so it can be tweaked to your preference. We added some smoke with the explosions, and that smoke is also visible when you or guards use the grenade launcher. The area-of-effect damage of the grenade launcher didn’t work when the player used it manually in the past, but that has been fixed with 0.13.0 as well! {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/28352917/d5fd68ae2dfe37d2dd44bff12b8fca41f1483092.jpg The previous update added the transparent green outline that shows up before you place certain items. Some items, like fences, adapt their shape depending on the surroundings when placed. The old system couldn’t properly predict that. The fuses can be stacked to create a “fuse elevator” that allows the fuse to go up a level. This is a bit of a unique system so we want to make absolutely clear how it works. But the green preview couldn’t properly show that transformation. There was a pretty technical problem here regarding the communication between the server and client, but Zun completely overhauled that. This means that the green preview now exactly shows how the fuse will adapt to the surroundings when it’s placed, and this improvement has been applied to other items as well, like the fence. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/28352917/1fcadd8f218f28cc32804a6444351862e9e6c211.jpg A noticeable other change concerns “scribe-type-colonists” - they can now pick items from high shelves, to a maximum of five stacked shelves. 0.13.0 contains a bunch of other small tweaks, improvements and bug fixes - see the in-game changelog for the full list! We hope the number 13 won’t bring us bad luck. Let us know how you feel about the changes, and please report any issues! {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/28352917/47c47b65ad12dbf3bc5294ee07b2df76c3d66ab4.jpg Veel plezier met de update :D Reddit // Twitter // YouTube // Website // Discord

{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/28352917/2123f2900a953d0780aa4564a75780166e04895d.jpg We’re participating in the City Builder & Colony Sim Fest which means Colony Survival is currently 30% off! This is a great moment to purchase the game if you don’t own it yet. As promised in the previous blog, we made a video showing the new systems! Here it is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S9mLnbCWU18 We didn’t merely work on the rubble-effect. We also added explosives! There are currently three types. (In the internal development build that will be released publicly quite soon) Firstly, there are regular bombs, which destroy blocks all around them. Need a building gone rapidly? These are for you! Secondly, there are shaped charges. They blast away a 3x3 area in front of them. They’re very useful if you need to make a tunnel. Last but not least, there are shaped charges that target downwards diagonally. This leaves a stair-like shape standing. Very practical when you’re digging a mine! {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/28352917/0750131dc0f058db6367514c1024464222533ab6.jpg To trigger these explosives, we’ve implemented a fuse system. They can be placed on the ground and they automatically connect to each other and to bombs. They can’t be placed vertically on walls though, so we had to think of an alternative way of going up a level. That turned out to be the “fuse elevator”. It’s made by building another fuse right on top of an existing fuse. The fuse now turns into two square rings on two different levels, connecting nearby fuses on both levels together. Another useful part of the fuse system is the fuse timer. It works like a regular fuse, but it contains a delay of four seconds. All combined, it’s a pretty complex and powerful system! Development on these new items and features is mostly finished. Just some finishing touches are needed. We’re hoping to release the update within a couple of weeks! {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/28352917/197165f0283f6bcaaf43bef7249ee260f6ea3687.jpg Bedankt voor het lezen :D Reddit // Twitter // YouTube // Website // Discord

{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/28352917/2e953398fb20d56a507143e35ad7d36cf249d2bd.jpg At the end of 2024, when testing the addition of the mill, I did another cheat-free playthrough of the game. I made a mistake in my planning and had to remove a fairly large wall that I had accidentally placed two blocks to the right of where it had to go. Destroying it was a bit of a tedious, repetitive task. I could’ve let my colonists do the work but I couldn’t be bothered setting up a construction area. It made me vividly realize that currently, destroying blocks is pretty…. boring. A bar fills up, a block disappears, repeat. But in real life, smashing a brick wall is actually pretty exciting. Chunks fly off, rubble rolls and falls everywhere. Why shouldn’t Colony Survival be like that? I instantly thought that I wanted to make the direction of destroying the block matter. Make it more interactive, less repetitive. Give players the choice to direct all the rubble into a specific direction. So that’s the new big change we’re working on! We currently have an internal dev build where this works fairly well. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/28352917/45ae9e131d1ab942cbf39711090d60abc3334839.jpg We used a “shatter algorithm” to break a 3D cube into many fractured parts. We took some of the smaller parts and use them when you are in the process of breaking a block. Where your cursor hits the block, little chunks fall off. When the block itself disappears, large chunks spawn inside of the now empty space, and they fly away based on gravity and the direction of your mining efforts. The fractured parts from the shatter algorithm work very well for stone blocks. But they make less sense for other blocks like leaves and wooden planks. So we’ve added more types of chunks, each fitting to a different groups of blocks. Testing the new chunks is a joy. It’s really fun to make big piles of rubble and to watch them bounce down slopes and tunnels. One of the first things I instinctively tried was letting them drop into water. At first, all the chunks sunk down to the bottom as if the water wasn’t there. Which kinda makes sense for stone rubble… but not for leaves or wood! So now we’ve also assigned different weights to the rubble, making some float and others not. For now, you’ll have to enjoy the rubble in the static screenshots in this blog. But they do look pretty amazing when you can actually see them moving, so we’re planning to share a video in the next blog! {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/28352917/df79a198ab9411ce1ff5834a00a1b1359dd8832f.jpg

