Ape Apps

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 putting the finishing touches on My Colony 2 v0.28.0 which should be hitting all platforms over the coming days. This update includes something new that @Architecture1134 has been pushing hard for weeks now, so let's take a look at what's included!


A couple of years ago now, Spice was added as a resource to My Starship, another title in the My Colony Universe, and now it makes it's way to My Colony 2 on the brand new Spice World map!

Spice World plays a little different from the other maps, as there are no surface resources whatsoever except for Spice. Spice is generated by Spice Veins which are scattered about the world and will continually produce more Spice deposits, so it is probably a good idea to found your first settlement near a Spice Vein.


From there, starting a settlement on a Spice World will be a long and slow process. You must fashion your initial structures out of Spare Parts which are slowly generated by your lander, and until you are able to build the Construction Yard, you will be spending some time waiting for Parts generation. The first structures you are able to build will be the new Spare Parts Bin (needed because the Lander only holds 4 Spare Parts) and the Basic Drill, a small simple drilling platform that will very slowly provide you with Ore.

While you are waiting for resources to generate, you can harvest some nearby spice with the new Spicebot. The Lander can hold 50, but you will eventually want to build a Spice Silo so you can store more Spice. Both Power and Water on Spice World are generated from the Dune inspired Wind Trap (since we are already on the Spice theme anyway), and you will need a lot of them as your settlement grows, until you are able to research and afford Nuclear Power.

Once you progress far enough in the game you will be able to harvest resources the old fashioned way using the Excavator, but until then, the new Supplies Field will provide you with a slow steady stream of Money, Ore, Gold, Aluminum and Uranium, in exchange for valuable Spice.


In the next update or two, I plan to implement a global unified server for My Colony 2, along with a new Galactic Board of Trade. At that point, you will be able to trade Spices off to other planets for profit. Until that time, Spice World is the only way to play with Spice. I will not be adding any sort of Spice Factory or other automatic Spice generation to the game, on this world or any other, so harvesting and GBT trade will be the only way to acquire Spice in the game.

Of course, Spice isn't the only new thing in this release. User @itsLiseczeq (aka cakedon) has created a new Regolith Extraction Plant which is now available on all Regolith using worlds, which was sorely needed after the changes introduced to resource consumption in the last MC2 update.


And finally for new content, if you were tired of building hundreds of greenhouse parks in order to slowly generate wood on non-atmosphere worlds, you are in luck, because the new Synthetic Wood Lab will generate wood a heck of a lot faster, as long as you can keep the factory fed with Oil and a bit of Charcoal.


Beyond the new content, and as always, a handful of bug fixes and performance improvements are along for the ride in this release as well.

As I hinted to before, next on the agenda is going to be to create a new global My Colony 2 server, similar to what MC1 has (but expanded), and implement a new Galactic Board of Trade for the game. Of course the system is made a bit more complicated by the fact that the game allows for extensive modding, but it's nothing that cannot be overcome. And of course, content updates and fixes will always be included as well!

So that is it for this update to MC2. Let me know what you think! If you find issues with the new Spice content, let me know, since I'm sure it will need expanded/changed/rebalanced as well (as new content usually does). Until then, enjoy the game, and stay tuned for more!

#mycolony2

Hello! In case you are not aware, My Colony's sequel has Spice World. I was thinking: Why not have Spice World here as well?


New Techs:

Spice World Base


New Unit:
Spicebot

New Structures:
Tire Drill
Wind Trap
Small Spice Silo
Advanced Spice Silo
Quantum Spice Silo
Spice Drilling Operation
Quantum Spice Drilling Operation
Spice Den
Spice Spa
Spice Store
Spice Clinic?
Supplies Field

Can be settled by UE and LIS.

@bastecklein if you like this idea, I would be more than happy to inkscape this.

GeneralWadaling said:

Architecture1134 said:I will expand more what spamdude is saying. Specifically, Spice was an (mostly) successful suggestion that the developer (bastecklein) added to the game. I created that suggestion, and Bast stated Spice originated from My Starship. As of today in the GBT (referenced from the GNN), Spice is an very expensive, exotic resource found only and exported from the Spice World. And those are your details.

