It's Friday in Australia & Japan
The release of the update was a great success! Not a lot of bugs have been reported, people seem to like it and are rapidly unlocking the new achievements, and the amount of active players has gone up dramatically. We're watching nearly all Colony Survival videos that are being uploaded to YouTube right now to figure out how people play the update!
There has been one error that we can't fix. People who've used mods in previous versions are sometimes unable to play 0.4.0. To fix this, the gamedata/structures folder has to be manually removed, after which the integrity of the game cache has to be verified to restore the removed files.
We have already released several hotfixes. These are the errors that we patched:
- Ardumus helped us find the source of a bug that deleted the entire stockpile. By default, colonists eat from the stack with the highest total food value, to balance the consumption of berries and bread. When they've consumed all food items, they instantly consume all other items because they've got a food value of zero. There was a line of code to prevent this, but instead of only letting colonists eat items with a food value bigger than zero, it allowed colonists to eat items with a food value bigger than or equal to zero... Thanks Ardumus for helping us find the error!
- We forgot to update the version number used for matchmaking. We quickly updated that within hours of the first release.
- When people unlocked the anvil, they instantly unlocked both the anvil and the bloomery achievement. We fixed that too.
The next weeks
The added complexity makes the current job blocks pretty annoying. While you drastically need arrows, you're watching your colonists create all kinds of stuff you don't need. Our highest priority at the moment is to allow players to set the importance of crafting recipes. This way, colonists will only craft luxuries when the essentials are finished.
We're also listening to all of your feedback and figuring out what problems you're encountering in 0.4.0. We'll probably release multiple patches to fix unbalanced recipes, adjust the difficulty and improve things that people tend to find annoying.
We're considering to create an 'easy mode' where crafting recipes are simpler again, more like 0.3.0. This should help people get used to the game and explore the new content, and it should please people who find 0.4.0 too complicated.
The next months and 0.5.0
At first, we were planning to work on giving crates real inventories, meaning you'll have to actually transport items from mines to furnaces and from fields to ovens. We've decided to focus on something else for two reasons:
- People seem to think 0.4.0 is complicated enough
- It's a big overhaul of a lot of systems and can't be released in multiple parts, meaning players will have to wait longer without receiving updates
We'll probably release colonists that can dig and build in 0.5.0. It's something we've been looking forward to for a long time, and we think it really fits a voxel RTS! Another benefit is that we can release the update in multiple parts. It could be released in four parts:
- Colonists that can dig; they could flatten hills and dig moats
- Colonists that can build simple structures like walls and cuboids.
- Colonists that can build structures from blueprints created by the player
- Colonists that can build structures from blueprints downloaded from the Steam Workshop
We've attempted this before shortly after releasing the game but couldn't finish the feature. We've got a better idea of how we want this new feature to work and we can't wait until it's finished! When 0.5.0 is released, we think we can justify raising the price to $24,95. That's effectively a 20% discount for players who purchased the game before 0.5.0 :)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wCtP_ajFwvA
Bedankt voor het lezen!