Daily Deal & LQA

We were invited by Steam to participate in a Daily Deal! In the middle of January, we had a significant discount and were featured on Steam’s frontpage. It worked out really well, leading to a serious boost in new players. Some of them are probably reading this, so welcome! We worked together with Allcorrect to get professional translations of the game in some major languages. They were implemented before the Daily Deal and we noticed a significant increase in players from the related countries. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/28352917/9ac0cee2b6d585fdbbd78e995f5d2f05d1813031.png But we hadn’t gone through the “LQA” process beforehand. LQA means Linguistic Quality Assurance. The professional translators who worked on our game only received a bunch of text files. They didn’t actually see their texts in the full context of the game. During the LQA process, a group of specialized testers actually played the game and tested the translations. It resulted in quite a lot of feedback that is now being implemented into the game. If any of you are using the new professional translations, please let us know how you feel about them! Fully content? Do you have criticism? We’d love to hear it. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/28352917/cecf13e18a8e8f11c8be97ee33f05cb824c1fa47.jpg

The Future

We have gotten some questions from new players whether we are continuing to update the game, and whether there will be significant additions to the gameplay. The answer to both questions is yes! We’ve had some very deep and serious discussions about the future of Colony Survival at the start of this year. What would we still love to add before we leave Early Access? What is still missing, what fun can still be had in the framework of the current game? We actually had some very inspiring ideas and we’re quite certain about developing in that direction. Yet simultaneously, we’re not 100% sure how to actually translate those into detailed gameplay and specific updates. We’ve still got some smaller ideas related to the rubble/chunks/destruction effects, so we’re working on those now and that will be the main content of the next update. Simultaneously, we’re working out how to actually implement those bigger ideas we’ve got for the future of the game. When we’re more certain about that, we’ll certainly share those plans with you! {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/28352917/332b9ff94aafd37e88dfdcf8f8bc8a35b69345b1.jpg Bedankt voor het lezen :D Reddit // Twitter // YouTube // Website // Discord

{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/28352917/b03c3fc4d902043da5e1b98e5095a0cec2a62984.jpg We have just released update 0.12.1! The most significant change is the addition of official game translations in major global languages. Both the storepage and the in-game content are now available in:

• German
• French
• Spanish
• Czech
• Polish
• Russian
• Japanese
• Korean
• Chinese (simplified)

We’ve worked together with Allcorrect. It’s not often that we collaborate so closely with other companies, or that professionals go through our .json files so thoroughly. But it went very well, with high-quality results delivered very quickly! And no, we aren’t paid or obligated to share this ;) The translations in all these languages will be updated officially when texts are changed or added in future updates. We had fanmade translations in all these languages beforehand, and they have been made redundant. We do still appreciate the makers of these translations, they have been very valuable in the past 7.5 years. For the many players who speak languages not covered by the nine in the list above: your fan translations are still very useful, feel free to keep submitting them! The game now supports both official and fanmade translations.

Zun’s Birthday!

December the 27th is the birthday of Zun! He is the programmer who started work on the very first prototype of this game 12 years ago. None of this would have existed without him. Congratulations are welcome in the comments and on Discord!

Year in Review

The last blog of 2023 was a little dark. We didn’t know precisely what to choose for the next update, and we were thinking about switching over to a sequel. That has changed quite a bit. We’ve got a lot of inspiration for new updates, and we’re very proud of the steps we've taken this year. We started 2024 by announcing the winners of the Builder’s Contest, with our very first voice-overed video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5M-xUwPVuTw In February, we released 0.10.1, which added water transparency! It makes a big difference to how the world looks, and we made another video to demonstrate it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IRUsFNhlkpk In the same month, we released updates that overhauled the lighting. We released the third video of the year three weeks after the second. Something that doesn’t work well on video but that’s still quite significant: those updates also added Steam Cloud Sync support. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d_i8hXLc-EU In March, we released 0.10.3, which added proper controller support. A month later, all of that was verified by Steam, and Colony Survival was also approved as “Steamdeck Compatible”! The Builder’s Contest, the new water and the improved lighting all came together in the production of the new main trailer, which was uploaded on April 19. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WbbDsOB_3zQ At the end of May, we released 0.11. The biggest difference was the new colonist model. It’s quite different from the old one, but we’re very happy with it. It has allowed us to add unique models for different jobs, instead of only changing the colour of the shirt. Apart from that, 0.11 also significantly enhanced construction jobs with new features. During the Summer, we worked hard on a new lighting system that features much more differentiated indirect lighting. It definitely makes the game look a lot better. I think we were a bit too soon with the filming of the new main trailer! It was released in 0.11.1 at the end of August. Which means we’ve already arrived in September and work on 0.12, which was released less than a month ago! The biggest change is the addition of the mill, and we’re very happy with how it turned out. It was quite a change for us:

• The mill rewards player crafting instead of work done by colonists. We’ve pretty much always focused on the colonist-part of the game, but encouraging the player to participate in certain ways actually works really well.
• The 3D-objects we’ve added in recent years were always fairly small, the size of one or sometimes two voxel blocks. The mill is much bigger.
• All our jobblocks are static, not animated. The mill actually moves! It makes it much more interesting to look at.
• We’ve always struggled to make UIs that combine functionality with being intuitive, aesthetic and moddable, and focused primarily on the first one. I believe the mill UI to actually be a big step forward in the other domains, and we hope to get more UIs up to that level in 2025!

{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/28352917/d3f5b7bf1cff6795ff6a835584cc457bae665609.jpg So we’re very happy with the progress we’ve made in 2024. We feel like all those changes were serious upgrades, and we’ve also sharpened our own skills. We’re looking forward to keep applying those. Heel veel plezier met de update, fijne Kerstdagen en een heel gelukkig 2025! Reddit // Twitter // YouTube // Website // Discord

{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/28352917/14aeaef1a6ca3516472fda6159cb71989852cfdf.jpg The newest update is available on Steam right now! It’s fully compatible with your pre-existing 0.9/0.10/0.11 worlds. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1zdFjAWNUDw Watch the release trailer here! Update 0.12.0 has a strong focus on the early game. From the very beginning, a mill is available to the player. The mill does not need colonists and can craft items 24/7. It can produce some fundamental early game items like beds and torches, and a handful of building blocks and roofs. It changes the start of the game quite significantly. There’s more to do for the player. Personally cutting down trees is more rewarding now. Players can also generate meals by removing naturally occurring berry bushes and putting the results into the mill. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/28352917/d3f5b7bf1cff6795ff6a835584cc457bae665609.jpg The mill does need time to do its crafting, and results are not automatically deposited in the stockpile. Players have to walk to the mill and choose whether to deposit the results in their personal hotbar or in the communal stockpile. Mills are limited to only one per colony or outpost. These drawbacks make the mill fairly balanced. It’s a great boost at the start, but as your colony grows it becomes more convenient to let colonists produce these recipes. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/28352917/66772f425ef643c1ea3e395082f003607454395b.png From a technical perspective, the mill is quite revolutionary for Colony Survival. It is currently the biggest object in the game, and it has actual moving parts. We had to develop some new systems to accommodate this, and we hope to use those systems for future additions. To make placing the mill more predictable for players, a greenish variant of the mill is shown where the player is aiming with the mill equipped. This new system is reused for a bunch of other objects too. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/28352917/c18e0da64a54677d5024b9a9f56387a9116f29db.jpg A small change with big consequences concerns the roofs. They were added a couple of updates ago and many people have used them, but they had a problem. When you place a diagonal roof on the front of a building, the roof-block becomes part of the facade of the building. But it does not adapt to the specific type of blocks in that facade. We chose some default cobblestone and planks textures for these facade-roofs, but in many builds, that didn’t match what people were actually using. It looked pretty wonky. Zun has built a new system that allows roof blocks in facades to automatically adapt to the block they’re resting on. It makes roofs look a lot better! The existing tiled roofs were only available when you had progressed quite a bit into the tech tree. We made new roof types that can be made with the mill at the start of the game: wooden roofs and straw roofs. Of course, they also use the auto-adaptation system. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/28352917/fc88e73ef982dd098dfa34141c84ecc8cb192dec.jpg Roof awkwardly connecting to blocks in 0.11 {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/28352917/a3b6f6c24370e2fff20954e4d9eb3303fecfde60.jpg Straw roof smoothly connecting to blocks in 0.12 For a long time, we’ve had quarter blocks in the game. Players could use these to build stairs. They were available in multiple colors, but they were untextured, and we have gotten quite some complaints about that. Zun could easily apply the auto-adaptation system to these quarter blocks, so we’ve added a new type of them: dynamic quarter blocks. They are automatically textured in the style of the block they’re resting on. And to make them even more dynamic, they can also be placed vertically! They also reuse a system from the crown moulding. Wherever two quarterblocks meet in a corner, they actually connect to form a unique shape. It opens up a lot of decorative possibilities. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/28352917/d4e056725b998414317fd898698de36ef31d465b.jpg In 0.11, farms could not have too big of a height difference between the highest and lowest part of the field. This has changed pretty radically. Farms on steep hills are now a possibility! {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/28352917/722378309ebea2b5e9f6727340327f0de9274b89.jpg Last but not least: by popular request, we’ve reintroduced coated planks! Heel veel plezier met de update :D Reddit // Twitter // YouTube // Website // Discord

