Great news: Content Drop 1 is here! And with it, Aven Colony is getting 11 new buildings, a new sandbox map … and a whole new transportation system!

We’re thrilled to introduce the newest addition to Aven Colony hovercars! The new Hovercar Station building automatically links to any other Hovercar Stations you build nearby. Now, you can not only solve your colonists’ commute problems, but you can do it in style, by giving them swanky levitating hovercar vehicles to fly all around the colony!

Content Drop 1 also brings a massive new Space Elevator. While quite expensive, this elevator provides a literal stairway to heaven, connecting your colony all the way to outer space using a massive carbon nanotube cable. The elevator that rides it massively increases your colony’s storage capacity while also docking directly with the orbiting Colony Ship to allow you to bring in large numbers of new colonists.

There’s also a new tool to help your colony deal with plague spores: the Decontamination Unit! Just place one of these next to one or more tunnel tiles, and it will serve as a firewall, spraying a decontamination liquid that kills plague spore microbes and disinfects any infected colonists.

On top of all that, there are 8 new decoration buildings that help you make your colony even more beautiful while also improving morale.

Finally, this update also brings a brand new sandbox map: Serpent Isle! This is a beautiful desert island in the middle of Aven Prime’s great northern sea, and is a uniquely challenging colony location due to its relatively low levels of geothermal vents and farmable cropland. Look closely and you can spot a number of creatures unique to this remote part of Aven Prime.

Additional Changes
  • Significantly modified temporal antialiasing to cause much less blurring, especially when close to buildings
  • Lots of optimizations that should significantly reduce the amount of hitching with large colonies and improve large-colony performance overall
  • Added a new “Decorations” submenu and moved the Park into this submenu (from “Services”)
  • The “Spaceports” menu has been renamed to “Ships & Vehicles,” and includes the new Hovercar Station
  • Made Vanaar and Sandy Gulch in the campaign slightly more difficult (this does not affect saved games, only new games on those maps)
  • Improved the look of the Employment overlay: now shows green arrows in most cases, or red if a worker’s commute is causing a morale penalty. Also dramatically improved the look of this overlay. It also shows connections between hovercar garages in purple if any colonists use them in a commute.
  • Improved the Commute overlay: this now also shows the red lines from the Employment overlay
  • Improved the effect when you recycle a Prometheus Lander
  • Sending an expedition out to investigate a distress signal which later turns out to be rebels no longer leaves you with “{0}” and “{1}” in the next
  • Crowding morale should now be a slightly more serious problem at most difficulty settings — but MUCH easier to addresss using hovercars!
  • The Morale graphs in the Statistics panel were 50% too small; they are now the proper size
  • The Bar & Grill now has a smaller morale effect in general and properly reduces the morale effect further at tier 1
  • The Earth History Center is now more expensive and has a reduced morale effect
  • The Park is now slightly more expensive to build
  • The VR Center’s morale effect has been reduced slightly
  • Habitats and Skyscrapers now use slightly less power and a Tier-2 Skyscraper is slightly more expensive
  • Laser mines now use less power and no longer reduce air quality as much as they did previously
  • Fixed an issue where holding Ctrl to highlight buildings while dragging a building for placement could cause buildings to temporarily disappear when you released Ctrl
  • Creeps & tentacles now vanish properly the moment a building begins its destruction sequence
  • Added more specialized POI marker types for expeditions: rebels, splinter groups, creep nests, and plague nests
  • Fixed a rare stability issue

For more updates on Aven Colony, make sure to follow the official Facebook and Twitter pages!

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