Ape Apps

This suggestion has likely been suggested before, but I think now that we have education, maybe we could take a crack at these and see if these ideas stick.

Bast wants to model My colony to be like Sim city, which is very apparent in many ways. For instance, like sim city, we have to manage utilities like water, power, trash, and also air pollution to an extent, all of which are factors that cim city employs. In addition to those needs, the player also needs to have fire protection coverage by placing fire departments at certain intervals to ensure that all of the city is protected, and law enforcement by spacing police stations around the city. Crime and fires are both very realistic factors in any given city and should not be an exception in mc.

The implications of fire feature would be very simple. All structures already take damage over time in mc, so it would be nothing to add a factor that increases the chance for a fire to occur in a structure as it's health gets closer to zero. The fires could be entities that appear around a structure when triggered.. If a fire is left at full health for enough time, it will spawn one or two other fires around adjacent buildings that weren't burning before. Those fires would spawn more fires if left a full health.This creates a sort of hydra effect. If a fire is damaged but then left alone, it will quickly replenish it's health and spawn more fires after remaining at max health for a few moments. Of course, when a structure's health drops to 0, it will explode as it does normally now in mc, except it should leave an ash pile that cannot be bulldozed and would require workers to decrease it's health and eventually cause it to explode and leave a space that can be used again.

In order to combat this, the player needs to make sure that this build fire stations at regular intervals so that the entire map is covered. The fire station will only trigger if it senses a fire within it's range of effectiveness, and more advanced fire stations will have larger ranges. The station carries a certain number of fire bots that are built with the station. The bots remain in the station until the station is triggered, upon which they are filled with water from the colony reserves and released from the station to go and fight the fire before it spreads. The fire station itself should provide a certain number of living spaces and consume food, wheels, lots of water, and rum. This is because some stations have living spaces where firefighters can spend a couple nights while they are on patrol. The station would direct the fire bots, once release, would path find on their own to the nearest fire, then once they've killed the fire, they pathfind to another nearest fire. If no other fires are in range of the station, the bots return. Another cool feature would be if when fire bots ran out of water, they had to return to the station to be refilled and then relased to go back to the fire they were fighting.

As for police and crime, there may be several ways to implement this feature, but here are two:

The first way is to simply cause unhappiness in colonists that walk through areas outside the ranges of any police station, which would motivate the player to space the stations appropriately.

The second way, which is a more interactive way, would be to implement robberies in mc, and decrease the likelihood of those happening in areas inside the range of police stations. Where the ranges of the multiple stations overlap, the reducing of the likelihood of robberies should stack. Whenever a robbery happens inside a certain building, everyone passing through that building for a time should become unhappy because of crime, and crime should be added to the pie of unhappiness reasons. After a while, the building should stop making people unhappy. In order for a robbery to happen, a working colonist will randomly become a robber and randomly pick a building to rob. Police bots would be stored in the police station and would be dispatched of a robbery happens in the range of a station. The bots will chase the robber and only have a certain window to catch the robber before he gets out of the stations range. If the robber is able to flee to an area out of range of any stations, he recieves a large amount of the colonies money reserve and turns back into a regular colonist and find work again. If the robber is caught, his occupation will become prisoner, and he will have to live in jail cells for a certain amount of time and then be released to find another job.Unhappy colonists should have a more likelihood to become a robber, so the player should definitely place multiple police stations around the capital to prevent a protesting colonist turned robber from getting away with the robbery. Banks and money producing buildings should be the most likely target for a robbery, with factories, sweatshops, power plants, food and water producing buildings being among the least likely. The robber should be able to take a larger amount of money depending on how many people are working, touring, living, being entertained in the structure at that time, so gaurd your arcologies heavily.

Prisons: these structures would have a value of jail cells, which prisoners would occupy. The prison would consume food, water, and steel, and some higher teir prisons would consume cloth, rum, and money as well. When you are out of Jail cells to put the prisoners in, then police stations will let the robber go, but without the money they tried to steal. If you want, you could implement some policies on what to do with robbers to give the player the choice on what to do with them. You could deport them, execute them on the spot, have them fight to the death in arenas(which would probably help out antiquitas since Romans used to force their criminals to fight to the death in arenas). Each option may need other buildings to designed for the purpose of doing your choice of punishment to the robbers.

Finally, yes, I know that robberies aren't the only form of crime. There's fraud, smuggling, drug dealing, prostitution, murder, and the list goes on. But for this game's needs, I think that robbery would be enough crime on it's own motivate a player to work towards protecting their colonies with law enforcement.

Thanks for reading my ramblings. And again, please don't comment saying that these ideas have already been suggested. I know, I'm just adding to those Ideas with my own little twist. I truly like my colony and I want to come up with ideas that can help improve it. I just don't want to have someone give me a two bit comment that this has been suggested before and my ideas go unconsidered, especially after all of the work that i put into making these ideas so descriptive.

For my agricultural idea I've put together some herbs and other plants that aid in the rpg/adventure aspect of the game. Some of these plants can create powerful elemental resistance potions or elemental catalysts needed to cast spells. Some are very picky in terms of the biome that they want to grow in, yet others can be grown anywhere.

Flaming Peppers:
grows wild in - deserts
grown in - hot biomes only
use - ice resistance potions, fire arrows, fire catalysts.
growing info - the plant can be harvested without breaking and regrows peppers over time. crops need to have one square of room all around to grow(prevents easy mass production).

Frost Melon:
grows wild in - tiaga, tundra
grown in - cold biomes only
use - fire resistance potions, ice arrows, ice catalysts
growing info - grows just like the flaming peppers and has the same spacial requirements.

Rubber tree:
grows wild in - jungle
grown in - hot and temperate biomes, but not cold biomes.
use - shock resistance potion, potential source of rubber, which could be a crafting material.
growing info - grows like any other tree, drops rubber bark and the normal drops when broken and should drop saplings so that becomes a renewable source of rubber bark.

Zing berry bush:
grows wild in - tiaga, forest, jungle
grown in - tiaga, forest, jungle only. It needs shade to grow
use - static arrows and shock catalysts.
growing info - can be harvested without breaking the plant and will regenerate over some time. They need to be planted adjecent to a tree in order to produce berries. growing next to rubber trees provides a bonus to growth and fruit growing speed.

chamomile:
grows wild in - grasslands
grown in - anywhere.
uses - health potions
growing info - grown on grass or farmland, grows faster on farmland. Spreads fledgling plants to adjacent squares to make it easy to mass produce.

sugar cane:
grows wild in: swamp, jungle
grown in: anywhere
uses: potions and food.
growing info - must be grown next to water.

Char lilly:
grows wild in - must be crafted with various fire related ingredients.
grown in - hot biomes only
use - provides nectar for inferno bees. Inferno bee hives in turn produce fire catalysts instead of honey.
growing info - char lillies are sterile, so they must be crafted in order to make more. they can be placed next to one another and must grow on farmland. The rate at which inferno hives produce fire catalysts is directly related to how many of these lillies are placed in range of the hive. This would make it easy to mass produce fire catalysts, which will be needed more and more as you progress through the game.

Frostbite Orchid:
grows wild in: must be crafted from frost/ice related items.
grown in: cold biomes only
use - provides nectar for blizzard bees. Blizzard bee hives produce ice catalysts from the nectar.
growing info - also sterile and have to be crafted, same hive mechanics, just for a different element.