{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/28352917/8ef4bc88bca9b163e66fec630b858747a51ca4e2.jpgEverything shown and described in this blog is not available publicly yet, it will be in the next update. Work on the projects detailed in the previous blog continued this month. We finished the mesh for the auto-crafter. To distinguish it from regular jobblocks, and to signal that it can do productive things without human input, it’s powered by wind - it’s a mill. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/28352917/a06a63e6a540a30e7f4ce4381b2522adb537d8fb.png We’re trying something new here. It’s not just a voxel-sized workbench, or a single large mesh like the banner. The mill is actually a combination of many smaller parts, most of which fit neatly within the 1x1x1 voxels of the game. Yet you won’t build it part-by-part. It will assemble automatically. The in-game bed already does the same. Technically, it’s two parts that both place at the same moment when you click once. But a structure with so many parts - we’ve never done that. Zun is working on some new systems to properly integrate this. I’m excited - we might add more structures like this in the future! Hopefully, we can actually get the blades of the mill moving while it’s active. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/28352917/4fa49be88f7c71ca645bb1833d5857d46333d1cc.png Most of the UI is functional. You can see it in the image below. On the left, there’s a list of possible recipes, currently only containing two test-items. You can select them and see some information about them, and then you can add them to the production queue. When items are done, they’re added to the box on the right. Players have to walk back to the mill to collect these items physically, either by assigning them to the hotbar or by sending them straight to the stockpile. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/28352917/02d2655e2dd6a88c02a05a3f78fb82c21afff008.png The new auto-textured quarterblocks look pretty great, and it made us want to use them more in our builds. Which quickly led to another desire: being able to use them vertically too. So Zun actually added that ability to the new dynamic quarterblocks! They can now be placed on the side of blocks too, instead of merely on top. This allows for a whole new range of decorative options. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/28352917/95d0ea82dd94f6b4dddab4bc709a0e64be96fb61.jpg Talking about decorative options - many people demanded the return of coated planks, the darker and more reflective variant of planks. A couple of updates ago, we replaced the old planks texture with a new one, but we didn’t add a “coated” variant. I’ve now made one for the new planks texture! {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/28352917/581db9aac821610770d55299d83a024c4bcc7bec.jpg Bedankt voor het lezen :D Reddit // Twitter // YouTube // Website // Discord

{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/28352917/59666f742de25eea50b8267bb6e547c1abb36921.jpg The two most dramatic overhauls of the game were update 0.7 and 0.9. With 0.7, we wanted to make the game more challenging and complex. That’s why we introduced features like the happiness system. Later on, we realized there was a problem with some of these features. They punished growth and recruiting more colonists. That was never the intention. We reworked the happiness system into the current Colony Points system. With 0.9, we wanted to make expanding and hiring more colonists more rewarding. One of the ways we tried to do this was by strictly limiting the player-crafting. If players can create hundreds of building blocks with the click of a button, letting colonists do this work is a bit wasteful and inefficient. We stand by this decision, but it has made the early game slower and less exciting. We want to fix this by letting players make early-game building blocks and other essentials without relying on colonists. But for the sake of balance, this should not be possible with just one click and zero other costs. We’re strongly considering to introduce the “auto-crafter”, a mill-like building that processes inputs into certain building blocks. But the auto-crafter takes some time to finish its production, and players need to be physically present at the auto-crafter to deliver and gather materials. It’ll empower the player in the early game, without being totally unbalanced. So we were thinking about the topic of proper early-game building blocks, and thought that we should add some new ones. The special roof blocks have been quite popular, but they appear pretty late in the tech tree. So an extra early-game roof block sounded good to us. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/28352917/2b52d7919d5aec2c8c5653772aa24f8afeb95282.jpg And what is a sensible primitive roof? A thatched roof made of straw of course! So we’ve been making all roof variants necessary to generate proper thatched roofs in all possible shapes. We’re very happy with the end result! While working on the roofs, we discussed another common issue. The sides of the roof are “their own thing”, but wherever they meet the front of a building, they have to match the blocks. The roofs that are currently in the game use some default textures for that front side - planks and stone bricks. If you were using those to build that structure, perfect, it’ll look great. But if you were using any other building materials, you get this weird stairs-like pattern where your chosen blocks meet the default texture of the roofs. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/28352917/9b18242d4e431c0fff185d6243c5da6b63f9dd63.jpg So, Zun decided to fix that! In the current unreleased dev-build, the front of roofs will actually match the block they’re standing on. It looks much better! And with that feature developed, Zun applied that a bit further. Why shouldn’t quarterblocks also match the texture of the block they’re standing on? So we’ve been playing around with the “dynamic quarterblock” now, which does exactly that. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/28352917/81b3f7b56cb818da377bbca8d3c7f88b00158a93.jpg All of these should become available in the next update, which hopefully makes the early game a lot more interesting! Bedankt voor het lezen :D Reddit // Twitter // YouTube // Website // Discord

