Aven Colony

Aven Colony is a sci-fi colony-building sim - create humanity's first settlement on an extrasolar world! · By mothership, Mothership Entertainment, ellie_team17

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Aven Colony updated to 0.1.14014

A topic by Mothership Entertainment created Nov 08, 2016 Views: 1,302 Replies: 7

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Mothership EntertainmentDeveloper8 years ago

Hi everybody ... Good news! Aven Colony build 0.1.14014 is now posted. We apologize for the delayed update; we'd wanted to post an update several weeks ago but were stalled by a critical bug fix from one our our middleware providers.

Installation instructions are available here.

Since it's been a month since our last update, we have a lot more changes than usual! Besides a ton of bug fixes, we've added a ton of new features to the game, most notably:

Plague Spores. These deadly biological spores slowly float toward the colony and get sucked into the coloy through Intake Fans (or Geothermal Generators or any other building type). They then split into numerous smaller "microbes" that rapidly spread through the colony's tunnel system, infecting any colonists they see! You will need Hospitals to stop the spread of the plague if this happens.
Plasma Turrets. Plasma turrets can shoot down Creep Spores, Plague Spores, and even shards from Shard Storms!
Lightning Towers. A Lightning Tower can fully defend part of your colony from the lightning strikes ("thundersnow") that frequently strike during Aven Prime's winter season, and will channel the electricity into any Energy Batteries connected to the same power zone.

You can see animated GIFs of all three of these features on GIPHY here: Plague Spores, Plasma Turrets, Lightning Towers.

Additionally, please note that our forums have been down for a few weeks due to spam. We apologize for the inconvenience and expect to have them back online within a few days.

Here are the full update notes:

New Features:

Added a Plague Spore that can enter the colony, split into tiny microbes, and infect colonists with the plague!
Added a new Plasma Turret that can shoot down Creep Spores and Plague Spores, and even shoot down Shard Storm shards!
Added a new defensive Lightning Tower! This protects the surrounding area from lightning strikes in winter and also feeds the electricity back into any Energy Batteries in the colony
Lots of new, more specialized voice-overs from the 5 main characters; also changed the assignments of who gives some of the various quests during the missions
Tons of additional ambient colonist voice-overs
Replaced voice-overs for the male colonist who sounded like a redneck and the female who sounded like Kalandra
A new alien dragonfly now wanders around Vanaar and Hyla's Crescent during non-winter seasons
Added a new SHIPE call from Commissioner Veronika near the start of Vanaar to remind you that following the mission objectives is optional
The "Consumable" row on the inventory dialog now shows up in red if no food types are marked as consumable
Big improvements to line-drawing in the Stats panel; also made the panel much taller
Rewards from Veronika now grey out you don't have room for them
There's also an 'X' button in the upper-right of this dialog to close it if all options are greyed (this is available for the mission objectives, too)
Added new data types to the Statistics dialog: immigrants accepted and food/water/storage/electricity per colonist
Added flashing lights that light up the surrounding area for landing and descending immigration and trade vessels
Added an urgent notification when there's a high crime level in part of the colony
You can now use Ctrl-Alt-X to temporarily disable the UI (for taking screenshots -- use PrtScrn if playing via itch.io or F12 if playing via the Steam closed beta)
The Mini-Storage building now animates as it was always intended to

Bug fixes:

Tunnels under construction (and other buildings!) are now FAR more visible against the snowy background on arctic maps
Fixed bug where Police Drone Stations that lost power would remove their positive effects much too quickly, which make "death spirals" happen much too quickly under certain circumstances
Azara Falls & Tenari Glacier sandbox: fixed a few Zorium deposits not being clickable
"Citizen dying" and "citizens starving" notifications now eventually expire
Citizens will no longer initiate death if they're saved from starvation at the last moment
Vastly improved line-drawing in the Stats dialog -- much cleaner lines
Fixed bug with the inventory panel progress bar pausing before refreshing when you opened the panel
Fixed a bug with colonists getting traffic-jammed at the entrances to buildings in some cases
Fixed screwiness with the mouse cursor in certain maps, especially Tenari Glacier
Fixed inaccurate text for winter cultivation for Greenhouses
Zooming in and out with PageUp and PageDown no longer pans left/right/up/down due to the mouse position; only mouse wheel zooming does this
Notifications no longer auto-open during an end-of-game SHIPE call
Simplified & shortened Veronika's intro speech in the main menu and added audio ducking to make it audible over the music
Fixed issue with VCR buttons getting "stuck" if you toggled them too quickly at low frame rates
Construction drones should now enter drone stations and dock much more smoothly
Fixed bug where the stats pane isn't visible if you load a save where the game has already been won or lost
Improved the effect when upgrading buildings, most noticeable with the Solar Panel
Vanaar: fixed a bug where the "mine zorium" quest would not count zorium already mined
Sandy Gulch: fixed a bug where one of the trade objectives could not be completed at "insane" difficulty due to insufficient gold in the cargo pod
Azara Falls no longer mentions an "object", since it's now about analyzing the alien structures
Fixed a bug with having a selected building get stuck as ghosted when exiting an overlay mode
Fixed bug where food wouldn't decompose if the storage building lost power if it was in a storage module or mini-storage
Fixed a bug with saving & loading certain quest types, such as getting food production or water production to certain levels
SHIPE calls now properly queue up instead of simply stomping calls in progress; this fixes an issue where important SHIPE calls could get missed under certain circumstances
Creep spores can no longer attach to buildings that have just been placed and are 0% completed
Fixed a bug where the morale effects of multiple retail, health, and entertainment structures would not stack properly but would instead just pick one arbitrarily
Social policies are no longer gated on referendum victories in Sandbox missions
Reduced the morale impact of VR Centers and Retail Centers by 20%
Reduced the morale impact of a Bar & Grill in 'Lounge' mode by 25%
Reduced the morale impact of an Earth History Center by 55% (though it's still extremely high!)
Improvements to mission objectives in Sandy Gulch
Lots of little tutorial text fixes
Landscape optimizations (enabled triangle culling)
Fixed a few random crash bugs
All tutorial arrows now animate properly
Upgraded to Unreal Engine 4.13, including lots of little bug fixes
Lots of additional tweaks and bug fixes