Static Azalea:
grows wild in - must be crafted from shock/static related items
grows in - all biomes
use - provides nectar to tempest bees. Tempest bee hives produce shoch catalysts from the nectar
growing infor - same as char lillies and frostbite orchides, but for the shock element.

night shade:
grows in: at the lowest depths of caves.
grown in: caves only
use: this plant contains the essence of corruption, an element that causes poisoning and madness. Can be used to make corruption arrows that turn enemies against one another and is also used in black catalysts.
growing info, must be grown on farm land in caves. must have at least one tile of space on all sides.

Glow coral:
grows wild in - the depths of the ocean
grown in - underwater only.
uses - this plant contains the essence of blinding light, this light is an element called holiness and can be used to craft holy arrows which cause massive damage to undead/corrupt enemies and set them ablaze, and is used in white catalysts.
growing info: must be placed on sea floor with one tile of room all around.

aetherial kelp:
grows wild in - underground ether rivers and oceans.
gown in - underground ether sea floor
uses - all cure potions that restore full health and remove all negative status effects, used in ether breathing potions, and used to make ether catalysts for ultima spells
growing info - very rare plant. grown on ether sea floor, must have three tiles of space all around to make mass production difficult. Harvesting the plant doesn't destroy the plant and it'll regrow it's harvestables over time.

Castor Bean plant:
grows in: jungle
grown in: jungle
uses: highly potent ricin poison that can inbue weapons and projectiles with poison damage. Also, there could be a possible poison catalyst if poison is to be an element, but let's assume it's not. Poisons would also be needed to make antidotes to rid yourself from being poisoned. Could also be used to make poison vials that would imbue all arrows and mele weapons with poison for a short time.
growing info: this plant will replicate a phenomenal rates by spawning fledgling plants right next to it or up to 2 tiles away, so all you have to do is plant on dirt and you'll have a ton of these in no time, no water required. Harvesting destroys the plant, but yields a lot of castor beans. Mass production should be easy, but these plants will kill all plants and animals near them, and there is a risk of poisoning yourself as you harvest them unless a protection method is implemented, such as rubber gloves. This makes these plants a pain to control for farming, but it's worthwhile to farm them. These need to be mass-produceable so that you can make lots of antidotes, poison vials, and poison arrows to aid you in your adventures, and poison is a pretty easy to come by thing in most rpg games.

aqualemon:
grows in: all levels of the ocean
grown in: all levels of the ocean
uses: water breathing potion and can be consumed as food for hunger and water breathing for a small amount of time.

Catalysts:
fire - used as ammo for fire spells. Made from flaming peppers, wax, and charcoal.
ice - used as ammo for ice spells
shock - used as ammo for shock spells
black - used as ammo for dark/poison/necro spells and can be used as ammo for fire, ice, and lightning spells. When used that way, it adds poison damage and boosts the elemental status effects that the particular spell imbues on the enemy.
white - used as ammo for healing/light/holy spells and can be used as ammo for fire, ice, and lightning spells. When used that way, it adds holy damage to the spell and boosts it's overall damage.
ether: can be used for any kind of spell and is mainly used as ammo for ultima spells. Ether catalysts should be very difficult to obtain.

potions and consumable:

potion of fire resistance: reduces fire damage and the likeliness of being set on fire, which does damage over time.
potion of frst resistance: reduces ice damage and the likeliness of being slowed or frozen in place.
potion of lightning resistance: reduces shock damage and the likeliness of being stunned or knocked back.
tea: crafted from water, sugar, and chamomile. Basic health potion.
antidote: this common potion needs to be easy to make because the player could get poisoned quite often.
all cure: made from aetherial kelp and other highly rare ingredients, this potion brings you back to square one so you can keep up the fight without having to retreat.
potion of water breathing: allows the player to breath under water for a time, vital for venturing deep into the ocean to get things like glow coral.
Potion of dark vision: allows you to see invisible enemies and objects and allows you to see night and underground as if it were day. Not completely required as enemies that use invisibility should uncloak for a time to let the player strike them. Would be made from black catalysts and other rare ingredients.
cleansing pack: a semi-common consumable that would cure most common status ailments other than poison, corruption, and blindness. Its made from soap, cotton, and water. Soap is made from animal fat and charcoal. It would need to be easy to mass produce as the player will often find themselves under a negative status effect.
eye drops: made from salt and water, salt comes from salt deposits under the ocean(and possibly in deserts), cures blindness.

Bees:
wax: harvested from hives and apiaries. Can be used to make candles, fire arrows, and fire catalysts.
Honey: restores health when consumed, can be used in better tiers of potions and consumables.
smoker: pacifies bees for a short time, allowing you to destroy their hive or apiary or harvest wax and honey. made with iron, charcoal, and zing berries, breaks after 64 uses.
Honey collector: made with wood and iron, used to harvest honey and wax from hives and apiaries. The amount of time it takes for a hive or apiary to fill with honey is directly related to how many plants you place in the range of the hives/apiaries. Chamomile flowers have the best affect, but all other plants can be used. Hives and apiaries increase plant growth speed and fruit generation speed of all plants around them by 20%, and if the ranges of hives/apiaries overlap then this effect can stack up to 5 times.

wild honey bee hives: occur naturally all over the world. The hive will attack if the player or other mobs get's too close, regardless of whether they intend to do harm, but the smoker tool can pacify them for a time. the hive will drop wax and 1-2 queens when broken.
apiary: crafted from wood, wax, and 1 wild or domestic queen bee. Bees will attack the player even though they are cultivated, but the damage is much less and apiaries that have been smoked are pacified for much longer than normal. Apiary bees will not attack a player for standing near the apiary, unlike the hive. However, hostile mobs that enter the range of an apiary are automatically attacked, making them good defensive turrets. However, this consumes honey, and they can't attack if out of honey, so it's important to not harvest defensive apiaries, and to put harvesting apiaries in a spot where they won't encounter hostility. The player can manually insert honey or catalysts(depending on the type of apiary) into the apiary to refuel it for battle. It will even drop itself when broken, allowing easy relocation. However, the apiary has a substantially reduced range compared to the hive.

elemental bees:
elemental siphon: used to siphon elemental catalysts from elemental apiaries. Elemental apiaries will attack the player with the elemental damage of their type when attempting to destroy or harvest from the apiary. The same apiary rules apply here regarding attack parameters, range, defensive action against hostile mobs, and smoke effect duration.
Inferno apiary: made from an apiary, a number of fire catalysts, a char lilly, and lots of charcoal. Drops itself when broken, allowing easy transportation. Only operates in hot biomes, produces fire catalysts at a speed directly related to how many char lilies in it's range. The lilies will die after a long time of use, dropping a depleted char lily that can be recharged by cooking in a furnace or with one fire catalyst. The inferno hive will always produce more catalysts than you'll end up using recharging the lilies, but you can get even more catalysts out of it just by cooking the lilies.

Blizzard apiary: made from an apiary, a number of ice catalysts, a frostbite orchid, and lots of ce. All of the rules for the inferno apiary apply here, just for the ice element. frostbite orchids can be recharged using ice catalysts or by crafting them with ice.

tempest Apiary: same rules apply as blizzard apiary but with the lightning element. Made from an apiary, a number of shock catalysts, a static azalea, and lots of rubber. static azaleas can be recharged with lightning catalysts or by crafting them with zing berries.

well, that's all I have for now, it's a big list of ideas, but I think it would make for some interesting gameplay mechanics. Let me know what you think.