Thanks for the info, lol 👍

Though instead of how spice got into the game, I'm more interested in the properties of spice in My Colony Universe - the thing about how we define what it is and its purpose.

For now I'm assuming the spice in MC2 is either a reference to Dune's Spice Melange, or the narcotics mentioned in Star Wars. Though I believe we should make spice different from those spice from the two mentioned sci-fi pieces, to make our "spice" more unique.

I think that spice may not be inspired and bast may have just created it up himself.

Architecture1134 said:I will expand more what spamdude is saying. Specifically, Spice was an (mostly) successful suggestion that the developer (bastecklein) added to the game. I created that suggestion, and Bast stated Spice originated from My Starship. As of today in the GBT (referenced from the GNN), Spice is an very expensive, exotic resource found only and exported from the Spice World. And those are your details.

Thanks for the info, lol 👍

Though instead of how spice got into the game, I'm more interested in the properties of spice in My Colony Universe - the thing about how we define what it is and its purpose.

For now I'm assuming the spice in MC2 is either a reference to Dune's Spice Melange, or the narcotics mentioned in Star Wars. Though I believe we should make spice different from those spice from the two mentioned sci-fi pieces, to make our "spice" more unique.

This Spice Den combines Spice with the elusive Duskshroom, generating 3x the profit of a regular Spice Den! It even out-produces the Investment Bank in money output, but you do need to get your hands on both Spice and Duskshrooms to use it.

On spice worlds, spice veins don't seem to work properly anymore. Rather than growing an increasingly large ring of spice around itself, every spice vein I've seen so far will only create spice in a maximum of three adjacent tiles, with spice simply failing to appear in any other spot. After poking around some unloaded segments, I realized that spice still spawns at normal rates, but because much of the time the three available spaces are already filled, the newly-spawned spice and existing spice deposits will cancel each other out. In the game editor, none of the data values seem to be off, so I'm guessing the issue has to do with how the game internally calculates spread.

This is the first version of my document for what I would like to see three months from now. I know that more can possibly be done, but I thought that this could be a good start to show.

Let me know if any of you have other ideas that you would like to see in the next three months.

Also, when new stuff comes up, I will edit or make a new post based on the changes necessary.

Document Text in case it doesn't download:


My Colony 2: Three Months From Now


Alien Decorations:

I believe we could have a pyramid monument dedicated to the Ancient Aliens

I would like to see some Alien Light Posts for my settlements

Personally, I would like to see Alien roads in this installment of My Colony, I was thinking an Alien Aluminum and Alien Brick variants can work for this

Alien Brick can also be used for a Wall as well, and the Artifacts could add a strength buff as well

The Alien Obelisk would be another Alien Decoration that could add some character


Player Mode:

A Regional Bussing Authority would make moving around in Player Mode a lot better

A Player House would be a good spawn location to base future mechanics of respawning on, but it can work for a home point to teleport to for the near future

A Player Bank Account will lay down the foundation for the uses of Money in Player Mode


Spice Themed Buildings:

A Spice Bar should be a way to convert Spice and Rum into Money to allow Spice Worlds to have a form of Entertainment and Money generation to match the theme

A Spice Clinic would be a good theme to keep in canon about what Spice is

Spice Dessert Shop would use Spice and Sugar to generate Money and provides a bit of Entertainment as well.

An Integrated Spice Drilling Operation could also be a new addition in order to keep up with increased demand for Spice


Resources:

Pottery would be a good start to future industries in My Colony 2, especially whenever it could get expanded into potential Commonware uses, but a single Pottery Works can be good for now

A better passive Crystalline maker should be on Ice Worlds because there isn't enough of a Just Be First advantage for Ice Worlds in my opinion

Spam's Fabrication Lodge to make Alien Relics would be something good for the future uses of Relics that will benefit our settlements as well

OilChan said:what does the spice den do?
however, I do still agree that the spice worlds need the spice den to remain competitive in these trying times.

It was our old moneymaker, something that gave us use for spice when people just offsource it. Practically our only way to make money off of it.

