After months of development work, I am finally happy to announce that the My Colony v3.0 update will finally be arriving to all platforms in just a few weeks on July 3rd, 2026! This is a huge update to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the game, and makes some pretty extreme "under the hood" changes that should carry the game forward to the next 10 years and beyond!

What originally started as an overhaul of the rendering engine eventually ended up turning into a complete rewrite of the game itself. So from a purely technical sense, My Colony v3.0 is an entirely new game. Of course, it uses all of the same game data and assets as the game currently does, and I have been making every effort to make the simulation "feel" the same as it always has. That said, some things are going to be a bit different, and in this article I want to give an overview of what all you can expect when the new update hits in a few weeks.

Infinite World Sizes

My Colony v3.0 now lets players build without limits, as world sizes are now "infinite." I put that in quotes, because of course your device hardware will always be a limiting factor. That said, most players should now be able to keep building on to their colonies basically until they get tired of playing the game. I'm sure there will always be that one guy who pushes the engine to the limit and proves me wrong (and if that is you, please report it so I can get it fixed)!

With this new change, regions have been removed from the game. They are simply no longer necessary. This does not mean you will lose your game if you are playing on a region map, it should simply be converted to the new map format the first time you load your save in My Colony v3.0.

My Colony now works on a "chunk and district" system, whereby maps are broken up into 16x16 tile chunks, and chunks can (optionally) be grouped together into districts, which will be able to have customized policies (more on that later).

Many of the performance gains in the new engine are attributed to the new chunking system. Most of the economic systems in the game are now completely simulated, which brings both upsides and downsides. For example, you will no longer see production bars when you hover over a building, because buildings no longer complete their production cycles in timed batches. Instead, their production rates are now calculated based on a multitude of factors, from the building condition, the availability of workers, even the health/happiness of the workers, the crime in the area, etc. These factors then give each building an efficiency rating. Buildings then produce and consume fractions of of their resources every single game tick based on their current efficiency rating.

To be honest, the new system is not 100% accurate, but it is very close. The upside though, is that the new simulation engine is vastly more efficient, and is how I can now support colonies of basically any size. The bulk of my time working on the new engine has been spent tuning this and trying to get it as close as possible to the way the old My Colony engine ran in an effort to avoid mass production disruptions when players load their colonies in v3.0 for the first time.

Multithreaded Operation

The other large change under the hood is the new multithreaded architecture for the game. Game simulation mechanics now run independently of the software renderer, so now large and heavy simulation tasks will no longer lag out the user interface. Likewise, heavy rendering cycles will no longer slow down the simulation.

The renderer itself has been improved to run better on most devices. I actually started to build a hardware accelerated renderer for this release, but it is not going to be ready for v3.0. That is still on the back burner for a future release. The software renderer has been improved quite a bit though, and even supports some new features, such as lightmapping on the buildings (for glowing windows at night time).

The issue with the lightmaps though, is I still have to make them for all 500+ buildings in the game. It's an ongoing process, and it will not all be done by the time 3.0 is out, but I will continue to add them for subsequent releases.

Play As Any Faction

I am adding content to every faction in the game so that any civilization can be played on any map type. This does not mean that some civ/map combinations will not be more optimized than others. Simply, you will be able to now select any civ/map combo you want at game creation, and you will not be soft-locked from progressing on any combo.

The Spice Will Flow

Speaking of map types, Spice World is being added as a new playable map type for all factions, along with the new Spice resource. The Spice World is not necessarily a beginners map, although it is certainly not as hard to play as some of the others. To support playing on the new world, new content is being added to each civilization in order to harvest and process Spice.

Command Center

The old Statistics window is being overhauled into the new Command Center, which will be a single location for many things that were previously hidden behind other menus and popup lists.

I am going to be adding a section to the command center with global rankings from the My Colony server of all colonies by different metrics, such as GDP, Population, etc.

Trade

I want to overhaul how trade works in the game, because the Galactic Board of Trade system isn't really very useful anymore, particularly with players being able to just gift resources. This is one of the last things I am going to implement in the new engine and I don't have it completely figured out in my head yet, but I am going to be changing how the online trading system works, or possibly doing away with it and switching to something else.

Custom News Ticker

Players will be able to subscribe to custom feeds for the scrolling news ticker. I am documenting the API to allow anyone to create their own custom news ticker feeds, you can find that information here.

Premium Structures

I have had multiple requests over the years for players to be able to purchase old premium structures that have already had their run. I think I am going to allow this, maybe at a slightly higher Ape Coin price than the original run cost, so that it is still fair to the players who bought them during the original time window.

Beyond v3.0

The new engine actually allows for a lot of cool new features that I don't have time to implement for the v3.0 release, but you can all look forward to in the future. For example, the old online multiplayer regions are going away, but the new engine is built to actually support real-time same-map multiplayer. I also plan on building the old Galactic Map directly into the game. Really, v3.0 is not the end of a giant update, but the beginning of the next 10 years for My Colony. Player feedback was pretty clear that most users wanted me continue improving the original My Colony instead of working on My Colony 2, so this is what I am doing.

My Colony v3.0 lands on Android, iOS, Windows, the Web and Steam on July 3rd. You can test out the beta now at https://beta.mycolony.online/ but be warned: once you open a game save in the new version of My Colony, you can never take that save back to the current/old version. Just keep that in mind.

Leave all commends/suggestions or questions at the official Ape Apps Discord channel!