Is it possible that working speed gets bugged out after a fire drill is done?
Before the fire drill, my civics went up pretty fast, but with 80 banks added and a fire drill done, it goes slower than ever. Could someone explain this? I thought fire drill was meant to speed up production since people went looking for jobs in the near vicinity.

More:
Fire shows up in the Resource bar. This indicates the amount of fire in the city. This DOES NOT have a storage limit, and each fire will produce 0.05 atmosphere/min. The fire spreads at a rate of 2/n/m (where n represents the number of buildings surrounding it). If a building adjacent to a fire department is on fire, the fire can't spread and extinguished instantly. What will extinguish fires are firemen and fire engines. When a fire is being extinguished, the colonywide water will reduce 1 per second. With the Advanced Firefighting research:
[*]Water consumption is reduced from 1 to 0.5
[*]Costs 450 research
[*]Reduces max trash from 1600 to 600, reduces trash chance from 20% to 10%

The fire's do not last last for long, so the proposed burning time is p=(l*w)^2 (building's area squared), where p represents burning time. There will also be an 20% chance to add a random amount between 20 and 1600 trash. Trash will exist as "trash deposits", a mass trash pile that can be cleared by reducing trash (e.g. burning it), and these contain 5-500 trash in it (depending on the burnt buildings size). If a home is destroyed, the population should stay but become homeless. At least 1 person (if within the facility or home) is injured and there is a 15% chance a person is dead in the injured. For example, if you have a population of 1,000 in a building, than it will be 15 mod 1000 = 150 people dead.
More will be shown later!
Reply anytime if you have any concerns or questions.

I have had the same experience with Fire Drill's as SlappySquirrel. Anytime I use a Fire Drill the colonists will wander aimlessly. They will occupy buildings and take random jobs. Even jobs with outrageous commutes. Also all the food and water will deplete thus having to start a new colony. Fire Drill feels broken at the moment.

Hmm, never thought that a tourist could get lost and die on the way back, its certainly possible. I've also had my tourists spontaneously dying left and right, which is especially strange because my tourism buildings are arcologies which have hospitals to prevent that very thing from happening.

As to the fire drill, not a great idea as fire drills with large populations will normally kill everyone. This is due to the large population consuming a large amount of food and water while they are moving house and occupation. Unless you have unholy amounts of storage for food, you will run out of food before new people are employed at your food generating facilities. While it is true that bast has increased the rate at which colonists find new work after a fire drill type of excess unemployment, I still wouldn't risk it unless you kept a safe backup file before doing so.

Just a note, if you do attempt a fire drill, I suggest throughout the duration of the drill you zoom in as far as you can in a spot with just empty space and no buildings. I find that this increases the simulation speed and reduces the chance of bugs that come with slower simulation speeds.

Hi. I want the devs to create a(n) Fire departments and buildings on fire. Fires will happen a mere 55% on lava worlds, 0% on ice worlds and 5% for everything else. Fires cannot be on fire departments, or deposits (except trees). I also want to make entities:

[*]Firefighter colonists
[*]Fire truck special vehicle (like the ambulance and the squad car)

Now: here are the build costs (for the small fire department):
1x1 size
Ore +950
Steel +50

Fire Department:
2x2 size
Ore +2500
Steel +500
Gold +350

More info and size and costs of the large fire department are coming soon. I expect a reply from the devs, and thank you all!

Big thx to @GeneralWadling for discussion in this topic at discord. But the main idea of this is 1 new rover type, a couple of hazards, and excessive atmosphere amounts.

This all begins when you have about 100 Million atmosphere, and you get loads of smog.

Colonist health Decreases at a rate of 5% every 30 minutes unless an Alpha Draconian, as they have Advanced Atmosphere Helmets

Fire hazard areas within a radius of 2 tiles of any of these resourse containing buildings can be ignited at any time:
Oil
Tritanium
Wood
Charcoal

Fire Rovers Puts out fires as long as they are in the direct 1 tile area of a fire when they patrol, can be dispatched by the Fire Station

Fire Station Builds the Fire Rover and contains about 10k water for storage.

Here is the Earthquake Area: I'm going to put it in either sunday or Saturday depending If I get tired. Also: This can or cannot be turned on in a random chance (thing). Keeping it vague because I havent the slightest for this right now. I'm just spitting things out and typing away.

Disaster: Earthquake When this happens, it's over for most buildings. Unless they are built out of tritanium, they are gone. Thankfully, there is a rover for that.

Rover:Rebuilder This little fella can tell all the rovers around him to rebuild the entire map at 40%-60% percent of the cost, depending on the type of quake.

Measuring Quakes There will be 5 types of earthquakes:
Whimp: Causes 5-10% damage, and generally steel buildings are fine.
Medicore This is when your bot will come in handy. This quake causes 10-20% damage, but bug steel builds wont be impacted.
Strong A little serious, does 20-30% damage.
Really Strong "This is getting serious. Someone call 991, please." Does about 50% damage.
Game Ending This is what you DONT want. Never in a million years. Demolishes most types of buildings, and causes 80% damage to all buildings. Scary

So, this has been an ongoing error since I've been playing, which is since before the insects came around.

The problem is, when I upgrade a building, I get workers coming back. But before I'll have some unemployment. After, I'll have MORE unemployment, despite having more available jobs. Before, the fire drill would fix it. But now, when I use the fire drill, none of my buildings are employed. I'm getting massive unemployment, and many of my buildings don't have a single worker. Some others only have one or two. But if I upgrade one, it fills with workers lightning fast. But I can't upgrade some of them, as they can't be upgraded.

I am using the most recent game version and I'm on an Android phone. Moto Z Play, phone and operating system up to date.

I used a Fire Drill a while back in my Zolarg colony, and about 10-15% of my population aren't being used at all for manning buildings, while some buildings are empty, and others aren't filled completely.

I used Fire Drill 10+ in-game hours ago, if it takes a while, it shouldn't take THIS long. An in-game hour at absolute maximum, anything more is too much.

PC, win 10, Steam v0.83.0
settings: everything set to on and normal, except for resource poppers and low res mode are off. Sim frequency is set to perfection and render fps cap is set to no cap.

Sad to report this issue seems to still be there. It hadn't happened before using the fire drill at about 800~ish people in my current LIS colony (small city from region) and in an older UE colony (mega) it also seemed to never happen until i'd used the fire drill once don't know how many population i had there but probably over the 2000 mark. From personal experience i suspect the issue forms after redistribution of population because of the fire drill but can't confirm that. Doubt the issue is with my pc as i have a pretty hefty system but if it helps i could list off my specs.

Greetings, Fedjen

ps. Will watch the forum for a week from now to see if there's any reply. Do let me know if there's more info i could supply, would like to help if possible :)

Turning off render colonists does not have any effect at all. but in order to try to figure out if the fire drill has anything to do with the issue i figured i'd try to start a new colony for testing purposes just to see how long it would be until i'd see the issue if at all. To my surprise i saw it happen already within under half an hour my small vehicle factory showed 0/1/1 and when i checked the workers it showed that there was in fact someone on duty. A few minutes later i saw the same happen to one of my greenhouses and then later again on a gold mint. (screenshot below) So it would appear that this has nothing to do with the amount of buildings/population nor with the fire drill. (fire drill just seems to highlight the issue rather than cause it) This new colony is also a local game rather than online so it's not a sync issue either.


Ps. Sorry for spamming not really sure what info is or isn't relevant so figured i'd give as much as i can.

