- Friday Blog 271 - Contest Winners and Double MKB Patch - 11 September 2026
The release of 0.18 went well! In subsequent days, we released a bunch of small updates, bringing the current version number to 0.18.0.9. They’re mostly tiny fixes, but some are worth extra attention. The biggest one concerns Remote Play Together, which can be used to play Split Screen Colony Survival with friends on distant computers, even if they don’t own Colony Survival. We developed Split Screen for use on one machine, where mouse & keyboard + controller is the most common solution for multiple inputs. But when linking up two machines remotely, double mouse & keyboard suddenly becomes a much more obvious solution. That’s actually quite complicated to get functional, and we hadn’t developed that yet. But of course, it is technically possible - and 0.18.0.3 granted this ability to everybody! Then 0.18.0.6 introduced two new significant changes. NPC pathfinding was improved to better…
- Friday Blog 270 - The Split Screen Update, 0.18.0, is Live Right Now! - 21 August 2026
This update does exactly what it says on the cover. Plug in a controller, divide your monitor in two and play the game with a friend right next to you! Enabling Split Screen will generate a second character who has the same capabilities as the first. The second player can start their own colony, explore the world on their own, use the top-down view, or share a colony with the first player. There’s a new Split Screen menu that allows you to customize the feature. Which character should be on which side of the screen, and which keyboard or controller should control them? This can be fine-tuned in detail. Is your friend currently unable to come to your place? No worries - Colony Survival supports Remote Play Together. Your friend doesn’t even need to own Colony Survival to participate in remote Split Screen! There are minor tweaks to the rest of the game. The first is especially helpful in…
- Friday Blog 269 - Blueprint Builders' Contest Ends in August + Splitscreen - 24 July 2026
The 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 unrelated impressive buildings to have a chance of winning! We will rank and reward the best entries. We’re not merely judging “impressiveness”. We are looking for blueprints that are reusable by other players, that can coherently fit into another world. The best five entries will receive Steam keys for Colony Survival, to share with their friends. And the top three will get something else in addition to that. These people will likely be some of our most experienced users when it comes to Oddity Pr…
- Update 0.17: “Quests & Counters” is Available Right Now! - 25 June 2026
A big new update is live on Steam right now! It should make the game a lot more accessible to new players, and it should speed up some of the slowest days of starting a new colony. There is a new tab next to the stockpile: “Quests”. These are missions that should guide you through the core of the game. They contain a goal and instructions on how to achieve it. When you’ve fulfilled its requirements, you can claim the reward of the Quest. The rewards are items like food, resources and some unique decorative objects. None of the old content is locked behind Quests. If you know how the game works, you can fully ignore Quests. It’s not a slow, mandatory tutorial. 0.17 contains more noticeable changes. One of them concerns the Notifications menu. The old one was a work-in-progress disaster. It looks much better in 0.17, and it has been deeply connected to the regular first-person gameplay. W…
- Friday Blog 268 - The Shape of the Next Update: QoL Improvements - 29 May 2026
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 events in-game, like a colonist being killed or Siege Mode triggering, will now generate an alarm-icon in the top-right of the screen, warning you about the event and connecting it to the Notifications tab. Colonist deaths will also spawn an in-game marker of the place where it happened for 60 seconds. They can be made visible again afterwards by going to the death-notification. From the very first version of CS, we’ve always had ammo-counters visible in the UI, helping you keep track of the stockpile…
- Friday Blog 267 - Oddity Press Update & Blueprint Builder’s Contest - 17 April 2026
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 added two kinds of chairs. A simple wooden one to match the large wooden table, and a more luxurious one that matches the desk. The new beds, the Luxury Bed and the Bunkbed, are now paintable! Use paint to change their colour, and use the paint stripper item to return the bed to its original state. Separate from the paint that was added years ago, 0.16 adds paintings, framed art that you can hang on the wall. The item picks a random painting to display every time you place it. There are currently sev…
- Friday Blog 266 - The 0.16 Beta is Available! - 3 April 2026
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: there are two new beds. The first is the Luxury Bed. All our colonists are tall and they do not fit properly in a bed where the entire bed frame has to fit within two voxels, or two meters. The Luxury Bed remedies this. It’s a bit longer than two meters, and the remainder of the third voxel is filled with a personal chest for the colonist. We’ve also added a Bunk Bed. It stacks two beds, and they can be used by two different colonists simultaneously. Quite the opposite of the Luxury Bed! All the o…
- Friday Blog 265 - Long Beds, Bunk Beds and the Oddity Press - 27 February 2026
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 wheel rotates and the press itself goes up and down. All of that is currently functional in the dev build. And the actual production of decorative items is already happening as well! One of the new items is going to be a new, more decorated bed. This being a Dutch game, our colonists are tall. Current beds fit neatly within two voxels, but the colonists are squeezed into them, feet clipping through the bed frame. The new bed fixes this. It requires three voxels in length. The bed itself is significant…
- Friday Blog 264 - The Culling Update, 0.15.1, is Live! - 23 January 2026
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 things that are not visible is a waste of computing power and energy. So, if you can determine what is invisible to the player and skip that in the rendering process, you get serious optimization benefits. Except… that you kinda have to render the world to determine what is visible and what’s invisible. But, this “test render” doesn’t have to be as detailed as the render output you actually see as a player. You can skip textures and lighting, you can do it in a lower resolution, and you can even comb…
- Friday Blog 263 - Into the Future - 26 December 2025
