It’s the last day and the last blog of 2021! We want to start out by thanking all of you for your support and your patience. We’ve released zero public updates to Colony Survival this year, and despite that, there’s still plenty of activity in the comments, on the Discord and in the surveys. That’s very motivating! Thanks to everyone who purchased Colony Survival: we’re very grateful that we can be dedicated to its development full-time. And thanks to the modders, the server hosts, the translators and all others who are helping us improve CS!
Despite the lack of updates to CS in 2021, a lot has changed behind the scenes. Our current dev build has new core mechanics, major changes to the gameplay, and lots of new jobs and items. It has been a productive year. We would’ve loved to release a steady stream of small updates instead of one mega-big-update, but sadly, we cannot. If 0.8.0 is a decent, finished, regular car, the current 0.9.0 dev build is a streamlined sports car with a race engine, three tires, no brakes, no radio and no air-conditioning. We believe the end result will exceed 0.8.0 in all dimensions, the current work-in-progress has some impressive new features, but it’s also such a massive overhaul that it’s currently just significantly less complete than 0.8.0.
We couldn’t have planned it otherwise. Everything is so interrelated: the jobs & and the tech tree, the jobs & the world generation, the tech tree & monsters & traps, all the new changes & the interface… When you change one thing, all the related things have to be adapted as well. We don’t treat Colony Survival as a sandbox game with wildly disconnected features: it ought to be one coherent experience where you follow the tech tree from the Stone Age to the Industrial Revolution.
Animal Husbandry
This feature was proposed way back in 2017, but we never actually implemented it. Due to the longer crafting times, 0.9.0 was getting quite heavily dependent on ‘regular jobblocks’, which means a lot of colonists standing next to randomly placed cubes. We were looking for a way to add some more ‘non-jobblock’ production to balance things out. Instead of just putting more emphasis on regular miners/farmers/fishers, we were looking for something completely new.
After a while, we came back to the animal husbandry idea. You’d have colonists actually caring for cows and/or sheep and/or goats. We’re unsure about the precise implementation, and it’s highly related to the dilemma above: should we delay 0.9.0 even further and add animal husbandry to it as well? Should we release 0.9.0 with an animal-husbandry-sized gap and add it in 0.9.1? Should we release 0.9.0 without that gap and then try to squeeze it in in a later update anyway? We’d love to have your opinion on that! Let us know in the comments or on Discord.
The Covid Situation
Everybody is probably tired of thinking about this, but this seems like the right place to mention it for a bit. The past two years have been weird. We've had multiple periods of shops/events/gatherings/schools being limited, hospitals nearing capacity etc. There were some times where we had to digest quite some new information to properly grasp the situation, which took some time and effort. Earlier on this all slowed down development a bit, but over time it's mostly back on pace as the situation has become more known, vaccines & treatments have become available, and generally we got more used to it. Hopefully 2022 will be calmer (knocking on wood!).
2022
Though we expect 2022 to be calmer in terms of COVID, we expect it to be a lot more exciting in terms of Colony Survival! We’re really looking forward to releasing 0.9.0. It’s going to be the biggest update CS has ever seen. It should both improve core mechanics and extend the gameplay with a lot of new content. The Yogscast often worked on the goal of recruiting 1000 colonists, but this was a stretch goal way beyond ‘regular gameplay’. We hope to make reaching 1000 colonists a sensible and expected part of completing the tech tree!
Thanks for being a part of the CS community, and we want to wish all of you a very Happy New Year :D
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Gelukkig Nieuwjaar!