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