With that change back in 0.37, you shoulda seen this coming. This time, I found that I am not the only angry spice world. Pretty much every spice world but @SPARKY0303 hates that change. If ya need proof, I will set up a poll. I can name a few users that want them back. Some are @therealchromedino , @OilChan, @solisruben296 , @Marcarious , and @RekEm1999 . I am pretty sure that there are other Spice Worlds that are angry and are just more quiet about it. I will set up a poll, let the people decide. @bastecklein please hear our cries.


EDIT: Doesn't have to be the old spice den, could be a nerfed variant of it so that we have a use for this spice.

Hello! Did you know that Spice Dens are made out of bricks? Did you also know that the current Spice Den model has no bricks? Want to change that? Well look no further! Here is an updated Spice Den!

Alright, so now there's the spice world which contains spice deposits, but we have to figure out the costs and uses of the spice factory I proposed. It's an building used for making spices outside of spice worlds. Here are the costs I proposed:

• Ore: +2,000
• Steel: +1,500
• Gold: +750
• Microchip: +20
• Food: +1,000

Has 50 workers. Smelts 1 food into 1 spice in 3000 ticks (60 tick w/ all workers), and consumes 1 sugar per 950 ticks.

Architecture1134 said:
A spice factory with a lot of workers. Creates spice on worlds that doesn't have natural spice.

Does anyone object? Speak now or hold your suggestions.

what does the spice den do?
however, I do still agree that the spice worlds need the spice den to remain competitive in these trying times.

spamdude said:I don't think you should necessarily bring back the spice den with its current stats. When you can make over a billion money a day with a mere 400 of a relatively cheap building, something's gone wrong.

it was our only real selling point. If those stats are bad, then nerf the spice den, not take it away from spice worlds lol

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 like this idea. Maybe edicts that allow for the construction of new buildings, but bars other things. Like Spice being legal would allow for stuff such as Spice Stores, Spice Spas, and potentially Spice Clinics to be built off of Spice Worlds, but at the cost of Spice Den output.

Hello, ladies and gentlemen! Today, I am presenting to the community the most efficient way to play on the Spice World, which I came up almost a year ago. I will now be presenting this strategy. This will give you important tips and tricks on how to play the spice world! I hope you like the strategy and you find it useful for later plays!
==The Strategy==

1. Generate 4 Spare Parts from your lander. You have nothing else to construct (for now) but the Spare Parts Bin. Get that built and you may build other buildings! Do not sell your lander, as it is the only way to store your ore provided by Basic Drills.
2. Build a Spicebot or 2. This will allow you to harvest spice and make use of it.
3. Build a Wind Trap. Basic Drills require power (of course), so build one after you have already build the Wind Trap. Save your ore for later and do not overspend it, especially on Small Light Posts.
4. Food is important for an colony to survive, you know that! Once you have got at least 1 Wind Trap and the needed resources, you will need to construct a Greenhouse in order to maintain colonial survival.
5. Your Spicebots, if not careful, will overharvest Spice, Of course, you want to maintain an larger storage space. Once you have enough resources, you may commence construction on the Spice Silo. That way, you can harvest more spice.
6. If you have gotten enough ore to construct the Construction Yard, it is imperative that you construct it, it will speed up your spare parts production significantly. If you do not have enough power, construct a Wind Trap.
7. Build an Supplies Field. This will get you enough resources to start making your colony huge! It will provide you a variety of resources (especially ore)! It is thus very beneficial for later use.
8. Since there are no ore deposits on this type of world, ore can only be produced artificially. Once you obtain an Builder Bot, construct an Ore Refinery, but save some of your ore. Fortunately, the Ore Refinery does not consume too much ore from 2+ drills.
   
   That is it for now! If you have any suggestions, questions or feedback, leave a comment, please answer the poll above, and have fun playing MC2!

Spice drilling is one of those things that excites us Spice World owners, but it is clear that we need to update our technology to enable us to locate and extract more Spice, so I made an Integrated Spice Drilling Operation. Since I borrowed this model from @therealchromedino , I want him to be able to get some credit as well. I hope this will help your Terra Divitiae development out, and I hope this can help other Spice drillers make use of some extra Microchips and Software as well.

yeah, that's my intention
though not actually nerfing the spice den itself, but introducing a nerfed variant for spice worlds
that way other worlds will still be incentivized to buy spice

spamdude said:yeah, that's my intention
though not actually nerfing the spice den itself, but introducing a nerfed variant for spice worlds
that way other worlds will still be incentivized to buy spice

I am willing to settle on that.