I am finally putting the finishing touches on the My Colony v0.86.0 patch, which should be hitting all devices within a few days. I had planned for this to be a huge exciting content update, but then once I started working on it, I began running into one problem after the other and it ended up taking way longer to complete than I had anticipated. As a result, there are a lot of engine changes in this update but no content additions, so from the outside it may look like I've spent the last two weeks doing nothing. Rest assured though, there are some improvements to the game in this release, so let's take a look!

The first major change, which actually inadvertently started a domino effect of changes to the engine, was a total rewrite of the way the game saves files. As most of you know, when My Colony first came out there was no such thing as Regions, and so the concept wasn't even considered during game saving. Once Regions came out, many of the engine mechanics had to change to accommodate having multiple game objects processing at the same time (the individual city you are playing, the region itself, and the minor updates to the surrounding region files).

With all of these changes happening to different game objects at the same time, the game saving function remained the same as before. I sort of duct taped a solution together which worked pretty good for the most part. For instance, I had never personally run into any major issues with saving a Regions game. However, there were always reports of problems with saving in Regions, particularly with Resources and Technology levels not saving. This is unique to Regions, as it shares a single Resource and Technology pool among many different game files.

In addition to Regions, the structure of the game itself has changed considerably over the last three years, and over time, layers upon layers of different ideas have been cobbled together in the code creating a mess of sorts. To resolve all of this, I decided to completely change the manner in which game data is saved to the system. The new method allows making saves to multiple game objects at a time, instead of just the currently active game object. For example, prior to this update, when you were playing a region, the overall Region file did not save until you chose "Exit to Region" from the game menu. With this new update, you no longer have to Exit to Region for all regional data to be saved.

This is all well and good, but I didn't anticipate, or rather appreciate, just how many parts of the code were tied into the previous game saving functions. This lack of preparation on my part led to a major issue in the pre-release code on Ape Web Apps where saving a regional city would cause all colonists to lose their jobs and become homeless. Which is not good. It was like doing a fire-drill with each save, except after the fire-drill, the colony would never recover. So that was fun, and working through that led me on a breadcrumb trail that resulted in little changes and fixes all throughout the engine.

As if that wasn't enough though, I also decided to make major changes to the way virtual colonists work. Virtual Colonists are the "colonists" in your colony when your population exceeds 2000. These colonists do not actually exist, but the game instead uses statistics to simulate their education, housing, entertainment, and industrial output. With today's changes, the accuracy of this simulation should be greatly increased, especially in regards to education, which was barely simulated before.

On top of those significant engine changes, I also decided to completely rewrite the way colonists find jobs! I know, too many big changes for one update. There were so many changes here that I could write a whole article about it, but to avoid putting you to sleep, I will give the general overview. With this latest update, the game now keeps track of a "now hiring" list, sort of like a classified advertisement page. Whenever a business has an open job, it adds a now hiring record containing the x:y location of the job, the IQ requirement, pay, etc. Whenever a colonist doesn't have a job, the game takes the now hiring list, and sorts it for that colonist based on location from their house, how it matches their IQ, how it pays, etc. They then start at the top of the list and apply for the jobs. If the job is within a certain range of their house (40 tiles I think) and they meet the requirements, they will take the job. If they don't find one, they will lower their standards a bit. If they still don't find one, they will enroll in school. If they don't find a school to enroll in, they will be mad and complain about lack of education.

This change actually works pretty good, but there is a computational penalty when sorting the job openings. When only a handful of colonists are looking for jobs, it's no big deal. But if you conduct a fire-drill and the entire colony looks for work at once, you might experience a lag in the game of several seconds or more. I will need to look into a fix for this at some point soon.

Ok, so that addresses the bulk of the engine changes I made. There are some other little things here and there that you might notice, as I actually changed so much that I can't remember it all. But since there were so many changes, I would expect to see bugs as a result. Please let me know in the forum what you find!

Let's move on to non-engine related changes. First off, on the main Region city selection screen, the game now shows the name of the city on the overall map.

I will probably add a toggle to turn this on/off, I just did not get to it this time. This is mainly for mobile/touch players, since they don't have a mouse and therefore do not see the mouse-hover popup box that Desktop players see on this screen, making it hard to tell which colony is which.

Next up, I have consolidated most of the Commonwealth management settings into the main Commonwealth section of the statistics screen, so you no longer have to dig through the Policy menu to find everything.

If you look closely at the above, you will probably also notice the next thing I added. That's right, you can now finally change your Commonwealth Tax Rate! This has been requested since Commonwealths first came out, and I apologize for not adding it sooner, but it's there now. I have also capped the Commonwealth Payroll Assistance at 500%, since some of the levels on the server were insane.

Moving on, I have added a new feature called Layout Templates. This is mainly for Regions, but you can now save a "Template" of your current map and export it to the file system to share with other players. When you activate a template on your map, you see a ghosted image of the template buildings overlayed on your colony (you can turn the image on/off) that you can use as a guide for building. This is mainly for players who have designed certain build layouts and want to share the layout with others. I imagine it would work best on an empty regional map with no resources. You can find the template options on the bottom of the General Statistics screen.

There is a new engine setting that allows you to turn Gamepad input on or off. It has always been turned on from the beginning, but there was a concern that if you were playing another game on your desktop while My Colony was open, My Colony would be processing the gamepad inputs from the other game. If you find yourself in this situation, you can now turn off gamepad input completely from the Engine Settings screen.

There have been some minor changes to Colonist processing. Entertainment facilities now increase energy and happiness at a faster rate. In addition, colonist happiness will also slightly increase when they are at home. I have also increased the starting colonist IQ range to make them a bit smarter by default (will not impact current colonists, only new arrivals). And finally, I have further increased the rate that colonists age, since I still think it's too slow.

And last but not least, there were a couple of changes to existing buildings. The Mass Driver trade capacity has lifted from 100 to 300, and the basic Greenhouse now has a slightly faster production rate and a higher storage capacity.

So anyway, for me this was one of those updates that was pretty large, but for the general players of the game, it should seem like a pretty small patch. Hopefully nothing major has been broken, but continue to let me know what bugs you find. I should note that on the Android and Windows clients, there is a new "Send Feedback" button on the My Colony sidebar that will allow you to send a message or bug report directly to my Inbox, and I will add this to the Desktop, Web, and iOS versions at some point too. A lot of times people leave bug reports in the app store comments, and those are easy for me to miss.

That's all for today;s update though, let me know what you find, stay tuned for more, and thanks for playing My Colony!

Since I made a Diamond Drill earlier, I thought Spice could use a 1x1 drill that would be smaller than the Spice Drilling Operation. I believe that this drill should produce less Spice than a Spice Drilling Operation, but not require any workers.

Since Water Worlds can't really exploit ADPs and UDDFs to the same degree as other worldtypes, hopefully the Transcendent Offshore Drill could level the playing field, producing vastly superior amounts of raw materials (including Crystalline) to the Quantum Offshore Drill. Think of this as the Ultra Deep Drilling Facility of the sea.

Transcendent Offshore Drill

"Drill unreal amounts of raw materials using recent advances in technology! Includes Clay and Crystalline."


Transcendent Sea Rover

"If the Extraterrestrial Sea Rover wasn't advanced enough, or you really hate the color purple, then this sea rover is the unit for you! Builds everything that the Sea Rover and the ET Sea Rover can build, + builds higher tech offshore buildings."

