Colony Survival

Released: Jun 16, 2017
Platforms: WindowsmacOSLinux
Last updated: 05 Sep 2026, 03:01 GMT

Updates & announcements

20 posts

21 Aug 2026Developer post
Friday Blog 270 - The Split Screen Update, 0.18.0, is Live Right Now!
This update does exactly what it says on the cover. Plug in a controller, divide your monitor in two and play the game with a friend right next to you! Enabling Split Screen will generate a second character who has the same capabilities as the first. The second player can start t
24 Jul 2026Developer post
Friday Blog 269 - Blueprint Builders' Contest Ends in August + Splitscreen
The Blueprint Builders' Contest ends next month, on Sunday August 23, at 23:59 Amsterdam time! All players are allowed to put one post in #Blueprint-Contest-Entries on our Discord . This post can contain a maximum of seven blueprints. This is meant to give you the opportunity to
25 Jun 2026Developer post
Update 0.17: “Quests & Counters” is Available Right Now!
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 throug
29 May 2026Developer post
Friday Blog 268 - The Shape of the Next Update: QoL Improvements
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
17 Apr 2026Developer post
Friday Blog 267 - Oddity Press Update & Blueprint Builder’s Contest
Update 0.16 is live right now! It adds the Oddity Press, a new automatic crafter that produces mainly decorative items, and new beds. Its content largely matches the content of the Beta, so we’ll refer you to that blog for those details. The Beta was useful, and we found all kind
03 Apr 2026Developer post
Friday Blog 266 - The 0.16 Beta is Available!
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
27 Feb 2026Developer post
Friday Blog 265 - Long Beds, Bunk Beds and the Oddity Press
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 Pres
23 Jan 2026Developer post
Friday Blog 264 - The Culling Update, 0.15.1, is Live!
Culling 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
Culling 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!
The "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
Original post
26 Dec 2025Developer post
Friday Blog 263 - Into the Future
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
28 Nov 2025Developer post
Friday Blog 262 - Update 0.15 Released - Top-Down View And Blueprints
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-do
24 Oct 2025Developer post
Friday Blog 261 - 0.15.0 Beta is Live!
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 Blueprint
25 Sep 2025Developer post
Friday Blog 260 - Movable World Slicing, Mesh Replacement, UI Refactor
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
28 Aug 2025Developer post
Friday Blog 259 - World Slicing, Sharable Blueprints, New Look For Old Blocks
These new features are still in development and not yet released. The world in the screenshots was built by Lagoon . 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
25 Jul 2025Developer post
Friday Blog 258 - First Video of the Top-Down View
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: It's all work-in-progress, so it will look different when it's publicly released. The interface is very basic. And when y
26 Jun 2025Developer post
Friday Blog 257 - Blueprint Builder, Top-down View and Eight Years of EA
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
23 May 2025Developer post
Friday Blog 256 - 0.14.0 is Live Right Now! Off the Grid, on the Path
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
04 Apr 2025Developer post
Friday Blog 255 - The Explosive Update - 0.13.0 Is Live Right Now!
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
28 Mar 2025Developer post
Friday Blog 254 - Explosives and Sale!
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: We didn’t m
28 Feb 2025Developer post
Friday Blog 253 - Destruction, the Deal and the Future
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
26 Dec 2024Developer post
Friday Blog 252 - 0.12.1 Released with Official Translations & Year in Review
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 (simplifie
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!
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
Original post

Colony Survival

Updates & announcements

Friday Blog 270 - The Split Screen Update, 0.18.0, is Live Right Now!

Friday Blog 269 - Blueprint Builders' Contest Ends in August + Splitscreen

Splitscreen

Update 0.17: “Quests & Counters” is Available Right Now!

Friday Blog 268 - The Shape of the Next Update: QoL Improvements

Friday Blog 267 - Oddity Press Update & Blueprint Builder’s Contest

Blueprint Builder’s Contest

Friday Blog 266 - The 0.16 Beta is Available!

Pip

Friday Blog 265 - Long Beds, Bunk Beds and the Oddity Press

Friday Blog 264 - The Culling Update, 0.15.1, is Live!

Friday Blog 263 - Into the Future

Friday Blog 262 - Update 0.15 Released - Top-Down View And Blueprints

Friday Blog 261 - 0.15.0 Beta is Live!

Friday Blog 260 - Movable World Slicing, Mesh Replacement, UI Refactor

Friday Blog 259 - World Slicing, Sharable Blueprints, New Look For Old Blocks

Friday Blog 258 - First Video of the Top-Down View

Friday Blog 257 - Blueprint Builder, Top-down View and Eight Years of EA

Anniversary & Early Access

Friday Blog 256 - 0.14.0 is Live Right Now! Off the Grid, on the Path

Friday Blog 255 - The Explosive Update - 0.13.0 Is Live Right Now!

Friday Blog 254 - Explosives and Sale!

Friday Blog 253 - Destruction, the Deal and the Future

Daily Deal & LQA

The Future

Friday Blog 252 - 0.12.1 Released with Official Translations & Year in Review

Zun’s Birthday!

Year in Review