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.

Greetings!

Back to one or two years ago, the "spice" first appeared in My Starship as one of the commodities you can trade, with no detailed info about this resource.
And more recently, we have "spice world" map and "spice" resource as additions in My Colony 2.

As "spice" is taking more appearance in My Colony associated games, here I would like to know the terminologies or at least the concept of what these "spices" are.

I will expand more what spamdude is saying. Specifically, Spice was an (mostly) successful suggestion that the developer (bastecklein) added to the game. I created that suggestion, and Bast stated Spice originated from My Starship. As of today in the GBT (referenced from the GNN), Spice is an very expensive, exotic resource found only and exported from the Spice World. And those are your details.

I don't think you should necessarily bring back the spice den with its current stats. When you can make over a billion money a day with a mere 400 of a relatively cheap building, something's gone wrong.

My Colony 2 is in the middle of a major overhaul to both it's logic and rendering engines. This update brings many changes that have been suggested by the community, so let's take a look at what is here and what is soon to come.


From a technical standpoint, My Colony 2 v0.40.0 (the previous release) and v0.41.0 (this release) are not even the same game. What started as a suggestion from @spamdude to process foreground settlement logic the same way background settlements are processed basically transformed into a complete rewrite of the game's server code. There is now almost no similarity in the way the game is processed compared to previous releases.

Everything in My Colony 2 is now simulated based on structure statistics, the only exception being unit/resource harvesting. This was actually going to be the original design for My Colony 2, but when I was soliciting community feedback at the beginning, there was a strong preference to have 100% accurate production stats with visible structure output bars, so the idea was scrapped (I was also going to simulate resource harvesting but that was also not a popular idea). With settlements and worlds now getting larger and larger though, I think it became apparent to many that the simulated model was best, and the game engine has now been rewritten accordingly.

This update is all about game performance, and the logic thread of the game should now be able to handle games that are several orders of magnitude larger than the largest colonies currently in existence. It is possible that some things might currently be broken or might not be working the way they were. Honestly I changed so many things this update that it would be quite easy for something to have slipped through the cracks, so please let me know in this thread or elsewhere in the forum what I may have missed. In general though, expect game performance to be much improved in this update.

Since I was already working on performance, I have been wanting to make a change to the Scroll3D engine for some time related to 3d model instancing. Basically, instead of creating a new 3d model for each structure in the game, you create one "instance" of the model which is reused/redrawn by the GPU multiple times. If you would like to see an example on how this can impact performance, please see the following WebGL example that the new code was inspired by: https://threejs.org/examples/?q=instan#webgl_instancing_performance

The reason I could not easily do this, is because 3d models using regular materials could not have both the regular face colors and the glowing "emissive" face colors without using two separate 3d models. Ultimately what I had to do was write my own custom 3d model shader material for Voxel Paint files, which now allows for regular, emissive, and metallic faces in one single model.

Lightmaps and Metallic maps are now baked right into the 3d model geometries when they are compiled in Voxel Paint. If models do not have this infomation baked in, they will need to be recompiled by the engine at run time. I already went through and recompiled most of the models in the game (especially the larger ones) so I don't think it will be much of a problem for MC2, and Voxel Paint will now automatically do this for all .vpp files going forward. This data actually makes precompiled .vpp files slightly larger, but it's not by much and I think it is worth it.

Using the new model light and metallic maps does incur a slight performance cost, as there is more shader processing that needs to be done on the models. For this reason, I have introduced two new engine settings for turning on/off voxel emissive and metallic properties. If you are on a mobile or do not have much of a GPU on your system, you can try turning them both off and seeing if it helps.


This update also removes the Depth of Field effect (Bokeh effect) from the game, the effect that would blur out the background. I might bring this back in the future, but it just wasn't focusing correctly and I did not have time to properly debug it.

So those are the main engine changes in this update. It might not seem like a ton, but it's basically all I have been working on for the past several weeks. TBH there is probably more that needs done too (please let me know), but I can't keep grinding on this update for MC2 while all of my other projects slip behind schedule, so further changes will need to wait.

