The overhaul of the tech tree is going well. The internal dev build is continuously getting new jobs and content. The past weeks saw the addition of new things like leather, animal carcasses, parchment scrolls, cooked meat and bronze tools. Testing these things is a lot of fun! It generally works as intended and requires only minor amounts of refinement.
But this week, we did discover that the early game does require a significant amount of reworking. We scaled down the monster threat at the beginning, and slowed down quite a lot of jobs. This works really well when you’ve reached 30+ colonists, but the start can be pretty annoying. This has multiple causes:
- Science progress relies on things like wheat and flax - requiring you to wait on your newly unlocked jobs for 48 or 24 hours
- Expansion of your colony requires items like beds, stone tools and crates, which all take longer to craft than they did in 0.8.0
- Your crafters still use stone tools, which seriously slows down your crafting
- You’re not attacked by any, or by barely any, monsters, making the nights pretty pointless
- There’s a serious lack of building materials, so you can’t start working on walls, towers and buildings
We’re working to fix this. Some essential items can be crafted quicker now. We’re working on new building blocks that can be produced on a large scale at the start of the game. Some other content and unlocks are being moved to the early game as well. The monster system is getting an overhaul, and there’ll be a significant amount of them at the start.
There’s something else that might be a bit repetitive to those who’ve read all previous blogs, but it was really noticeable to me this week. The biggest thing I personally was missing in Colony Survival was something I could really put my teeth into. I would hop from a relatively minor project to another relatively minor project - and then I had finished the tech tree. I would’ve built a big fort, I would have 350 colonists, I would’ve 50 builders & diggers available who could terraform the world into any shape I desired - but no grand purpose to put all of that to use.
0.7.0 was supposed to fix that with the New-Colonies-In-Other-Biomes idea. It works, but not in the satisfying way we hoped for. Your old colony makes a glider and a Colony Starter Kit, and that’s it. Then you pretty much start over from scratch, with slightly different content. It’s not a grand purpose for your original colony.
While playing the 0.9.0 dev build, I've gotten convinced that we’ll finally manage to implement that purpose successfully. Things feel more “weighty”. Items like leather and linen take a decent amount of time to craft, making them feel more valuable and incentivizing you to expand and put more workers in these jobs. I was at 50 colonists when I unlocked copper! Simultaneously, reaching 50 colonists is a lot less punishing, because colonists attract a lot less monsters in 0.9.0 (with ‘monster attraction’ being partially shifted to tech unlocks) and them not requiring luxury items anymore. You’re also not forced to work through production chains that require a lot of random items any longer.
I’m really looking forward to building out the tech tree, right into the early modern period. It would be amazing to be able to properly reward players for building a city with 1000 colonists. Not just with an achievement, but with the gameplay actually requiring it and continuously rewarding you with new tech, new weapons and new jobs. That would truly be the grand purpose I’ve been looking for for years now!
Bedankt voor het lezen :D