Community24 Jul 2026Friday Blog 269 - Blueprint Builders' Contest Ends in August + SplitscreenThe Blueprint Builders' Contest ends next month, on Sunday August 23, at 23:59 Amsterdam time! All players are allowed to put one post in #Blueprint-Contest-Entries on our Discord . This post can contain a maximum of seven blueprints. This is meant to give you the opportunity to share a set of related buildings, like castle walls and gates and towers - you don’t need to develop seven different…
The next update is 0.16.1, not 0.17. This means: no major changes to content, but a whole bunch of improvements to Quality of Life. Tweaks that make playing the game more convenient. The ugliest menu in the game was the Notifications tab. It was a chaotic, work-in-progress UI. It’s a lot more functional and pleasing to look at now! And it even has a connection “outside of the menu”: major event…
Update 0.16 is live right now! It adds the Oddity Press, a new automatic crafter that produces mainly decorative items, and new beds. Its content largely matches the content of the Beta, so we’ll refer you to that blog for those details. The Beta was useful, and we found all kinds of little glitches. They’ve all been patched now. We also added some new content. Chairs were missing, so we’ve add…
The Beta is live right now! Precise instructions on how to join it appear later in this blog. The main content addition is the Oddity Press . It’s an automated crafter, like the Mill. The Mill makes essential items for the start of the game, and the Oddity Press does the opposite - most of its items utterly lack functionality, and are purely meant for decorative purposes. There’s one exception:…
All changes mentioned in this blog concern the internal dev build. Nothing has been released publicly yet. This month, work on the Oddity Press has continued. It works like the Mill: specific items will be produced there, over time, without a colonist present. But the Oddity Press will be unlocked later in the game, and it mainly produces decorative items. The Press is a moving object. The whee…
Culling frozen right in front of Lagoon's castle - invisible terrain does not get rendered Colony Survival was a Daily Deal last Sunday. For an entire week, the game is 50% off! This is the moment to purchase the game for yourself, to recommend it to your friends - or to gift it to them! Until this update, the game rendered everything the camera pointed at. But of course, visually rendering thi…
Colony Survival is currently 25% off until 5 January! Welcome to the last blog of 2025! We want to start out with a heartfelt thank you to all our readers. To everybody who bought the game and has made it possible for us to be dedicated to this project full-time. To everybody who left feedback, wrote a Steam Review, recommended the game to friends, shared a blueprint, uploaded a world, created…
For a quick and clear overview of all new features, read Blog 261 Ladies and gentlemen - welcome to a new era. After more than a decade of development, this first-person strategy game finally acquired an (optional!) new perspective, the traditional view for strategy games: top-down. This changes everything. Think about real life. What jobs match strategy games the best? Architects and generals.…
Update 0.15 is available for a public test right now! The core new feature is the top-down perspective. Unlock the Overseer’s Desk in the tech tree, place it in your colony, and click on it to switch to this perspective. From the top-down view, you get access to the new Blueprints feature. There is a “Scanner” which allows you to select and save parts of your world. Right next to it is a “Place…
All the progress talked about in this blog concerns the unreleased development branch and is not publicly available yet In the last blog we announced “world slicing”, the ability to “cut the roof off” and see inside of buildings at the level of the “top-down trigger”. It’s a fun experiment, but because it’s just on one level, it’s not very practical. Many buildings have floors on wildly differe…
These new features are still in development and not yet released. The world in the screenshots was built by Lagoon . In the past month, we continued our work on the top-down view feature. We added a “worldslicing” feature, where everything above the height of the “topdown trigger” turns invisible. It's practical to be able see inside houses, but it's essential if you want to use the topdown vie…
We made good progress with the top-down view this month! This short video shows what it currently looks like in the internal development build. Watch it here: It's all work-in-progress, so it will look different when it's publicly released. The interface is very basic. And when you place a blueprint of a building, it's constructed instantly. Of course, that's not the intention. The video demons…
Colony Survival is part of the Summer Sale and currently 30% off! For years, players have been asking for a blueprint builder or “copy-paste builder”. A way to select an area of the world - a building, a palace, a tower - and to let your colonists build a copy of it in some other place of the world. One of the very first mods actually contained such functionality. I totally understood the appea…
The newest update is live right now and contains a massive overhaul of NPC movement and pathfinding. In all previous versions, NPCs were rigidly constrained to the voxel grid. They could only move in straight lines to the blocks directly next to theirs. 0.14.0 changes that. NPCs are now able to move diagonally! This is true for both colonists and monsters. Before 0.14.0, NPCs didn’t really care…