There are some minor content related changes as well. Firstly, the Tree Farm and the Palm Sapling are now buildable on the Forest World, which was an accidental oversight on my part. In addition, the Spice Den can now be built on the Spice World again.

3D model art has been updated for the following structures: Barracks, Construction Yard, City Hall, Golden Shelter and Spice Drilling Operation.

Finally, two new structures from @spamdude have been added to the game, the Crystalline Trap and the Crystallizer Array, both Ice World exclusives.

I know there are now quite a few Voxel Art submissions waiting to be added to the game in the backlog. I hope to be able to get to all of these in the next update, and if I don't have to end up rewriting the whole game again then my plan is to work on those for 0.42.0. There are also changes that need to be made to the GBT to address spamming and other issues, and those are also on the list.

Hopefully the next update will not be so technically intensive and I can go back to adding fun stuff, but that will depend on how many bugs these changes introduced, so please let me know what issues you find in this release, thanks for playing mc2 and stay tuned for more!

#mycolony2

November is here and with it comes My Colony 2 v0.43.0, the Community Content Dump Update^TM! What does that entail? Let's find out!


Before looking at the new content, there are a couple of minor engine and other miscellaneous changes here as well. I have fixed a bug where the sell object button was not working. I also fixed a bug where the infantry units were super tiny.

Four existing structures received new artwork in this update. The Spice Den ( @therealchromedino ), the Ancient Alien Gold Synthesis ( @therealchromedino ), the regular Gold Synthesis Lab ( @GeneralWadaling ) and the Ore Refinery ( @GeneralWadaling ).

The Forest World now has 15 new tree models provided by @rahtdrgn . In addition, the Sports Stadium is now also buildable on the Forest World map.


Also thanks to @therealchromedino , we have a new military unit in this update, the Battle Droid! This is a more expensive version of the existing infantry unit, with the same firepower but a higher armor rating and it does not cost any population to build. It also builds from the War Factory instead of the Barracks.

Settlements can now be upgraded to levels 6 and 7 in this update. I am thinking that Level 7 will be one of the requirements for declaring independence and founding a Nation.

The Political Theater research tech is now available to unlock as well.

In addition to the above, this update contains 26 new structures. I will list them out below, along with the user who provided the artwork for each.

New Structures

• Column of Dominion ( @spamdude )
• Column of Leadership ( @spamdude )
• Column of Protection ( @spamdude )
• Column of Artistry ( @spamdude )
• Column of Welcome ( @spamdude )
• Column of Power ( @spamdude )
• Column of Perfection ( @spamdude )
• Column of Truth ( @spamdude )
• Burning Individual Statue ( @spamdude )
• Blue Brick Road ( @therealchromedino )
• Jewelry Store ( @RekEm1999 )
• Basic Family Shelter ( @Architecture1134 )
• Hall of Congress ( @GeneralWadaling )
• Restaurant ( @RekEm1999 )
• Uranium Synthesis Lab ( @therealchromedino )
• Mart ( @spamdude )
• Convenience Store ( @spamdude )
• Dealership ( @spamdude )
• Mixed-Use Office Block ( @spamdude )
• Spice Store ( @therealchromedino )
• Spice Spa ( @therealchromedino )
• Retro Arcade ( @SPARKY0303 )
• Dark Solar Road ( @OilChan )
• Diamond Solar Road ( @OilChan )
• Oil Burner Station ( @OilChan )
• Oil Fracking Operation ( @OilChan )

If you enjoy the new content please be sure to thank the above artists for their contributions to the game!


That is all for this update. With all of the new structures added, it may well be that some things need rebalancing, so play around with the new stuff and let me know what you think. There is still a ton of work to do on My Colony 2 and there is no way I am going to get it onto Steam before the end of the year as I had hoped, but that is ok! We will just keep plugging away at it and it will just keep getting better as the months go on!