{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/28352917/650cb815394f1edfaa3f6cef713e045539736794.jpgThe lightmapping made visible A massive update to the lighting system is available right now! It’s compatible with pre-existing savegames. If Steam doesn’t update automatically, try verifying the integrity of the game cache. In the previous versions of the game, the world was either directly lit or indirectly lit. Direct lighting occurs when the sun hits an area, all the rest is shadow. There was just one value for each. Whether the shadow was behind a little bush in an open field, or deep into a cave, didn’t matter. All indirectly lit areas received the same brightness. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/28352917/c4d51a80803152258af72e2ead41248874c250c5.jpgOld We did add a system that checked the position of the player. It measured how exposed the player was to the skybox. If the player was in an open field, the indirect lighting would be boosted. Deep in a cave, the indirect lighting would be dimmed. But this too treated all shadows in the same way. If you were standing in a tunnel in the middle of a mountain with a view onto bushes in the middle of a field, the shadows in the tunnel would be just as dark as the shadows caused by the bushes! Of course, this is not how lighting works in real life. Real light bounces around. When something is not directly in the sun, but sunlight is reflected towards it from the sky, the ground and other nearby surfaces, it still appears bright to us. But when you close your curtains, move into the basement or walk into a cave, the reflected light gets weaker and weaker until it is fully dark. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/28352917/f2a9783c2dcb2365e029e4f8ad10f2de83938fa6.jpgNew It’s very performance intensive to continuously simulate this on your PC. But as a voxel game where the world is made out of big cubes, there are some useful approximations. In the new update, we calculate lightmaps for all those cubes. The brightest value is for every 1x1x1 area that can directly see the sky above it. Every block that can’t see the sky like that, but that is directly adjacent to the first category, is a bit darker. This chain is calculated 16 blocks deep. Shaded areas in forests and the interiors of buildings with big windows will be a lot brighter compared to the previous update. But on the opposite side - deep tunnels will be actually dark now! There’s a more realistic contrast in general. The wonky system where all the indirect lighting would become brighter or darker based on the position of the player, has been removed. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/28352917/d55f155483ae9d7d6dd50f96c52dbe39f159a748.jpgOld Instead of trying to trace complicated paths to the sun, there are some simpler rules you can apply. Crevices and hidden corners will always be darker than openly exposed surfaces. Ambient Occlusion exploits this to add some realism. We had been using a standard AO that applied this effect, but it only looked at smaller details - it had a range of about five centimeters. We added a new one that uses the voxel system to analyze the local environment. Instead of five centimeters, it adds appropriate shading based on a range of about two meters. Last but not least, while polishing the lighting and its consequences, we took a look at the tone mapping. Tone mapping is a form of image processing that tries to turn the raw outputs of the game engine into something your monitor can render well. The old tone mapping was pretty standard, but it did increase contrast and change colors in ways we weren’t completely happy with. We changed it to more neutral tone mapping. The new lighting system is more complex than the old one, and that will decrease performance a bit. But at the same time, you should need less torches and other player-made lighting in this new version, and that actually helps performance again. Another thing that should help with performance on very low-end hardware, is a a way to toggle the sun off. With the new light mapping, the game actually looks fairly okay in that state. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/28352917/62730c8f8550532d6f21f04fd101b426c8a30323.jpgNew If you’re playing 0.11.1 and you run into any glitches or bugs, please let us know! If you don’t like the changes in general, if you want things to be darker, brighter, with more contrast, more saturated, less saturated - share that too. The previous version, 0.11.0, will still be available in the beta branches tab. We’ll definitely read feedback on our Discord, in the comments of this blog and on our Steam Forums! Heel veel plezier met de update :D Reddit // Twitter // YouTube // Website // Discord

{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/28352917/678dc525819c1be1d05ad0773d7ac01911116cc9.jpg In the previous blog, we talked about an improved lighting system. We’re close to releasing it publicly, but we love to do a test first! We’re curious about the results in different worlds, the performance on different hardware and your opinion about it. The differences aren’t extremely obvious when just roaming the outside world, but it does really affect interiors, and it’s especially noticeable in underground conditions. Tunnels that are far from sunlight are actually dark. If you want to try the beta, go to your Steam Library, right-click Colony Survival and go to “properties”. In the “betas” tab, enter the access code sendfeedbackplease. This will unlock the beta-light branch. Enable it and your game will be automatically updated with the new lighting! It should not pose a risk to old savegames. You might encounter some buggy edge cases though. As the access code suggests: please send feedback! Join our Discord and share your feedback in #general or put your screenshot in #screenshots. Feel free to leave a comment on this blog too. Veel plezier met de beta! Reddit // Twitter // YouTube // Website // Discord