The new update is live on Steam! The biggest changes are “rubble” and bombs. When you or a colonist destroys a block, small chunks of rubble will appear and fall to the ground. Bombs take advantage of this new system by instantly removing large amounts of blocks and blasting the rubble away. There’s also a complex fuse system that allows you to detonate the bombs remotely. The fuse system suppo…
We’re participating in the City Builder & Colony Sim Fest which means Colony Survival is currently 30% off! This is a great moment to purchase the game if you don’t own it yet. As promised in the previous blog , we made a video showing the new systems! Here it is: We didn’t merely work on the rubble-effect. We also added explosives! There are currently three types. (In the internal development…
At the end of 2024, when testing the addition of the mill, I did another cheat-free playthrough of the game. I made a mistake in my planning and had to remove a fairly large wall that I had accidentally placed two blocks to the right of where it had to go. Destroying it was a bit of a tedious, repetitive task. I could’ve let my colonists do the work but I couldn’t be bothered setting up a const…
We have just released update 0.12.1! The most significant change is the addition of official game translations in major global languages. Both the storepage and the in-game content are now available in: · German · French · Spanish · Czech · Polish · Russian · Japanese · Korean · Chinese (simplified) We’ve worked together with Allcorrect . It’s not often that we collaborate so closely with other…
The newest update is available on Steam right now! It’s fully compatible with your pre-existing 0.9/0.10/0.11 worlds. Watch the release trailer here! Update 0.12.0 has a strong focus on the early game. From the very beginning, a mill is available to the player. The mill does not need colonists and can craft items 24/7. It can produce some fundamental early game items like beds and torches, and…
Everything shown and described in this blog is not available publicly yet, it will be in the next update. Work on the projects detailed in the previous blog continued this month. We finished the mesh for the auto-crafter. To distinguish it from regular jobblocks, and to signal that it can do productive things without human input, it’s powered by wind - it’s a mill. We’re trying something new he…
The two most dramatic overhauls of the game were update 0.7 and 0.9. With 0.7, we wanted to make the game more challenging and complex. That’s why we introduced features like the happiness system. Later on, we realized there was a problem with some of these features. They punished growth and recruiting more colonists. That was never the intention. We reworked the happiness system into the curre…
The lightmapping made visible A massive update to the lighting system is available right now! It’s compatible with pre-existing savegames. If Steam doesn’t update automatically, try verifying the integrity of the game cache. In the previous versions of the game, the world was either directly lit or indirectly lit. Direct lighting occurs when the sun hits an area, all the rest is shadow. There w…
In the previous blog , we talked about an improved lighting system. We’re close to releasing it publicly, but we love to do a test first! We’re curious about the results in different worlds, the performance on different hardware and your opinion about it. The differences aren’t extremely obvious when just roaming the outside world, but it does really affect interiors, and it’s especially notice…
The release of 0.11 was a big success! Player counts regularly peaked above 300 simultaneous players, and our recent review rate rose to 98% positive. Thanks to everybody for the support! We released a couple of small patches, fixing some minor issues and improving some models a bit. We also updated the Steam Storepage. All screenshots were multiple years old, and none featured the new colonist…
Update 0.11 is now available on Steam! The most visible change is a total replacement of all the colonist models. In the past, we only had one colonist model. It used UV-mapped textures, and they were difficult to change for us. The only thing that varied between colonists was the color of their shirts. The new vertex coloured model is much easier to adjust for us, and the differences between c…
The current colonist model was already in the game over eight years ago, in early 2016. The workflow for producing it was horrible. The model has a bunch of surfaces that connect and disconnect in many different spots. To texture them, the model has to be “unwrapped” into a flat image that displays all these surfaces next to each other. But getting a feel for how the textures look on a 3D model…
After six years, Colony Survival finally has a new main trailer! Here it is: Making it was quite the challenge. We really wanted to showcase the potential of the game. We needed beautiful worlds that integrated all the new content from 0.10.0, stuff like the enhanced rail system and all the new decorative items. We asked for help from the community with the Builder’s Contest - here are the winn…
The game is currently on sale! It’s 30% discounted. If you don’t own it yet - this is a great time to purchase it! And if you do - thanks, and consider telling your friends or outright gifting them the game :) Today, we released 0.10.3. The main changes concern controller support. In the past, we did some work to make it a bit possible to use the controller, but it was still very primitive. Lot…
Announcements are the developer’s own posts to the game’s Steam news feed: updates and their patch notes, in-game events, releases and sales. The important ones are marked on the players chart.