My Colony 2 has just been updated to v1.0.5! This is the last release before the game finally makes it's long awaited Steam debut, so let's see what's new!

First, and finally after all of these years, Music and Sound Effects come to My Colony 2! You can now actually hear something while you play the game. The music soundtrack is a mixture of tracks I made for the game in Garage Band over the last several years, and a few that I had AI generate just to fill it out. I might replace them with more Garage Band music at some point, we will see.

Next up, the game now has Achievements! The initial set is just a base implementation of 10 simple achievements, but the roster will be filled out more as time goes on.

I have once again changed the water shader in the game. Initially I think water effects are disabled by default, but if you turn them on in engine settings, you will get the updated shader. This is the same water shader used for the recent updates to My Empire and the new game My City and it should be pretty performant.

Speaking of engine settings, the antialiasing setting now actually works. The toggle has always been in the game, but it has been completely non-functional up until now. So now you can go ahead and turn it on to get a better, more crisp picture. I have also added a new vibrant mode setting that is on by default that adds a bit of saturation to the game. I think it makes the colors pop nicely, but you can disable it if you do not like it.

The chat sidebar has returned to the game. I pretty much ripped the chat sidebar code out of the original My Colony and ported it into My Colony 2. Let me know if it seems faulty or glitchy to you, but in my testing it seemed to work fine.

Also new, and a long-awaited feature from the original My Colony, there is now cross-world resource gifting in My Colony 2. I have also changed how gifting works a bit for both cross-world and same-world players, now when you send a gift, instead of immediately going into the players' stockpile, it will go into the new Gifts tab in the statistics window, and you can accept the gift once you have room for it. Be careful though, as gifts expire after 90 days, which should be plenty of time to take ownership of them.

And in preparation for the upcoming Steam launch, particularly as it relates to the Steam Deck, there is now full gamepad support in My Colony 2. The goal is that you can play the game entirely with a controller, and you should now be able to do that. If you enjoy gamepad play, try it out and let me know if there is anything I've missed.

There are other little improvements as well. You can now click on resource objects (like ore deposits) and you will get a popup showing how much they have left in them (hard to believe it was missing from the game for so long).

Another behavior imported in from the original My Colony, now if you build a new structure and you have no idle builders nearby, but a unit that is harvesting is close and can complete the construction, it will now temporarily stop harvesting to build your structure, and then go back to what it was doing.

On Android devices, the game now handles the Android back gesture properly. Before it would just exit the game completely, now it will first close any open dialogs, then save and quit to the title screen, and then properly quit the game.

Another addition brought in from the recent revamp of My Colony 1, when you select a unit that is currently in motion, you will get a line from it's current position to it's destination, along with a text readout of how many units away the current unit is from it's destination.

Of course, I mentioned that the game is coming to Steam. My goal was to have it on Steam before Christmas, but I am thinking the actual date will be sometime in January. I don't have a Steam store link to share yet, as I have not yet built out the Steam page (which will also need to go through Valve approval), but once I have that I will share it with everyone so you can add the game to your wishlists.

So that about rounds up this update for the game. The goal is to polish things up, make it a lot smoother for regular play, and get it ready for Steam, which I expect the next update will be the one that lands on the platform. If you have issues with the build or gameplay suggestions, the best bet is to submit them via the in-app Send Feedback dialog, as I have set up an automated triage script that will automatically file the issues into a to-do list, which makes it very easy to access everything during updates. Otherwise, check out the official Discord channel to talk about all things My Colony 2!

The new My Colony 2 update should be live now (or very soon) on the Web, Ape Apps Launcher, Windows, Android, and iOS. Find download links below, and stay tuned for more!

Download My Colony 2