{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/28352917/349fbc5a4ed2ca5c20e1af21a4653b9690bd0892.jpg The release of 0.11 was a big success! Player counts regularly peaked above 300 simultaneous players, and our recent review rate rose to 98% positive. Thanks to everybody for the support! We released a couple of small patches, fixing some minor issues and improving some models a bit. We also updated the Steam Storepage. All screenshots were multiple years old, and none featured the new colonist models. We uploaded a bunch of new ones to rectify that situation. We’re already hard at work on the next big update. The lighting in Colony Survival has been fairly primitive. Sun lighting was harshly divided between “direct” and “ambient”. Of course, in real life, sun shadows have a much more complicated gradient. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/28352917/1ef28b68ef8cc6222ed52fc868d59d40fb2167d4.jpgVisualizing the new lightmaps So Zun is working on a system that dynamically renders lightmaps. He has added an Ambient Occlusion system that uses raytracing to make corners and crevices appear darker. And he has built a system that knows which areas have direct sunlight overhead. The floodfill system that was already used for lighting from torches and such, now applies to that as well, to make the sunlight spread around more natural. All of this helps to make the lighting more beautiful, more realistic and more practical. It’s still a bit wonky in certain edge cases, like when it has to deal with water, so it’s not completely ready for release yet. But it will go public in the next big update! {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/28352917/35b4de9bb3fd6bbb66d2bbc31d33bcb87fc609e3.jpg Bedankt voor het lezen :D Reddit // Twitter // YouTube // Website // Discord

{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/28352917/77866e49ba27a8a08e53065bcc187f17f9358587.jpg Update 0.11 is now available on Steam! The most visible change is a total replacement of all the colonist models. In the past, we only had one colonist model. It used UV-mapped textures, and they were difficult to change for us. The only thing that varied between colonists was the color of their shirts. The new vertex coloured model is much easier to adjust for us, and the differences between colonists are much bigger now. A lot of colonists have relevant tools and bags attached to their belts. There is a wide variety of hats and helmets. Shirts, pants, shoes, the belt itself, the wristband - all of these appear in many different colors. Some colonists are more muscular, others less. Some have rolled up sleeves, others don’t. Some wear wrist guards, others wear gaiters. We are very happy with the results and hope you can appreciate them as well! Let us know about your most and least favorites, and share your ideas to improve the look of current and future models. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/28352917/5b6433ba7f52efbddb08b7571cdd74ea3375cc80.jpg To make the colonists even more unique, we’ve decided to add individual names to the colonists. When you recruit a small group of colonists simultaneously, there’s a large chance that they share the same surname. Names are only visible while you wield the command tool. Click on a colonist with the command tool and a new menu will appear. Here, you can generate a new random name for your colonist, or you can edit it manually. You can also see which job they’re doing, and visualize where they are traveling.

Better Builders

But that’s not all! Construction areas received some improvements. They’ve become much more customizable. Want to build just walls? That’s possible. Want to build cylindrical walls? No problem. Want to dig out a huge round hole? You can do it all in 0.11! Apart from the shape of the area, there are now 4 different construction assignments you can give to your colonists:

Remove All - remove all blocks in an area

Build All - fill the area with a specific block type

Remove Specific - remove a specific type from the area

Replace Specific - replace one type of block with anotherWe can’t wait to see what you’ll build with these new options! {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/28352917/b66ca7391658772aa2923dab3e1de6b3f5d23824.jpg Some final changes: over time, grass blocks will spread their grass to neighbouring dirt blocks. And previously, saplings placed by the player would always grow into the same tiny, basic tree. In 0.11, these saplings will be able to grow into the tree shapes you saw in “nature”. Let us know about your experiences with 0.11 in the comments or on our Discord! Veel plezier met de update :D Reddit // Twitter // YouTube // Website // Discord

{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/28352917/b7ba01fa8bb524728f9c26ffb089137b5706aa6b.jpg The current colonist model was already in the game over eight years ago, in early 2016. The workflow for producing it was horrible. The model has a bunch of surfaces that connect and disconnect in many different spots. To texture them, the model has to be “unwrapped” into a flat image that displays all these surfaces next to each other. But getting a feel for how the textures look on a 3D model from a flat image is very difficult. When it looked semi-decent, I didn’t want to touch it anymore. The only difference between the colonists is currently the color of their shirt, which we can very easily adjust by putting a simple color code in a .JSON file. When we added new monsters in 0.9.0, we used a different method to craft the models. Instead of texturing the model in a more traditional way, we made slightly more detailed 3D models and used vertex painting to color them. We had used the same method to generate for example the beds and torches at the very beginning of Colony Survival development, and later on we used it for jobblocks as well. We’re very happy with the results there. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/28352917/514ed4f3ce95bcad8d7919b799f5be9b3eca794a.pngFarmer / tinkerer / beekeeper I had used it to make a new vertex-painted colonist model before the release of 0.9.0, but Zun never got around to implementing it. It was also a bit “flat”, undetailed and boring. In recent weeks, Zun did put it in an internal development build, and I gave it a bit more life and detail. We like the results a lot and are near-certain of adding this to the main branch. Instead of merely having a different-coloured shirt for every job, it has now become possible to make much more custom designs for different jobs. I can quickly adjust how muscular colonists are, the color of not only their shirts but also of pants, shoes, bracelets and belts, I can roll shirt sleeves up or down, I can add tools to their belts or hats to their heads. I’ve been making a bunch of new models for different jobs and we believe it’s a big improvement!