I have been playing My Colony on Fire TV and have some questions/issues:

1. I started an off-line game because I didn't have an account. I have since created an account and paid for premium. I can't find any way to change from an off-line to an on-line game with the Fire TV interface. I have read forum posts about how to do it, but those options don't appear to exist on Fire TV.

2. Some of menus that come up when you click on objects (grass, road, etc.) don't seem to be navigable on Fire TV. Once grass or a road is placed you can't get rid of it (destroy, sell, etc.). Is there something that I am missing there?

3. Because of the issues I decided to move my gave from the Fire TV to my computer. But, I can't figure out how to do that either. When you save off the mcz file you can't choose where to place the file. Getting anything off of the internal memory is difficult even if I knew where the file was, so having the option to save to the SD card would be great.

Thanks.

Further addtional ideas here (•ω•)
• Disasters will damage buildings and reduce the condition percentage. Fire does a continous damage while earthquake does a single-time heavy damage.
• When a building condition reached 0%, it directly become rubbles, which only trash (rubbles) will be left. Like a trash pit it will degenerate slowly, but you can also collet up the trash (by destroying the rubble) and put them inside incinerators. Rubbles cannot be rebuilt into buildings.
• Manual Repair by policies is limited to those buildings with condition 50% or above. Others has to be repaired by rebuilder.
• The building shuts down automatically after condition drops to 30% and below.
• Fire can spread to adjcent buildings. So when there is a fire outbreak put out fire quickly and stragetically.
• Don’t put volatile and flammable storages near lava! Otherwise it can quickly set on fire!

Why, after a fire drill, are colonists so unwilling to take existing jobs? They will fill nearby new construction immediately, and occasionally will fill reactivated buildings if they've been deactivated for a while (I wasn't paying attention to the time, but upwards of 10 minutes), but they seem completely disinterested in existing jobs, to the point where i lost all my food and water because nobody wanted to work.

I initially ran the drill because I was seeing persistent unemployment numbers and buildings with vacancies. I'm hoping when I play tomorrow that tinkering with salaries and minimum salaries will help.

After I let the game on for an hour I came back to find that I had no food and water and that 800 colonists had died (I know why this happened but it's not the important thing here).
Afterwards I saw that almost none of my 18000 colonists that were still alive were working so I performed a fire drill. I have been afk for about 2 hours and in the stats menu it says that most jobs are filled (though I don't think that this is true).
But the thing is that they don't want to work. I tried to fire a colonist from the capital building to stimulate the other to work (it worked in the past) but it instead fired all of the workers in that building (also happened in the past).
So idk what to do right now...

so anyway in my colony two the dves added a new adveaced veacle factory that use an excavor.

but there now can be the rpotacal for even new suefuel vecals from the factory that can be bulit so i got a few new vecale ideas

idea 1: the M.R.M.D. aka the moble raw mertals depo. bascly this veacal is bacly a much smaller moble raw mertals depo that can move when not in depoyd mode. so how it works is when you build it it looks kike knida like a very big clukky simitruck iwh a large gray and organe traler in moble mode. but when you want to get alot of those far away deposits but you dont want to buld alot of lnog roads or lnie of raw mertal depos with road like mazes just to alow thse difent knid of resorcse hervsting rovers to pathfind to them. then this viecal will bacly whn in depoy mode will bacly not only act as a suplly deopt but also a raw nmertals depo drop off ponit with a bit smaller storage just for droping thsoe resorecs off with any raw resorce depsost bascly to the nearst acatly colony resrostoke pile. but the thing here is when deplayd it can't move but allows any near by resorce reover to bascly drop off its resoring into the M.R.M.D.

very handy for long distasce resorce depost mineing wihout wasting so much resring from buidlng so many raod and otehr resorce dropp of strage budings in super lagre mazes and big pain of haveing to doing. alot of deimsion if you wan to expanid your clonys after that maze nightmare later.


idea 2: a bus for civlain pop trasfer from one sedlement to the other


idea 3: the combat unit version of bascly idea 2. the dev knows this one allredy! its a apc with a LMG gun. we all have already seen this before in colnoy wars due to the fact we got a very simear pvp combat knid of gameplay in this game to for multplayers for preumum too. so devs you know what im talking aobut. yes just add the apc from colony wars for you infty unit trasportand fro one colony to the other with a LMG.

idea 4: the colony wars sscout rover. its just a basic rover with a mitray camo peant job with a mehinse gun on it.
ment to scout out for any ai or player hostle units and buidlngs before you send in a porper froce

idea 5: a proscpertor drill veacle. its bacly a mni ore fracker drill buding but it can be deployed and will try to drill for and uncovder resorsce depotes out of the gonud. think like the excavoer but you don't have to make massvie holes inh the gound. when depolyed and then told to prespect it will try to find a rescoe deposted. how it work game ppla ywise is knid rng based. ther will be a cahce it would eather not mfind anything or one of the forlying deposts mgiht be fonud. some of the deposets (thsi will be subect to the devs destection) could be for exapmle be ore,gould,ureunium,alen artcafact(prettylow chasce),rethith(high cahnhe on actne ruinplanets and moons/astriolds but veyr low on other planets),cahrcaol(earth like desters, and ocneanic worlds have a much higher chansce while mars ice and otehr hostle plants are much lower),and aluniumium. but the real main meaty specal game micanic is maybe thids vecal will have a fonud underground oil deposit that would be discoverd! when this haapens instead of a resorce derpsot sawpin the megage will popup the preospector dill fonud oil! when thiss happens insead of after prscping undeploying. the prospsctoer dill veacal will stay permtny deployed and it then will become bascly for all a very practal reason becomes a real oil well. this will some what trun the veacle into a oil well buding that would be perment and will make much more oil per tick then a oil sisnthis lab but some planets like deserts and ocens and eath likes will have much higher chacnse haveing this happen. but almost every map tpye other then astrods and moons would bealbe to have this happen, howver in if it rolls a oils well even on a moon or astriodl it would say instaed the propesctor drill fonud a hellium3 udergonud depotist instead and will truing into a oil well but it outputs helium3 instad of oil for comonsence logic here. but both oil and hellum3 or even ether under gonud deposted in the oil well from could all heppen on a ancent ruin planet bescue it a ruin planet you could ifnd all three of them ther bascly.

idea 6: um maybe a bulldoser that can raise and lower the terran more easly so you can fixe the mess your exavator made but when you do that if you sue the xecavor in the same place it wount do any rngs resocse deposit spwans unless it digd much deapr in the same spot then it did lastr time but the chainc of finding some thing would be far lower or just impsobale.

If anybody was looking for a massive My Colony 2 update this month, I've got you covered! v0.34.0 is dropping now on the Web and the Ape Apps Launcher and is packed with goodies that you will not want to miss, so let's take a look at what is new!


The first change you might notice is that the title screen has been reworked, matching the layout from the title screen of Terra Nova 4X. This is a fairly minor change at the moment, but as MC2 had been using the generic Web App Core title screen, I was limited on what I could potentially add to it in the future, so now I will be able to make some changes and improvements going forward.

I also did quite a bit of work on Player Mode in this update, which had been completely borked until now. There is now a new HUD/UI for the mode, complete with health bar, radar, current location stats and more!


There remains a ton of work to be done on Player Mode. Right now there are still glitches and the controls are a bit wonky, but it is functional if you want to give it a test. My Colony 2 is eventually going to contain an entire sub-game based on Player Mode, but for now it's still fun to just walk around your colony and check things out.

There are new options on the Statistics screen for server operators in this release, and the first one is actually quite important.


