Friday Blog 224 - Big Content Update on the Beta Branch

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The beta has been live for two months now. In the first month, we focused on polishing, fixing and streamlining the existing content of the beta. In the past month, we’ve worked hard to add a bunch of extra content. 0.9.0 is feeling a lot more complete now!

The most exciting new content, in my opinion, is gunpowder related. Gunpowder is now made at the alchemist, and requires sulfur, saltpeter and charcoal. Sulfur is mined in heaths and saltpeter can be made in composting bins. The first weapon that can be crafted with gunpowder is an explosive trap. It adds a new feature: area-of-effect damage. It’s triggered when a monster walks on top of it, and will hit all monsters who are within 2 blocks of distance. To make the explosion look more convincing, we decided to add force to the ragdolls of dying monsters. Other traps and guards now also apply force when they kill monsters, making the combat look more satisfying.

After Zun added support for area-of-effect weapons, he applied this effect to caltrop-traps as well. Further research leads to handcannons. These are primitive, handheld gunpowder weapons that do a lot of damage, but they can only hit monsters at a short range.

We’ve added another way to protect yourself from the monsters. It’s a “failsafe”. It has to be slowly charged over many days, and can then be used once to take out a lot of monsters simultaneously. It will also reduce the monster threat for the next night. It’s very useful as a way to save your colony when you make a mistake and monsters breach your defences.

The failsafe consumes “Sacred Points”, which are earned by distributing “Sacred Meals” to your colonists. These meals are made sacred when a colonist adds a candle to them at an altar. There are multiple tiers of meals, and we’ve reintroduced chickens and cabbages as a way to make advanced meals which earn more Sacred Points.

Another new item is the Astrolabe. Historically, it’s an astronomical instrument with many functions, one of which is determining your location. In Colony Survival, selecting an Astrolabe in your hotbar will display the location of nearby ‘unique biomes’: heaths, swamps and mountaintops with special ores. This makes it a lot easier to find and travel between them.

We’ve also introduced “alarm bells”. You can place them on any block, and if a monster steps on top of it, a loud bell starts ringing, indicating the presence of monsters in a location determined by you. They make it a lot easier to notice problems in your defences before they become a big problem - and they give you some time to run to the failsafe and trigger it, if necessary.

This new beta content patch also contains a glassblower, which requires silica sand found in the heath, and potash for the composting bin. Glass can be used to make eyeglasses, which can be used by researchers, writers and scribes to speed up their work. It can also be used to craft a monocular. Select it in your hotbar to use it!

That summarises the biggest changes, but the patch contains a lot of other tweaks. Science which adds threat to the colony is a lot more noticeable now. The furnace and splitting stump have lost their texture-designs and are now 3D vertex colored meshes. Tin and gold appear deeper in the world. There are new jobs