Thanks for playing everyone, and stay tuned for more.

https://mycolony2.com/

#mycolony2

Also remember to build a greenhouse park ASAP to start collecting wood, as tree farms can be used on Spice Worlds but they're made of wood. If your world's spice deposit generation is broken (as mine is), the wood from the tree farms can be used to run charcoal factories which then feed into gold extractors. Also a very inefficient process, but it's the alternative to constantly having to jump around fifty different spice veins.

there should definitely be a localized money maker for spice worlds though, or else better uses for spice

In order to add a bit of extra game-play experience, I believe that each world type should have Faith buildings that tie to the World Type. For example, I believe that Spice Worlds should have buildings dedicated to the Sandworms/Spice Deity. When a world has enough Faith, it should help with increasing colonist happiness and contribute to keeping a settlement socially stable. If Faith gets low, it should increase the amount of instability in a settlement accordingly. An example of this could be a Spice Shrine for a Spice World, and this could evolve into larger buildings or even increasing decorative varieties that contribute to Faith. If anyone else would like to discuss this more, feel free to reply to this.

Hello, folks!

Today, I am here to talk about the development of MC2. I will talk about several things. Today, I will talk about some new stuff and changes that @bastecklein will add in the next update.

First up, Spices! These new spices are produced by the Spice Factory. This facility consumes food and sugar and then converts it into 5 spices. It will take a medium time to produce (about 500-1200 ticks) to produce spices. Spices have a 5% chance to be directly consumed by colonists along with food reserves. Spices cannot be stored by a regular silo, and must be instead stored at the Spice Storage. The spice storage is a climate controlled, gravity-based container which stores spices. The spices cannot be stored in the food silo because it's heavier than food (1:5 weight ratio). The next is an addition of buildings to the LIS faction.

I know the most of you have proposed LIS buildings, and that being said, I had a building in mind that I had: Please welcome the LIS Staging Grounds! This is where LIS infantry are sent to declare war on the United Earth, and to train themselves. This building can only be built once you have an LIS Barracks. The two buildings will be paired together if a settlement declared war on another. I will also plan to announce it's United Earth equivalent, the Staging Grounds. It exhibits the same purpose as the LIS equivalent. I would also like to share Unit Morale, exclusive to infantry and combat units. Unit Morale only applies when there is a war. It will be applied at the start, at 100%. The unit morale decreases slowly, at 1% deterioration per 30 seconds. The Unit Morale also changes as follows:
If a unit is hit by each bullet, one bullet will decrease the morale by a random amount (min. 0.0001, max. 0.5).
If a unit is killed, the morale is reduced 2%. This applies to all categories, land, and sea.
If an enemy is killed, the morale won't change. If a player achieves victory, morale will reset to 100%. If they are defeated, their morale goes all the way to 0%. If an enemy is shot, morale will change by the aforementioned random number range above.

That is it for now. Let me know if you have anything in mind and I will respond to it. Thank you, and have a wonderful day!

You crack me up @Architecture1134 , I think you could run the MC1 clothing sweatshop 😄

As others have said, I don't foresee LIS being added to the game. Although, I have considered in the future, once the base game content is more complete, releasing official expansions to the Mod Shop, including Zolarg and Alpha Draconians. Maybe LIS too, why not? Doesn't totally fit in with the timeline, but it's a game.

Spice could be a thing. I do have spice trading in My Starship, which is also a My Colony Universe game. I look at it as more of a rare planet-specific resource, sort of like Ether. Maybe it will be something to consider once I get planet-to-planet trading implemented, there can be a new planet added with natural spice.

@bastecklein, I agree with you. I think natural spice deposits are good, but consider the factory. Should we make a spice factory for artificial spice production?

bastecklein said:You crack me up @Architecture1134 , I think you could run the MC1 clothing sweatshop 😄

As others have said, I don't foresee LIS being added to the game. Although, I have considered in the future, once the base game content is more complete, releasing official expansions to the Mod Shop, including Zolarg and Alpha Draconians. Maybe LIS too, why not? Doesn't totally fit in with the timeline, but it's a game.

Spice could be a thing. I do have spice trading in My Starship, which is also a My Colony Universe game. I look at it as more of a rare planet-specific resource, sort of like Ether. Maybe it will be something to consider once I get planet-to-planet trading implemented, there can be a new planet added with natural spice.