You can now toggle your server's Private/Public status on the World statistics, which was a long requested feature. You can also toggle on/off the My Colony Online feature (which gives access to online trading through the GBT, among other things). However, and this is important, worlds created before MC2 v0.29.0 will all be in offline mode until activated on the World screen! This is because the MC Online flag in the save file was ignored until this update, and it defaulted to Offline before v0.29.0. Now that the flag is no longer ignored, worlds with the old default will be set to offline.

So the first time you load up your world in v0.34.0 (or higher), you must go into the Statistics screen and turn My Colony Online back on, if you want to use the GBT. You do not have to worry about losing resources or anything like switching between online/offline in the original My Colony. MC2 takes care of this by blocking all connections from modded games.

In addition to the above, server managers can now set the maximum number of online connections allowed in their game. You could previously set this using a chat text command, but now it's just a lot easier to do it from the UI.


Moving on, I have tried to make some interface changes to make My Colony 2 easier to play on mobile devices. The 3D nature of the game makes placing structures more difficult than it was on the original version of My Colony, but I think some changes in this update will help.


Firstly (as seen above), the ground grid lines are now turned on by default on touchscreen devices, allowing you to more easily see where you are placing structures. If you do not like this setting, it can be turned on/off in the Engine Settings menu under the Interface section, but on touch I think it makes a significant different in making the game more playable.

Next, I have tried to make it so that, no matter what orientation you have the camera rotated, placing a new structure will always originate from the top-left tile corner of the tiles to be occupied. On a touch screen there is no "hover" like with mouse input, so it's hard to tell where the building is going to be placed, and a lot of times with the camera rotated, you would have no idea where the building was going to show up once you tapped the screen, so now it should be fairly consistent no matter how you are rotated or zoomed. This was actually more difficult to implement then it might seem, since what tile constitutes the top-left corner is sort of subjective, especially depending on how far the camera is rotated in one way or another. At what angle is the cutoff where top-left becomes top-right, etc? Anyway, after hours of fiddling with the angle cutoffs, I think I have it to where it "feels" good, but you can play with it on mobile and let me know.

Moving right along, I have expanded the building stats that appear when you click on a structure's stats icon. You can now view the production/consumption ratings of Money, Civics and Research. There is still more expansion to be done on building stats, but this change alone makes a pretty big difference, IMO.


Now let's move on to new content, as there is a lot in this update. This release includes 22 new structures, two new techs to unlock, and one new unit. Among the new content in this release are 3D model contributions from @rahtdrgn @therealchromedino @GeneralWadaling and @spamdude so please be sure to show them appreciation for their great works!

Since there are so many new structures, I am just going to list them all out, and then comment on a few of them afterwards. A lot of the structures in this release are of the "Advanced" variety, needed upgrades to existing buildings.

• Advanced Robotics Factory
• Ether Reactor (art by rahtdrgn)
• Ancient Alien Gold Synthesis Lab (art by therealchromedino)
• Star Gate
• Advanced Microchip Factory (art by GeneralWadaling)
• Advanced Plastic Factory
• Underground Drop Room (art by spamdude)
• Spice Drilling Operation (art by therealchromedino)
• Advanced Spice Silo (art by therealchromedino)
• Quantum Spice Silo (art by therealchromedino)
• Quantum Oil Tank (art by therealchromedino)
• Advanced Regolith Synthesis Lab (art by spamdude)
• Quantum Offshore Drill
• Advanced Vocational Training Center
• Spice Den
• Galactic Trade Authority Office
• Ether Crystal Reactor
• Plaza Mosaic Tile
• Investment Bank
• Advanced Helium 3 Extractor
• Black and White Checkered Pavement
• Street Sign

First I want to discuss the new Interdimensional Transportation tech which unlocks the new Star Gate, because this is going to tie in big with a Player Mode feature in the future.


Basically, the Star Gates are going to allow characters in Player Mode to seamlessly travel between worlds/servers. Ultimately, the area around your Star Gate will be the first thing a player sees when they enter your world from that perspective, so you may want to include things like informational signs about your world, and you may want to leave some space to build specific Player Mode related structures that will be available in the future. You may also wish to have at least one security turret nearby, as you never know what is going to be coming through the Star Gate. The Star Gates will also allow fast travel of players/colonists/units between distant settlements both on and off world.

The Star Gates are going to be a critical component of the Player Mode. I wanted to get them in the game sooner rather than later, because the My Colony Online database is keeping track of every star gate in the "universe," and I need to get that database built up before I can enable the fast travel and other features.

Moving along, an old favorite from the original My Colony has returned, as the Bank can now be upgraded to the Investment Bank!


You can start bringing in some pretty good money for your settlement with the Investment Bank, but it's not actually the best money maker in this release. That honor goes to the new Spice Den!


The Spice Den is a brick structure repurposed from an old food production model that GeneralWadaling had made a couple of years ago, and as long as you are able to keep it running with Spice, you will make some nice profits, as the rich and famous in your settlement will pay top dollar to get their Spice fix in a safe and discrete way. Obviously if you are not on the Spice World you will need to procure your Spice from the GBT, so you might want to stock up whenever it becomes available, as I suspect this is not the only Spice related structure we will be seeing added to non-Spice worlds.

Note that the Spice Den is the first structure in the game that actually has a negative Security rating, so you may need to offset that with an extra security headquarters.

Now, you have heard of the noble Extraterrestrial Builder, but what about his equally noble cousin, the Extraterrestrial Sea Rover?


The old offshore drill got a Quantum Offshore Drill upgrade in this release, so it needed a new boat to build it. Not only is this new version of the offshore drill faster, but it also brings up Alien Artifacts! This was badly needed I think, since artifacts are fairly rare on the desert world, and you just can't dig much at all on the water world, so these new Quantum Offshore Drills will come in handy.

Speaking of badly needed, you can now easily generate Helium 3 on any world with the new Advanced Helium 3 Extractor. You will need Regolith to operate it, but that shouldn't be a problem once you construct the new Advanced Regolith Synthesis Lab.

So what happens when you want to conduct big trades on the GBT but you don't want to build hundreds of Trading Depots? That's where the new Galactic Trade Authority Office comes into play!


This is another decent money making structure, but it also greatly increases your gift/trade capacity (I forgot the number, but it's big).

A lot of the buildings that needed upgrades got them in this release. We now have the Advanced Robotics Factory, the Advanced Microchip Factory, the Advanced Plastic Factory, Advanced Vocational Training Center, and the Underground Drop Room (upgrade to the Storage Yard), just to name a few.


In addition, the Spice World now has the new Spice Drilling Operation, which is basically an Ore Fracking Operation for Spice. There are also the new Advanced and Quantum Spice Silos for superior Spice storage.

There is also the Quantum Oil Tank upgrade, for storing larger amounts of Oil.

Finally, all of these new structures will require a great deal of power. That is where the brand new Ether Crystal Reactor comes into play!


You will need a continuous source of both Ether and Crystalline to run this thing, so you may need to watch the GBT for deals. If you can afford it though, the Ether Crystal Reactor will provide you with a 55,000 power rating, far eclipsing the current Integrated Nuclear Reactor.

At the end of the day, there was a ton of work put into this update, so I hope you all enjoy it! There is a lot more excitement for My Colony 2 on the horizon. My goal is to have, by the end of this year, full gamepad/tv support, full VR support, music, sounds, a Steam release, and to have enough content and features to overtake the playability of the original My Colony. So stay tuned for more large updates like this one, because this size of release is going to be the norm, not the exception!