Names and miscellaneous

That’s not all we’ve been working on. To make colonists feel even more personal, we’ve decided to generate names for them. We made a long list of first names and surnames and each colonist gets a random combination of them. Colonists recruited in quick succession of each other have a high chance of sharing the same surname. In our internal development build, they are only visible while wielding the command tool. Making sure they’re not blocked by headgear or crafting icons, and that they’re not floating in the middle of nowhere either, is a bit of a problem that we’re still working on. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/28352917/a54c259aa32bff9161e90e72fca7338d36f2336e.jpgNamed colonists Another change concerns the saplings. Saplings placed by players would always grow into the same very small tree. In the next big update, saplings will be able to grow into larger, more diverse and more natural shapes, like the trees that are in the world when you first launch the game. Also, builders will be able to use a couple of extra items like roofs and rails, and crafting limits will become a bit more flexible. In the current live build, the number of the limit has to be a multiple of the amount of items produced in one recipe. So if a recipe results in 3 arrows, it has to be 3/6/9/etc. That will no longer be the case with the next release. We hope you’ll enjoy these changes as much as we do! Let us know how you feel about the new colonists and names, and feel free to share your ideas for specific jobs in the comments or on Discord! Bedankt voor het lezen :D Reddit // Twitter // YouTube // Website // Discord

{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/28352917/c8ccc2f20678c467b8228035bcdbf9b645766cd0.jpg After six years, Colony Survival finally has a new main trailer! Here it is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WbbDsOB_3zQ Making it was quite the challenge. We really wanted to showcase the potential of the game. We needed beautiful worlds that integrated all the new content from 0.10.0, stuff like the enhanced rail system and all the new decorative items. We asked for help from the community with the Builder’s Contest - here are the winners! Although their worlds are impressive and beautiful, they didn’t showcase all the things that we thought a main trailer should contain. So we spent weeks building a custom world exactly suited to filming the trailer. Then we filmed it. For the first time, the entire pipeline is 4K. 4K rendering of the game, 4K recording, 4K editing. The difference with older videos is very noticeable! Last but not least, we needed a proper trailer song. One that will really “grab” newcomers who visit our storepage for the first time and know nothing about Colony Survival. Eventually, we found The Mad King by Rok Nardin, a young Slovenian composer. We got in touch with him and licensed the song for our trailer. We are very excited about the end result. Thanks again to everybody who helped make it possible! {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/28352917/91615a922ff53d5f3819b1ceb613ad2d50b02606.png We set another major step since the last Friday Blog. We now have full controller support and Steam Deck compatibility! This is actually a thing that is checked by the team behind Steam. You have to put in a request for them to look at your game, and then they’ll actually play it and test a bunch of different features. We didn’t get fully approved on the first try. We received some feedback about things that we needed to improve. We did, and this week we did get the full approval! This is a feature that has been popularly demanded since the release. If you’ve been waiting to try and play Colony Survival with a controller or on your Steam Deck, then this is the moment! Bedankt voor het lezen :D Reddit // Twitter // YouTube // Website // Discord

{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/28352917/4171140376c598c3a246d0b6f161b89eda549fa3.jpg The game is currently on sale! It’s 30% discounted. If you don’t own it yet - this is a great time to purchase it! And if you do - thanks, and consider telling your friends or outright gifting them the game :) Today, we released 0.10.3. The main changes concern controller support. In the past, we did some work to make it a bit possible to use the controller, but it was still very primitive. Lots of basic functions were very inconvenient. Now, Zun has put in a lot of effort to make using the controller (or playing on Steam Deck) a lot more comfortable. He has actually been playing the game a lot on his couch, with a controller, this week! He has implemented a long list of small tweaks to improve that playstyle. There are some non-controller related improvements too. One of the most noticeable changes concerns the fisherman. With the new water transparency, we changed the model of the fishing rod: the line now continues under water. The functionality has also changed a bit - your fishermen can now use water that is 1 or 2 blocks lower than they themselves are. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/28352917/98dfaf709643f114081d49eac525dae8727d41ee.jpgRaftsburg Last and least, for the first time in years, we’ve updated the storepage. We changed some promotional texts to better reflect the current state of the game, nearly completely rewrote the answers to the Early-Access-questions, and updated some banner-images. Bedankt voor het lezen! Reddit // Twitter // YouTube // Website // Discord

