The new iron blocks, work in progress
Last week, we asked you for your opinion about future pricing. We received a lot of responses. The outcome partly surprised us, so we’re glad we posed the question and want to thank you for sharing your ideas!
The idea of gradually raising the price was very popular. Perhaps because most of you already own the game, but there were multiple examples of people who didn’t own the game yet and still supported raising the price.
Content DLC was less popular than expected. Most people replied that they opposed it. We didn’t have any detailed ideas for DLC so we can promise that we won’t release content DLC this decade :)
Cosmetic DLC received an opposite response: it was a lot more popular than we expected! But it’ll be hard to compete with mods, and cluttering the Steam Store with skins and such might discourage some people from buying the game itself. So we find it hard to think of a way to make cosmetic DLC profitable and worth the development time, so we’re focussing on other things first.
Some people were worried about the pay-to-win loot crates, so we want to clarify that we were joking and that we're never going to add terrible mechanics like that. We hate seeing them in other games and will certainly not add them in our own game!
We now believe that the best path forward is a slight price hike in Q1 2018. We also read the comments of people who thought Colony Survival currently did not have enough content to justify a price hike. We fully agree with them, and we want to add a lot more content before we raise the price. We hope to release explosives and more realistic stockpiles before we raise the price, and we’re not sure whether the new price is going to be $22,49 or $24,95.
The price hike has multiple benefits:
- It’s effectively a discount for early adopters, rewarding the risk they’ve taken.
- It makes ‘waiting for discounts’ a less viable and ‘buying now’ a more viable strategy :)
- We don't have to release DLC, so no split community and no cluttered storepage. Everybody who owns the game owns the "Full Definitive GOTY Edition".
- Hopefully, a higher income to sustain development of Colony Survival for a longer period.
We will not suddenly raise the price, we’ll warn everybody well ahead!
Update Progress
In the last couple of weeks, a lot of code has been refactored to make future development easier, to extend mod support and to improve performance. This week, we’ve actually started adding a lot of the new items and blocks of 0.4.0. A lot of them still lack icons, textures and functionality but we’re working to add that as well!
We’ve totally rearranged underground blocks to improve mining and finding ores. We thought that adding more ores to the bottom layer of the world would make it way too cluttered, especially for new players. So in 0.4.0, it’s possible to remove the darker stone blocks and ores themselves, and mine deeper to discover new ores. The first layer of ores will contain copper and tin. Iron, clay and the other ores can be found in deeper layers.
The new ore system, visible because of glitches
The location of the ores is determined counting down from the surface, instead of counting up from the bedrock. This means that it’s viable to start a colony on top of a mountain and mine for resources there. It also means you can find all the ores on the same level by mining a straight corridor into the side of a mountain!
Update 0.4.0 more than doubles the amount of ‘smelting blocks’. It adds kilns, bloomeries and finery forges. So we’ve updated the code behind them. The amount of fuel consumed is pretty vague now and it will be a lot clearer in 0.4.0. Fuel will become part of the recipe of an item, so every time you’re baking bread or smelting iron ingots, a fuel-item will be consumed. You’ll be able to split planks into firewood, so you don’t have to be afraid that all of your wood will be consumed :)
Firewood can be crafted slowly by the artisan (the colonist who crafts items at the workbench), but it can be made quicker by recruiting a woodcutter. This is especially useful for bigger colonies that consume lots of firewood.
Our current to-do list before we can release 0.4.0 looks like this:
- Add more icons, textures and functionality to the new items
- Balance the recipes and crafting times of the new items
- Add a guard recruiting interface so you can recruit the 8 different guards
- Add the new monsters
- Add the technologies that allow you to expand the safe zone around the banner
- Add a way to visualize the safe zone
- Add the technologies to unlock the new items
- Add gradually increasing colonist recruitment costs
- Add new achievements
We hope to release the update in October and we’ll keep you up to date on the progress!
Mod News
A lot of the progress in the mod support in the past few weeks has happened in close cooperation with Pandaros. He made some awesome mods and even wrote a Beginners Guide to Modding! You can find his work here. We try to support modders as much as possible in our Official Discord. Everybody is welcome there!
Bedankt voor het lezen!