Thank you again for playing My Colony 2 and remember, build up your parameter defenses, because @poumm is out there, lol!


Just kidding, poumm. You're ok!

#mycolony2

Today I am releasing v0.37.0 of My Colony 2, and from a technical perspective, this is the largest release since the game first came out in late 2020. My Colony 2 has now been moved off of the antiquated Web App Core framework that I first developed back in 2012, and is now being hosted at it's own domain at https://mycolony2.com/. There are some important implications associated with this change, so let's get into it!


The most obvious change is that the game is now hosted at a new URL. Since the majority of My Colony 2 players access the game through the web client, everyone is going to need to update their bookmarks to the new location. If you have the game installed to your device as a Progressive Web App, you need to know that the PWA will not automatically change to the new URL, so you need to first uninstall the old PWA and then install the new one. I realize that it is a bit of a pain, but the change will be worth it in the long run.

The biggest impact this will have is related to save data. Users who sync their save file to the Cloud or who have exported their save data to the filesystem (which I highly recommend) will not be impacted at all, but if your save game is stored in the internal app cache (the riskiest solution with a browser-based game), data will not carry over to the new domain. I hope that most players took heed of this change when I announced it about a month ago! If it ends up being an issue, I might be able to cook up some sort of migration solution, but I think most players will be fine. I think (hope) that the mobile versions of the game are not impacted by this.

Beyond what was stated above, the migration off of the Web App Core framework resulted in considerable changes to the game engine "under the hood." The Web App Core functions touched almost everything, so in many ways this update constitutes a serious rewrite of major portions of the game. Because of this, I would sort of expect there to be some issues here and there. Surprisingly, I have not run into many of them during testing, so maybe things went more smoothly then I had planned, but please be on the lookout for things I may have missed, and please post about what issues you find here in the forums.

Since so much of the code was being changed in this release, I did take the time to work on a few issues that had been plaguing the engine for a while now. First of all, the issue with faded/muted colors I think is pretty well fixed. There may be a few models left that still have color balancing issues, and if you notice any of them please post a list in the forum here so I can get them re-color balanced for the next update.

There had been an issue where Spice deposits were not spreading properly on the Spice World, and this has now been corrected.

Additionally, there was an issue where players who were connected to a remote dedicated server were unable to access the Galactic Board of Trade or other MC2 Online features. This should now be fixed as well.

Game loading and startup should be a lot faster now than it used to be, especially after the first load. I decided to stop compressing the main game data bundle, and even though this added 4mb to the initial game data download, I figured it was not a big deal, since after the first load, the browser stores the bundle data anyway. This means that the data no longer needs to be decompressed when the game is starting up, which on some devices (especially mobile) this could take quite a long time. The start up time improvement can actually be pretty significant, especially if the app is installed to the system as a PWA. I have noticed start up times on the new release of just a few seconds.

Big improvements have been made to flying units. They were sort of borked before - drones randomly disappearing or flying up into the stratosphere, landers not moving, etc. They should just work now.

Don't you hate it when you join a world, then you scroll around the map trying to find a good landing spot, only to never be able to find your lander again? Fear not, if you have not yet deployed your lander, it will not be automatically placed in the Bookmarks tab, so you can always go and find where your lander is sitting.


A major rebalancing has been done in this release, thanks in large part to a document put together by @SPARKY0303 (which you can find here). There were a ton of changes implemented from this, so here is just a rough readout of everything I did:

• Increased firing range and reduced money cost of the Brick Wall Turret
• Increased the gift capacity of the Galactic Board of Trade to 25k
• Fixed the borked stats on the Museum
• Increased the ore cost and output of the Medium Software Studio
• Increased the uranium cost and the artifact storage of the Giorgio Institute
• Increase the build cost and money/civics output of the Investment Bank
• Increased the output and worker requirement of the Bank
• Increased the cost and research output for the Center for Artificial Learning
• Increased the build and input cost of the Robotics Factory while also increasing the robot output
• Increased the cost and doubled the production rate of the Plastic Factory
• Increased the cost and production output of the Advanced Microchip Factory
• Increased the cost and production rate of the Advanced Plastic Factory
• Increased the build cost and production output of the Synthetic Wood Lab
• Increased the worker requirement of the Synthetic Oil Lab while doubling production input and tripling output
• Increased the rum cost and consumption for the Galactic Stock Exchange while also increasing the money output
• Increased the food cost and money output of the Canteen
• Increased the cost and attack power of the Pillbox while decreasing the attack range
• Added worker requirement and increased salt water consumption for Fish R Us
• Increased the worker requirement and food output of the Hydroponic Farm
• Increased cost and production output of the Vertical Warehouse Farm
• Increased cost and software cosumption of the Research Facility while increasing research output
• Decreased Rum consumption and increased Money output for The Rum
• Increased money output for the Trading Depot
• Decreased build cost and aluminum output of the Advanced Drilling Platform
• Increased the cost and artifact output of the Ultra Deep Drilling Facility while decreasing the aluminum production
• Increased the cost, money output and rum consumption of the Galactic Trade Authority Office while decreasing the worker requirement
• The Spice Den can no longer be built on Spice Worlds
• Increased the worker requirement and production rates of the Aluminum Generator

There may be more rebalancing work to do in the future, so let me know what your thoughts are on the changes.

Some other things have been changed as well. The Blue Dorms have been renamed to the Painted Dorms, which you can now specify your own color for. The Ancient Alien Ore Refinery has been re-skinned with a new model provided by @SPARKY0303 .

Also fulfilling a big request from MC1 players, there are now Building Counts available on the construction sidebar.


I have also added a new option to the Performance Tweaks section of the Engine Settings menu, allowing users to customize the number of chunks that the game renders around the camera.


We also have two new models in this update from @spamdude , including the new Fish Bin Complex (for storing lots of fish), and the giant new Large Brickworks, for bumping out lots of bricks!


Next up, as hinted to in the previous update's release notes, Diamonds have been added to this update, along with the Diamond Miner and the Diamond Solar Tower.


Diamonds are a Lunar World exclusive, and can only be discovered through digging. Once you uncover a diamond deposit, the Diamond Mining tech is automatically unlocked, allowing you to construct the Diamond Miner. Diamond utility will be expanded in the coming updates. At some point once every world has it's own unique resource, there will be some late game super structure that requires a ton of the unique resources from all of the different worlds.

Ok so last but not least, probably the biggest and most common request I get for the game via the in-game feedback is to bring back the Ore Mine from MC1. I never considered the Ore Mine to be necessary, since the world sizes are infinite and you can always just go and find more Ore, and later on you can just generate Ore on all worlds. That said, people have always wanted it, so today I am introducing MC2's version of the Ore Mine, which is the new Ore Drill.


The Ore Drill works sort of like the Spice Vane that occurs naturally on the Spice World. You build it, and then every once and a while it will plop out a small Ore Deposit. Once you build your settlement up to the point where you can make your own ore, you can simply bulldoze the drill. I think this is a reasonable solution for early game Ore, and I might make a Gold version of it in the next update as well. The Ore Drill is only available on maps that have surface ore.

So that is v0.37.0 in a nutshell. The update is available right now on the Web at it's new location (https://mycolony2.com/) and will probably hit the various mobile platforms throughout the weekend or early next week. Please let me know your thoughts on the changes (good or bad), spread the word that the URL for MC2 has changed, and stay tuned for more MC2 goodness to come in the months ahead!

