Colony Survival — patch notes and updates
Stored observation / content update:
Dated developer announcements recorded from Steam. Open the source for the complete update.
| Update | Date | Excerpt / source |
|---|---|---|
| Friday Blog 267 - Oddity Press Update & Blueprint Builder’s Contest | 2026-04-17 | 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 it |
| Friday Blog 266 - The 0.16 Beta is Available! | 2026-04-03 | 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 |
| Friday Blog 265 - Long Beds, Bunk Beds and the Oddity Press | 2026-02-27 | 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 |
| Friday Blog 264 - The Culling Update, 0.15.1, is Live! | 2026-01-23 | 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 determi |
| Friday Blog 263 - Into the Future | 2025-12-26 | 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 ca |
| Friday Blog 262 - Update 0.15 Released - Top-Down View And Blueprints | 2025-11-28 | 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 h |
| Friday Blog 261 - 0.15.0 Beta is Live! | 2025-10-24 | 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 i |
| Friday Blog 260 - Movable World Slicing, Mesh Replacement, UI Refactor | 2025-09-25 | 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 in |
| Friday Blog 259 - World Slicing, Sharable Blueprints, New Look For Old Blocks | 2025-08-28 | 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 col |
| Friday Blog 258 - First Video of the Top-Down View | 2025-07-25 | 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. Th |
| Friday Blog 257 - Blueprint Builder, Top-down View and Eight Years of EA | 2025-06-26 | 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 d |
| Friday Blog 256 - 0.14.0 is Live Right Now! Off the Grid, on the Path | 2025-05-23 | 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 |
| Friday Blog 255 - The Explosive Update - 0.13.0 Is Live Right Now! | 2025-04-04 | 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 |
| Friday Blog 254 - Explosives and Sale! | 2025-03-28 | 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 |
| Friday Blog 253 - Destruction, the Deal and the Future | 2025-02-28 | 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 everyw |
| Friday Blog 252 - 0.12.1 Released with Official Translations & Year in Review | 2024-12-26 | 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 companies, or that professionals go through our .json files so thoroughly. But it went very well, with high-quality results delivered very quickly! And no, we aren’t paid or obligated to share this ;) The translations in all these languages will be updated officially whe |
| Update 0.12.0 Has Been Released! | 2024-11-27 | The newest update is available on Steam right now! It’s fully compatible with your pre-existing 0.9/0.10/0.11 worlds. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1zdFjAWNUDw 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 a handful of building blocks and roofs. It changes the start of the game quite significantly. There’s more to do for the player. Personally cutting down trees is more rewarding now. Players can also generate m |
| Friday Blog 251 - A Windmill for Coated Planks | 2024-10-25 | 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 here. It’s not just a voxel-sized workbench, or a single large mesh like the banner. The mill is actually a combination of many smaller parts, most of which fit neatly within the 1x1x1 voxels of the game. Yet you won’t build it part-by-part. It will assemble automat |
| Friday Blog 250 - Improving the Early Game, and other Much-Requested Features | 2024-09-20 | 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 current Colony Points system. With 0.9, we wanted to make expanding and hiring more colonists more rewarding. One of the ways we tried to do this was by strictly limiting the player-crafting. If players can create hundreds of building blocks with the click o |
| Friday Blog 249 - Update 0.11.1 Is Live Right Now! Bright Forests, Dark Tunnels | 2024-08-30 | 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 was just one value for each. Whether the shadow was behind a little bush in an open field, or deep into a cave, didn’t matter. All indirectly lit areas received the same brightness. We did add a system that checked the position of the player. It measured how |