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After several weeks of work and dealing with a suspension from Google Play, My Colony is back with patch v0.98.0, the Zolarg Update! The Zolarg have long lagged behind the Human races in terms of content, and they are still behind with this patch, but the gap is closing, and will continue to close in the months ahead. But this is a good step in the right direction, as this update adds 20 new structures to the Zolarg lineup, as well as a couple of new techs and units, and access to the Abandoned World map. There are a couple of other goodies thrown into the mix as well, so let's take a look at what is new!

Firstly, My Colony is now available to players on the Kongregate platform, which you can find by clicking here. So if you get a new commonwealth member who plays on Kongregate, be sure to welcome them to the My Colony family!


Next up, there has been a long-standing bug related to Entertainment, Medical, and Education stats on certain buildings. This was only reported by certain players, but after finally isolating the bug, I believe more people were probably experiencing the issue, even if they did not realize it. Essentially, a certain condition would lead to a routine in the code that was supposed to check if a building had more guests/students/patients than the building allows, and instead of a greater than symbol in the code, I had accidentally typed an equals sign, which was altering the in-memory game definition for the building class in question, changing the number of guests/students/patients that the game thought the building allowed. This would actually have far reaching effects throughout the entire colony, making entertainment buildings think they did not accept guests, and so on. The game would be fine again once the game definitions were reloaded from memory, but would get messed up again during gameplay.

So anyway, that bug is now fixed. Things like that are easy to miss when there are tens of thousands of lines of code to deal with! Really though, the impact should have been pretty deep on most colonies, so do not be surprised if there are changes to the way the simulation runs now going forward.

I have made a tweak to the existing Zolarg Customs Processing structure, increasing the rate that it receives tourists by about 2.5x. It was just taking forever for new Tourists to arrive on Zolarg maps, and there was no real reason why the building needed to be so slow to begin with.

So now we move on to the new Zolarg content. Since there is so much, I am just going to list everything out and then offer an overview in the following commentary.

New Techs

• Mega Construction
• Insectoid Dominion

New Units

• Regobug
• Etherbug

New Structures

• Polished Water Vats
• House of Running Rum
• Labor Camp
• Megamound
• Potterbug's Mound
• Deluxe Command
• Unholy Tower of Stuff
• Glazed Mound
• Smart Power Spire
• Quantum Slab of Processing
• Quantum Wet Cone
• Quantum Circuit Foundry
• Unholy Gold Grower
• Crystalline Growth Chamber
• Tower of Truth
• Antanium Blast Furnace
• Ether Powertube
• Designated Swim Area
• Regolith Incinerator
• Pot of Ether

To start with, I wanted to address some of the long-standing complaints with Zolarg maps. One of the big ones was the super low giftcap as compared to other civs. With that in mind, Zolargs have gained another upgrade to their Capitol structure, the Deluxe Command.


This brings the Zolarg gift capacity up to 500,000,000, which I believe is reasonably sufficient for any colony. Likewise with storage, Zolarg get another large boost with the upgraded Unholy Tower of Stuff, which has a capacity of 3,500,000 for most goods.

For power generation, Zolarg gain two new power plants, the upgraded Smart Power Spire and the new Ether Powertube. The Ether Powertube is the most powerful, offering 12,000 power generation, but it requires Ether to operate. This is no problem on the Abandoned World map which the Zolarg can now populate, but the structure will otherwise require receiving a gift of Ether or purchasing it from the GBT. There will be more Ether specific structures coming to the other civs as well, and I plan on adding other map-specific resources to other planets too, as I have previously outlined a few months ago.

For those who can't get Ether though, the also-new Smart Power Spire still offers 3,500 power generation, making it no slouch either. Realistically, it would only take a handful of Smart Power Spires to run a full medium sized map.

Zolarg can now be played on the Abandoned World map, which required the addition of the new Regobug and Etherbug, as well as the ability to convert Regolith into Ore using the new Regolith Incinerator.


Now I would rate a Zolarg Abandoned World as "not for beginners," as without proper management, you will quickly run into shortages of Food, Water, and Sugar right off the bat. Ore production is also expensive in terms of Sugar and Regolith, at least until you unlock other Ore generation methods. It is the only map though where Ether can be obtained (for any civ), and it should be fully playable once you get past the initial stages.

Zolarg Alien Tech gets a boost in this update, with much needed "quantum" upgrades for several existing structures. Zolarg also gain Pottery production, automated Wood harvesting (through the new Labor Camp), and automated Crystalline generation (through the Crystalline Growth Chamber). All of these changes make running a Zolarg resource farm a lot less of a chore than it was before.

Obviously there is still a lot more to do with Zolarg, but this update does make it a lot better. Once Zolarg are up to speed on most of the resource generating buildings, they will also need to be filled out with regular diversity type buildings. Things Humans have that make a colony not look so uniform and bland, multiple ways to create and use resources in different combinations. This will all come, it just takes a bit of time!

So there is still a lot more coming for Zolarg in the future, but not in the next update. v0.99.0 will be focusing on the Reptilians, and they will be getting a similar "shot in the arm" that the Zolarg just got in this release. Following that, My Colony will finally be hitting v1.0.0, and I am going to finally stop calling it Beta. I figure after 100 feature updates and countless platform-specific bug updates (152 on Android alone), the game can finally be referred to as 1.0, lol.

To celebrate the 100th feature release of My Colony, I plan on doing a special public edition of the My Colony podcast, where anybody in the community will be free to join me for the recording session, as we discuss the past 3 1/2 years of My Colony and talk about the future! I am either going to use Discord for the recording, or embed recording and group voice capabilities into the My Colony streaming mechanism and record the Podcast while I stream gameplay. I haven't decided yet, but after research, I think adding the capabilities to the site would be trivial. It's just a matter of whether or not I want to take the time to implement them :-/

So anyway, that is all for today's update. It should be rolling out to all platforms over the coming days, so be on the lookout! As always, leave your feedback and suggestions, and stay tuned, because there is a whole lot more My Colony to come!