Full notes
Full Colony Survival update
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What changed
- Maps
- Gameplay
- Events
- Performance
Colony Survival changes
Work-in-progress terrain rendered with the new system
In the past month, Zun has made major progress on the new terrain generation! It uses a fundamentally new design philosophy.
In 2017, we released CS with arctic areas in the north and tropical areas in the south. We wanted to give players the opportunity to settle themselves in a different looking area. We did want to give players a large temperate area to find the ideal spot for their colony, so the distance you’ve got to travel before finding another biome is pretty huge.
In 2019, we wanted to make these distant biomes useful for gameplay. We added the multiple colonies feature, and unique resources per biome. We liked the idea, but it was disappointing in practice. Travelling and trading between colonies is very tedious, and the rewards aren’t worth it.
0.9.0 fixes that core problem by adding outposts, which are like new colonies, except that their stockpile is merged with the main colony. This makes it a lot easier to set them up and to benefit from their unique products.
More from the new terrain generator
Instead of demanding that players travel huge distances to distant biomes, we’re now reworking the world to have more variety in the spawn biome. Instead of having random patches of arctic and tropic intermingling, the spawn biome is now intended to be mostly temperate, interspersed by fens and heaths. These fens and heaths contain unique and valuable resources. Some ores are only available at mountain tops.
It’s basically the same ideas as 0.7.0, but the barriers are a lot lower, and the rewards aren’t just some relatively useless endgame items - the rewards are now a core part of the tech tree.
Fundamental changes to the world generation are pretty much always breaking old savegames. We can add new jobs, items, monsters and weapons to 0.9.1, but we can’t easily overhaul the terrain generation there. So this is something we’ve got to get right before the update releases. We’re not merely making some adjustments to change the terrain a bit, we’re reworking and optimizing the way the system works to the core.
That reworked system is now capable of rendering pretty nice terrains and the results can be seen in this blog! It’s very much work in progress though, it should look quite different in a couple of weeks.
”Threat-shifters”
In previous versions of CS, the amount of monsters that assaulted your colony every night was purely determined by the amount of colonists living in your colony. In 0.9.0, these colonists generate only a small amount of “threat”, and most “threat” is generated by unlocking certain important technologies in the tech tree. This makes it a lot easier and more rewarding to recruit large amounts of colonists.
When you start a new outpost, this threat is divided proportionally according to the amount of colonists living there. So imagine there is a total of 1000 threat. If the main colony has 200 colonists, and the outpost has 50 inhabitants, the main colony gets 4/5th = 800 of the threat, and the outpost gets 200 of the threat.
When you expand the outpost until it also has 200 inhabitants, the threat is equally divided: 500 for the main colony, 500 for the outpost. This means the amount of monsters appearing at the gates of the main colony actually decreases!
Work-in-progress "monster attraction statues"
Once I playtested this, I instantly noticed how 'relieving' my outpost was for my colony. It
Source
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