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 a mod. We literally could not have done this without you! We wish you all a very Merry Christmas and an amazing 2026. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S9mLnbCWU18 2025 saw a lot of work on polish, quality-of-life, accessibility and scaffolding that we can continue to build on for years to come. The year opened with a new collaboration with Allcorrect, which helped us translate the entire game into a bunch of major languages. We released 0.13, which added explosives and rubble that's visible every t…
- Friday Blog 262 - Update 0.15 Released - Top-Down View And Blueprints - 28 November 2025
https://youtu.be/QgYrI0gWX3g 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. But their main design work doesn’t happen on the frontline or in the middle of a construction site. It happens at a headquarters or office, standing next to a big table filled with maps, or a desk full of blueprints. This helps them to get an overview and see the whole picture, to make adjustments in a dozen different spots without physically travelling to a dozen different spots. Colony Survival faced a bottleneck. We couldn’t make the game much more complex without…
- Friday Blog 261 - 0.15.0 Beta is Live! - 24 October 2025
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 “Placer” that opens a list of all saved blueprints that you can place back into your colony. A placed blueprint will start a construction project, and you need to assign construction workers to build the project. Blueprints can also be exported to codes, or imported from them. This allows you to easily share buildings between worlds, with friends or with strangers. To help navigate indoor and underground spaces from this new perspective, we’ve also added X-Ray vision as a toggleable option. When activat…
- Friday Blog 260 - Movable World Slicing, Mesh Replacement, UI Refactor - 25 September 2025
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 different levels, and it also makes it hard to see into underground spaces. Zun has added a major improvement to this feature: you can now determine the height at which the world is “sliced open”! It’s a radical new way of looking at your colony. Previously invisible things become very visible. I’m certain this will affect how players build their worlds and I’m looking forward to seeing that impact. Screenshots in this blog should give you an idea of how it currently looks in-game. And as you can see in…
- Friday Blog 259 - World Slicing, Sharable Blueprints, New Look For Old Blocks - 28 August 2025
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 view in underground situations! Last month’s blog and video caused some confusion, because buildings were copy-pasted instantly. Of course, that was not the intention. Since then, that has been fixed as well: blueprinted buildings are built gradually by colonists, like all other construction projects they can work on. Blueprint saving was quite wonky at the time of the last blog. The blueprint was gone after reloading the world, and stuff like texts on signs or crafting configurations on jobblocks wer…
- Friday Blog 258 - First Video of the Top-Down View - 25 July 2025
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: https://youtu.be/OCcjfFNz_ZM 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 demonstrates the new features, currently called the "scanner" and "placer". The scanner allows you to select a part of the world and save it as a blueprint. The placer allows you to select a blueprint and place it in the world. The core of the feature is currently working, but there's still a lot to do before we can release it. For example, at the moment blueprints disappear when you return to the main menu and then reload the world. The video mentions the orthographic persp…
- Friday Blog 257 - Blueprint Builder, Top-down View and Eight Years of EA - 26 June 2025
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 appeal, but I worried deeply about the implementation. Designing proper interfaces to intuitively handle complex RTS-functions from a first-person perspective is a hard task. How do you make sure to select exactly your structure, but nothing extra? And how do you place it in the world? How do you visualize to players that it’s rotated in the right direction? How do you align it to the ground, how do you determine the exact height? How do you deal with clipping through the terrain, how do you prevent th…
- Friday Blog 256 - 0.14.0 is Live Right Now! Off the Grid, on the Path - 23 May 2025
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 where they walked. Grass or an actual floor, dry land or water - they were equally quick on all terrains, and had zero preferences. This has changed too! All NPCs now strive to avoid water. Colonists prefer walking on proper paths and get a minor speed boost there, while they are slightly slower on blocks like grass and sand. Monsters can’t open doors anymore - but have learned to destroy them. They have a bit of a dislike for doing that, making colonists behind doors safer in a lot of situations…
- Friday Blog 255 - The Explosive Update - 0.13.0 Is Live Right Now! - 4 April 2025
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 supports junctions, “elevators” to go up a level and special fuse blocks that introduce a delay to the system. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S9mLnbCWU18 You don’t have to wait until you’ve unlocked and produced gunpowder to try the new system. Fairly early in the game, you can unlock them in the merchant, where they can be purchased for Colony Points. (Which is the currency you earn in-game, not some microtransaction nonsense) The rubble system automatically limits the amount of rubble generated when…
- Friday Blog 254 - Explosives and Sale! - 28 March 2025
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: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S9mLnbCWU18 We didn’t merely work on the rubble-effect. We also added explosives! There are currently three types. (In the internal development build that will be released publicly quite soon) Firstly, there are regular bombs, which destroy blocks all around them. Need a building gone rapidly? These are for you! Secondly, there are shaped charges. They blast away a 3x3 area in front of them. They’re very useful if you need to make a tunnel. Last but not least, there are shaped charges that target downwards diagonally. This leaves a stair-like shape standing. Very practical when you’re digging a m…
- Friday Blog 253 - Destruction, the Deal and the Future - 28 February 2025
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 construction area. It made me vividly realize that currently, destroying blocks is pretty…. boring. A bar fills up, a block disappears, repeat. But in real life, smashing a brick wall is actually pretty exciting. Chunks fly off, rubble rolls and falls everywhere. Why shouldn’t Colony Survival be like that? I instantly thought that I wanted to make the direction of destroying the block matter. Make it more interactive, less repetitive. Give players the choice to direct all the rubble into a specific dir…