Bast, it has been 2 updates. Please add it ASAP. I was away for an long time srry

In time for the weekend, My Colony 2 has just been updated to v0.27.0 and should be hitting all platforms shortly! This update has a critical fix that might actually end up killing some existing colonies, so you are going to want to read on to find out what's new!


First for the big change. As I was implementing one of the new buildings for this update (the Ancient Alien Microchip Factory), I noticed that during it's production cycle, it was not consuming any Alien Artifacts. I tweaked with the building in the game editor a bit, and still no consumption. Upon further investigation, I noticed that no building was consuming any resources, and it's been like this all along!

How I missed such an obvious flaw is beyond me, although I don't know if anybody else really noticed it either. It's easy to overlook a bug that actually benefits you, I suppose. Looking back though, stockpiling resources did always seem a bit easier in MC2 as compared to MC1.

Anyway, I went ahead and fixed the issue, loaded up my main colony, and it immediately died. Stockpiles of Ore, Gold, Wood, Charcoal, Crystalline, Rum, Uranium, you name it, all quickly evaporated. My settlements had been running so long on a balance based on zero resource consumption, I never built up the necessary production and gathering capabilities to handle the industrial output. Needless to say, it pretty much brought my entire colony to a standstill. Not only that, but since I had several settlements connected to the same resource pool using trade depots, every single one was brought down to a grinding halt!

It actually took me several hours to recover my game from this calamity. In fact, the fix required me to alter the stats of several buildings, because it became plain once resource consumption was factored in that many buildings were either under producing or over consuming resources. Because of this, production and consumption stats have been altered in this update for the Sugar Extraction Lab, Tree Farm, Charcoal Factory, Uranium Enrichment Facility, Canteen, Gold Synthesis Lab, Ore Fracking Operation, and Rum Distillery. I think I have a reasonable balance going right now, but of course there are likely things that I have overlooked. If you find structures that need rebalanced because of this changed, either buffed or nerfed in some way, let me know in the comments to this post.

Now, while I was trying to figure out this new balance, it was actually quite difficult to do at the beginning, as My Colony 2 lacks detailed resource consumption/production stats like you would find in My Colony 1. At least it did lack those stats, as this update now adds a new Resources tab to the Statistics window!


As in My Colony 1, you can select each resource to see the breakdown on which buildings are providing/using a specific resource, which is a huge help when trying to work out and balance your settlement production levels.


Of course, the resource stats are not exactly, and cannot be exactly as they are in MC1, due to the nature of resource pools in MC2. Resources in this game are not kept per-player or even per settlement, but are rather stored in dynamic "pools" that can change as time goes on based on the existence of logistics stations, outposts and other such structures. This made putting together the stats collection and reporting a bit more difficult than it was in MC1, but it's mostly working here now. To view the stats of a resource pool, you have to move your camera/viewport to a settlement first, and you will be shown the stats for the resource pool that you are currently active in. At some point I will probably make it possible to view a list of all resource pools and which settlements they are connected to, I just have not gotten to it yet.

Moving along, this update brought a few big changes to roads, changes that I started working on a few updates ago and neglected to finish until now.

Firstly, roads with either production or consumption properties (such as the Solar Road) are now finally functional. Prior to this update, you could build a huge Solar Road network with 200 tiles, and it would only produce power based on the first tile placed. Now, they work as you would expect.

Next, Roads are now actually factored in to the path finder, and their "drive speed modification" stats now actually work! You may or may not have noticed, but before this update roads had basically no impact on what your Rovers did, other than providing an aesthetic look. Roads are now fully functional, and will work in basically the same manner as they do in MC1.

Finally, and maybe most importantly, you can no build roads (and some other structures) anywhere you want, no settlement required!


Wouldn't it be nice to build a big beautiful highway connecting all of your settlements together? You couldn't do it before, but you can now! Roads can now be built anywhere, as long as you have an appropriate Rover in range. The resources used to pay for the roads will come from your closest settlement to the road in question (the closes settlement owned by the player building the road). The only restriction is that you can not build a road in a chunk/settlement that is "owned" by another player.

The Game Editor now also allows you to specify other buildings, besides roads, that can be built out-of-settlement. The only one right now is the Commemorative Plaque, since I figured it would nice to be able to place signs along the side of your highways.

