Last week, we released 0.7.5! It generally went pretty well, but it also caused a handful of issues. We've released a bunch of hotfixes to solve these problems. The latest version of Colony Survival is now 0.7.5.8.
Sometimes, NPCs would get stuck. The compass and the glider had issues. Health wasn't saved properly in certain cases. The Field of View slider has a new max of 130, and the default is now 70 instead of 60. All of the issues above and some other minor ones are now fixed.
Tech Tree Overhaul
Disclaimer: none of this has been released yet, it all concerns internal dev builds
This week, we've started working on the biggest tech tree overhaul since 0.7.0 was released in the Summer of 2019. Earlier this year, we've concluded that we weren't 100% happy with the way you had to progress through the tech tree. Some parts felt disjointed, some parts had weird requirements, and it ended too soon. We're currently restructuring it to make a lot more sense and to be more enjoyable. Here's a mock-up of the first work-in-progress changes:
Too many sciences weren't useful on their own. For example, technologists were unlocked without any recipes, and barley farmers don't have a purpose without chicken farmers. We've merged many of them to make science unlocks more relevant and satisfying, instead of administrative busywork.
On the other hand, the perpetual stew was meant to be way more primitive than the luxury meal, but they were both contained in a single unlock. Instead of a satisfying ladder where each step yielded something new, it was a long slog to climb a hill with all the reward at the end. This has been changed, and there should be a marked difference now.
Some of the unlocks require "HAPs". This is our work-in-progress name for "Happiness Points". Instead of having to balance your daily happiness production with the unhappiness caused by 'overpopulation', with a confusing system where the cost of your happiness items rises when your colony grows while the reward is stagnant, "HAPs" will be earned by every single happiness item you distribute to your colonists. These HAPs can be used for all kinds of vital and useful things: unlocking new science, recruiting new colonists, and killing monsters in difficult nights.
Some key steps of the tech tree will require rising amounts of HAPs, and there'll be a bunch of "repeating science" with the same exponentially growing requirement. We hope this will result in a satisfying gameplay loop where you can upgrade and expand your colony for a long time, with each improvement yielding the ability to produce more HAPs and to continue climbing the "HAPS-ladder".
We're deliberately separating this change from a more general overhaul, with the hope that we'll be able to release this update before the end of the year. Hopefully, by Christmas or even earlier, Colony Survival will simultaneously be more accessible for newcomers and more rewarding for veterans!
Bedankt voor het lezen!