{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/28352917/945921f9dc40976fe57e7357d269df311e56ccb0.jpgLagoon's world used in these screenshots and the video Lighting has changed quite dramatically! Here is a before/after video: https://youtu.be/d_i8hXLc-EU Last month, we published a pretty long video featuring the winners of the Builder’s Contest. There are many different shots of those worlds in the video, but they’re pretty much all filmed during the middle of the day or in the night. I deliberately avoided sunrises and sunsets. They look pretty impressive with the landscape, but I felt that they didn’t work well with the towns and buildings - they made everything look very dark/red/yellow. Another problem I noticed was the excessive strength of the torches and lamps placed by players. In the middle of the day, they were still casting bright yellow/orange light on the buildings around them. It felt quite wrong that I had to avoid large parts of the day cycle to make the game look great. So we decided to update the lighting! It looks quite different now. Sunsets and sunrises are brighter in general, and the yellow-red effect associated with them lasts much shorter. In the old version, the effect lasted for many in-game hours, which doesn’t make any sense. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/28352917/15a667e574a611b77a914698208dc89566ced2be.jpg To simulate morning dew, there is a new fog effect in the valleys, which helps to bring some of the ‘drama’ back. And we’ve dimmed torches and other player-built lighting during the day, to make towns appear less “orange”.

Cloud Sync

More technical explanation of the lighting changes below, but other major news first: Colony Survival now supports Steam Cloud Sync! It will be automatically toggled on for worlds made in 0.10.2 or later, but it has to be manually enabled for pre-existing worlds. These worlds will be uploaded to the Steam Cloud, and automatically downloaded wherever they are missing from your Colony Survival install. Convenient if you switch from PC to laptop or Steam Deck, a lifesaver if your harddrive or entire PC suddenly fails. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/28352917/48d9f2ff987b84d0c2299045150402b16f3713bc.jpg

In-depth with Lighting

When we had to figure out lighting during the full day-night cycle for the first time, it was probably 2014. We had little experience and hadn’t put much thought into it. I remember thinking that sunsets had deep, dark long shadows, and that dark shadows are pretty much the same things as night, right? So when the sun sets, shadows get longer until they cover everything in darkness, which we then call night. Sunrise is the reverse process. It took embarrassingly long for me to properly witness a full sunrise in real life and fully comprehend what’s actually happening. It’s actually bright outside for a pretty long time before the sun becomes directly visible. Indirect sunlight is bounced through the atmosphere and makes things pretty bright before that happens. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/28352917/6790657e21d3dcb8e5d5112dbc0b05a6a3bf0ca2.png When you can see the sun directly for the first time, the sunlight has to travel through the atmosphere for a very long time before it hits your eyeball. Which means that a large percentage of it has already scattered away and bounced around. As a consequence, when the sun is close to the horizon, you actually don’t witness deep shadows. The direct sunlight is weak and the scattered light that is indirectly bouncing around is relatively strong. Around noon, when the sun is in its highest position, sunlight is way less disrupted by the atmosphere. This makes the direct sunlight much stronger than the indirect light that’s bouncing around, leading to deep, dark shadows. Our old lighting didn’t follow these rules, and went straight from deep sunset shadows to night. These deep shadows were also very yellowish, leading to a pretty weird, unnatural and unappealing look for many structures. The new settings should improve this. The best solution would be full raytracing, but that’s a very computationally intensive solution that is still not 100% practical, so we’ve got to approximate it as best we can. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/28352917/fcc158083a169153852483237f18177af76418c8.jpg Another problem is that our eyes absolutely do not register light objectively. They constantly adapt to the world around us. Two things that have the same brightness might look completely different to us, depending on the circumstances. ”Lux” is the unit of measurement for brightness. Bright sunlight is measured at 111,000 lux. A sunrise or sunset on a clear day only measures 400 lux. A candle generates roughly 10 lux, and a full moon 0.25 lux. Our eyes will adapt to both bright sunlight and a full moon. When adapted to 111,000 lux sunlight, a 10 lux candle barely even registers. But when adapted to 0.25 lux moonlight, a 10 lux candle can visibly illuminate an entire room! Such extreme differences and the adaptation between them aren’t present in Colony Survival. Which meant that torches that look realistic in the night, also turn cities orange in the middle of the day. The more I looked at it, the more it annoyed me. So Zun added a system that reduces the lighting of torches and other player-placed lamps during the day, and increases it again during the night. That’s not how it works in real life, but this too seems to be a better approximation than the old system. Feel free to share your opinions about the changed lighting with us! We might need to tweak it a little more. The previous blog has instructions on how to change the lighting settings yourself at the end. Veel plezier met de update! Reddit // Twitter // YouTube // Website // Discord