Moving along, I did a lot of focus and work on performance optimizations in this release. When a map had larger settlements, the game was starting to get so laggy (at least on my M1 Mac) that it was barely playable anymore, so something had to be done. Obviously there is always more performance work to be done, but here are some of the changes so far.

Firstly, I reduced the radius of chunks that are generated around the camera, and I lowered the time that it takes before the engine clears out chunks that are no longer active around the camera. This provides a pretty large reduction in memory usage when you are in a big settlement, as it can reduce the number of .vpp models loaded in memory significantly. At some point I will probably make this a setting in the Engine Settings window, so people with epic desktop computers and RTX video cards can turn their chunk render distance way up if they want to, but since most players right now are using a smart phone, I decided to lower the default setting.

Speaking of default settings, most of the "pretty" engine settings, such as Anti Aliasing, Depth of Field, Dynamic Shadows, Fancy Water, etc, are now turned off by default. These you can always just turn back on in the settings menu if your machine can handle them, but I wanted the default settings to be low so that a new player wont get in the game and immediately experience lag if they are using a lower end machine.

A lot of improvements have also been made to the server code, which runs on a separate thread from the renderer. There was a pretty big issue where the game server would lag down hard if you had a ton of rovers in your game, since every "tick" a rover checks to see if it should be building something or not. To address this, the server now keeps track of whether or not there are actually buildings under construction, and so Rovers will only check if they should be building when there is actually something to build. Makes sense, right?

Moving along, since the last update introduced the Excavator and digging, it basically became possible to turn the Desert World map into a little water world by digging out your own lakes and rivers. Because of this, it only made sense to allow all of the water based structures and units to be constructed on the desert map.


You are now free to terraform your Desert World map into the holiday paradise that your colonists have been yearning for.

Next up, this update adds the classic Crystalbot from MC1, and with it comes the ability to create and grow Synthetic Crystalline Deposits. Be careful though, because the Synthetic Crystalline is a cancer that is as aggressive as ever, so I would suggest not building it too close to your settlement...


My original inspiration for Crystalline (back in MC1) was the Tiberium from Command and Conquer, a substance that provides power but that also spreads and can become an environmental catastrophe. For this reason, you need to take extra precautions when dealing with the synthetic stuff, as it can easily get out of hand if you let it.

I think I mentioned earlier in this post that the Ancient Alien Microchip Factory has been added to the game. This along with the Crystalline stuff requires two new techs, Ancient Alien Manufacturing and Crystalline Synthesis. I also added the new Luxury Townhome, a decorative housing unit for Premium players.

Since I was on the topic of new Research, I will mention the final engine change to this update. Players who are either in a hurry or want to speed through a new game can now instant-unlock new research using Ape Coins. Like I mentioned in the last My Colony 1 release notes, I am going to be looking for better ways to monetize the My Colony games without resorting to heavy advertising, and this seemed like a reasonable way that is totally optional and does not fundamentally change the game for existing players.

So all in all, this was a pretty big update for My Colony 2. I would suggest that all players be careful when they first open their games after the update, and to comb over your settlements and their research stats, because there will probably be things you need to change, particularly if you have an older established colony.

Moving forward, my near-term plans are to continue expanding the Alien/Quantum tech trees. I am also going to be bringing a Galactic Board of Trade to My Colony 2 in some form (gotta work out the details on that one), and I will also probably be adding a Spice World (not related to the Spice Girls) to implement some of the Spice suggestions from @Architecture1134 and others. There is also a lot coming soon to the original My Colony and to Colony Wars, but more on those another day. All in all, a lot of excitement coming to the My Colony Universe of games, and I should probably put together another episode of the My Colony Podcast to discuss it all. But until then, check out the new update, enjoy, have a good weekend, let me know what issues you find or suggestions you have, and stay tuned for more!

https://www.apewebapps.com/my-colony-2/

#mycolony2

Hello, friends. Today, I want let you know that I am doing an public testing world on the Spice World, my suggestion, released months ago, and I just started the world months ago and then took a break from MC2. Right now, school has not started yet, but I will make more progress on the spice world testing later today. Thank you.