#mycolony2

I had to do a fire drill after building several new jobs, then I deactivated all the housing (including sheep farms), did another fire drill, then soon afterwards did another, and they finally started getting jobs close to their homes. When homelessness reached about 1-2%, they all started abandoning their homes, jumping homelessness up to 84%.

@Sniperfido: This happens when a single colonist gets repeatedly assigned the same job incorrectly, and when this colonist takes a break, the whole building gets shut down. It usually takes 6-8 hours for my ~50k population colony to fix all these issues after an expansion project and a fire drill.

@Gallopavo: After doing a fire drill, sit tight for a few hours and everything will be back to normal. There is a bug with oscillating homelessness, and Bast (the only developer of this amazing game) knows about it and is trying to isolate + fix it. Be patient! Most of this stuff wasn't even here a few months ago.

The same thing happened to me with colonists having a high unemployment rate after a fire drill, even though I had roughly 30k colonists and 40k jobs. Looking a little deeper, I discovered the average savings was a little over 13 million per colonists. I adjusted my labor costs, taxed them til they had under 100 avg savings, then a stimulous package. Shortly after, my unemployment dropped like a rock. Seems they go to work faster if they have no money.

I always save exit and wait few second then restart colony after fire drill, it seems all back normally after restart game.

One method that also seems to work is a Fire Drill if you have a government building of at least level two (unless Zolarg). Afterwards, go back to the title screen and then reopen the colony. That should help jump start things.

Suggestion though, especially if you have lost a lot of colonists: Deactivate ALL buildings but food/water production, house and power buildings before doing the Fire Drill so that it forces people into those jobs first.

misteddawn said:One method that also seems to work is a Fire Drill (...) Deactivate ALL buildings but food/water production, house and power buildings before doing the Fire Drill so that it forces people into those jobs first.

Thanks for the tip! Things seem to have smoothed out in one colony; the other I've kinda lost interest in lol...

Fire drill is emergency use as that is a pain even if or when it works correctly .
Fire drill also Unnecessary as Just reload the game from main screen works .
But once every 3 or 4th time ill do a hard reload just to clear any thing that may be a problem .

My disabled buildings keep their employees and I have been doing the fire drill to correct that. After the fire drill ill have hundreds of colonists who want get jobs. Im on a android phone and have completely closed the game and opened it back up and still have that problem until I add housing. Is there another way around that?

Did you build the housing closer after the fatigue went up? If so, did you conduct a fire drill?

Just because housing is closer doesn't mean they'll move on their own. If you did the fire drill and fatigue is still up then I'm not sure.

Have you tried fire drill ? Sometimes I got the same (high homelessness for no reason) and I just fire drill and it leaves for a while
And for the work I have noticed that higher than "light" will cause the fatigue to increase so sometimes, I put it on light to decrease it a bit
It may also be because the sum of all the concerns has to be 100% so if they have everything they need what does it do / mean ? I don't really know about that

Android 7.0
Galaxy Tab S2
My Colony v0.53.3

If I make a new building requiring workers, or activate one I had off for some

reason, then no one will take that job unless I first perform a fire drill.

The building needs to be on when the fire drill is initiated, or no one will take

the job so you can't perform it, then activate the building.

Today My Colony v0.54.0 (v0.54.1 on Android) is being pushed out to all platforms and should arrive on your device shortly. This was originally intended to be a big Reptilian update but there were several engine changes that took precedent this time. Details below!

My Colony v0.54.x Changelog

New Stuff

• New structures: National Flag, Torture Booth, Drone Pad, Gold Grower, Aluminum Grower
• New Unit: Uranium Extractor
• New ad-free Structure: Pavement Lit

Changes

• Memory and File Size Reductions
• Firedrill/Employment Changes
• Opening existing online games now requires an Ape Apps Account
• Added engine support for variable color units and structures

Notes
The new Reptilian content is generally geared towards making the Lava World map playable. I had a lot more planned for this update, but I wanted to get it released in a timely manner, so it will have to wait until next time. Barring any major engine changes or glitches, v0.55.0 will have a lot more Reptilian stuff.

On to the engine changes. Since the last few updates, the #1 reason for crashes and getting stuck on the loading screen on mobile (especially on Android) was the game running out of memory. The reason for this is that when I designed the game originally and there were only 8 different structures to build, it made sense to load all of the assets at the beginning when you first entered the game. Today though, there are over 320 different structures and almost 50 vehicles, and many structures can now be flipped which adds extra graphics assets which need to be loaded. Because of this, you have probably noticed that the game was taking longer and longer to start up at the beginning, and sometimes it never started up at all. This was due to the game using up all of it's allotted memory from the operating system. The issue was particularly bad on Android, where the memory cap is far less generous than on Desktop computers, even on newer devices that ship with 4 gigs of RAM.

To get around this, My Colony will now only load graphics assets, on demand and as-needed. There are likely still some bugs to be worked out related to this, so let me know what you find. You might notice buildings or ground tiles not appearing right away. Generally they will show up in a second or two. Zooming in and out can also make them appear quicker some times. It might be a small annoyance, but I think the tradeoff will be worth it. Particularly on smaller colonies, the memory reductions can be quite significant.

Another new reduction in this release has to do with save file sizes. I have started compressing some of the building related save data more efficiently, which should reduce the file sizes on some saves. Your mileage will vary depending on the layout of your colony, but on my main colony, my file size was reduced by a little over 10% (compressed). I didn't do a before/after on a non-compressed colony, but it is probably similar.

Moving along, there have been significant changes to the Firedrill system, as well as the way in which 'simulated' colonists find and fill jobs. Generally, the amount of time it takes for your colony to settle back down after a fire drill has been sped up significantly. Also, simulated colonists now find and fill jobs significantly quicker than before. I realized that I forgot to apply the same improvements to the speed in which they find housing, but that will probably be in the next update.

These changes were in part to address a lot of the complaints people have about unemployment and jobs being filled. The old method had simulated colonists fill jobs based on the general unemployment rate of the colony at large, so if you had massive unemployment, they would find jobs slower, and if you had low unemployment, they would find jobs faster. In my mind, this offered a more realistic simulation, as it doesn't make sense (in 'real life') to be able to just call a fire drill and suddenly an economy is back to normal. Judging by the forums though, I think most people perceived this part of the simulation as a bug, so it has been removed. Simulated colonists will now fill jobs at their earliest convenience.

What has not changed though is the colonists' daily cycle. In general, a healthy colonist will have his day divided into 3 parts: work, sleep, time off. So if your colonists are 100% employed, which is unrealistic but somewhat common in this game, then you should at most expect 33% to be on-duty at any given time. I know that many people perceive this aspect of the game as a bug also, but to me, changing this would make the game sooooo easy, even easier than it already is.

Next up, the engine now supports adding a bit of color to certain in-game structures. This is mainly necessary for the upcoming Colony Wars game, and an example can be seen in the screenshot below:

The flags on the building now take up the color that was set in the Overview tab on the statistics screen. I might expand this more to other structures, but it was primarily put in for the benefit of Colony Wars. I also noticed that it is not working right on iOS yet, so I still need to figure that part out.

Finally, there has been a suggestion in the index for lighted roads. I made some engine changes and added one in there as a test, but I want to see how it impacts performance before expanding it further. To be determined.

So anyway, that is it for today's release. Much more on the way, so stay tuned!

Where is the fire drill button? Man...