Art Improvements:

Vastly improved the rivers and waterfalls in arctic maps
New Plasma Turret and Lightning Tower
Revised and improved Stats dialog
Immigration Center changed from yellow to blue

Thank you for being part of the Aven Colony community!

Paul Tozour & the Mothership Entertainment team

bluesaka1118 years ago

Yes, but can you check the ingame graphic settings?

The Distant blur keeps reset itself to Very High level everytime I run the game.
The Resolution quality keeps:

Reset itself to Very High level everytime I run the game
Reset itself to normal after I switch it back to Very low level

Thanks. Btw, If you looking for a good forum software that provide decent function and anti spam features, I suggest you check those:

Mybb
Simple Machine Forum
Discourse - If you want a simple forum with tagged forum for quickly view posts betweens categories but I am not tested this one in term of spam protection yet.

mothershipDeveloper8 years ago

Thanks for the heads-up; we'll investigate.

timmolicious8 years ago

I would really just like to see performance issues improved when your colony starts to get too big. Having too many building makes the game start to lag really hard. Also the game seems to have a real hard time loading the grey screen when previewing a building or tunnel you want to build if you are too close to a spot on the map you can not place the building. Main example being on Hyla's Crescent attempting to place buildings near the waters edge takes a long time for it to load and gets a little buggy trying to create a tunnel path. That and the more buildings you have, the longer it takes to load and place a new building each time.

A minor fix would also be the funny looking texture on the loading screen for the winter map with the river flowing down the mountain. It looks like it is flowing over a flat surface instead of falling down a mountain.

It would also be cool if you could do partial designs to the maps such as resource placements for the sandbox mode as well as the arrangement of the starting colony buildings and how they are connected.

Sandbox mode with the Referendums set to Never should also be able to access all of the various policies you can put into place.

Another idea might be an upgraded tunnel that allows quick transport of your citizens to various locations. The main reason behind this is because I love to zone and organize my colony into districts and it would be cool to me if I could put the housing in one area and the farming in another, etc. without having to intermingle them into a mess just so the citizens are close enough to where they work. Obviously the tunnels would be an upgrade that would cost more nanites to upgrade or build, and would consume more power. But the benefit would be that citizens do not feel that it takes too long to get to work.

timmolicious8 years ago

Also maybe possible diagonal placement for the tunnels and buildings.

timmolicious8 years ago

Thinking more into the idea of the upgraded tunnels, you could also have a public transport service building that these upgraded tunnels are used for. this building consumes power and can be upgraded to the various tiers to produce more efficient transportation across longer distances. My first idea would be either some internal tram that works its way around or perhaps a skybridge or buried tunnel system for seperate transportation to smaller access stations you have to build where citizens utilizing the transport system can enter and exit.

timmolicious8 years ago(+1)

And while im going on a rampage of ideas i think might be cool for the game, More seasons might be cool too.

Certain map types can have longer or shorter seasons, or permanent seasons. Or only some of the seasons for that matter. This would be customizeable on the Sandbox mode.

Example of a season could be Summer where Solar Output is 150%, Crop growth is 150% but water consumption is 200%

Fall where conditions are relatively normal but storms are more likely to occur. Or perhaps people are more prone to getting sick if the colony has any External Air Intake Filters.

Spring could also have positive benefits like reduced need for happiness producing buildings or just a passive boost to happiness while its spring time. Spores might be more likely to spread.

mothershipDeveloper8 years ago

Hi Timmolicious -- yes, we'll be doing a lot of work to optimize the late game as we get closer to launch.

As for the bugs you reported in your post -- a lot of those, like the issue with social policies being locked due to referendums on Sandbox maps, were fixed in 0.1.14014. Are you playing with the latest version?

itch.io

Aven Colony

Aven Colony updated to 0.1.14014