Progression

A colony grows through five stages. This page says exactly what moves it from one to the next, what each stage opens up, how fast a colony of a given size builds and breeds, and what to check when growth has stopped.

The five stages#

The rules behind the table:

• Both numbers are needed at once. Sixteen Nerans in ten structures is still Growing.
• Population is everybody on the roster, children included. Structures is every building the colony has finished, whether it chose the building itself or you placed it with the Colony Planner. An upgrade replaces its building rather than adding one, so it does not raise the count.
• Stages only go up. A colony that later loses people or housing keeps the stage it earned.
• The check runs once per colony cycle. A colony that meets a later threshold goes straight there; it does not have to spend a cycle in each stage on the way.
• All six thresholds are configuration keys — see Config.

When a colony advances, every member who is online is told <colony> has grown: it is now <stage>. The crossing is also published on Core's threshold event bus (channel nerocolonies:stage, scoped to the colony id, value 0–4) unless thresholdEventsEnabled is off, and sent to companion apps (Link module). The owner and every online member also receive the personal record gate nerocolonies:stage_<stage>, which the Colony Chronicle quests read (NeroQuests integration).

The beacon's Needs tab shows the current stage and the next milestone: next: the Starter Works while founding, then next: 6 Nerans, 6 buildings and so on. /nerocolonies colony info prints the stage and the structure count.

The Starter Works#

Four buildings stand between Founding and Settled. They are the blueprints whose stage is founding, built in this order:

An entry starting with # is an item tag: any planks, any logs.

Why they need your materials. From Settled onwards a colony with nothing in store still builds, slowly, by fabricating from scrap. While it is founding it does not: the Starter Works go up from supplied materials or not at all, so the first four buildings are your contribution to the colony. After that it can carry itself.

How it plays:

1. The two founders arrive with the beacon. The colony picks a site for the first Starter Work and waits. The beacon's Colony tab reads Waiting for the Starter Works' materials: see the Needs tab, then press Give needed items.
2. Hand over the listed materials. The quickest way is to carry them to the beacon, open it and press Give needed items above your inventory: the colony takes what it needs and leaves the rest. A Colony Depot inside the claim, a Needs Board, or a hopper or pipe into the beacon work too. The beacon's six food supply slots are for food only.
3. The moment the whole set for the current building is in storage it is taken, once, and the building goes up at full speed. Then the next Starter Work begins.

A part-delivered set is not taken: the materials stay in storage until the set is complete. The Needs tab and the Needs Board both list what is still missing. A Starter Works material is always marked needs your help, with no time estimate, because the colony will not gather it for itself.

You can choose where a Starter Work goes by placing it yourself with the Colony Planner. It still needs its materials.

Offline catch-up never advances an unpaid Starter Work.

Worlds from before stages existed. A colony saved by an earlier version has no stage on record. The first time it is looked at it is placed in Settled if it has already built at least one housing blueprint and one farm blueprint, or has more Nerans than founderColonistCount; otherwise it starts in Founding.

Datapacks. A pack that ships no founding blueprint has no Starter Works, and its colonies become Settled on their first cycle.

What each stage unlocks#

The full list, with sizes and what each building provides, is on Buildings.

The third column is maxAutoStructures (default 12) multiplied by one for Founding and Settled, two for Growing, three for Thriving and four for Metropolis. It limits only what the colony starts on its own. Buildings you place with the Colony Planner are not stopped by it, though they count towards it; upgrades are not stopped by it either, and do not change the count.

Besides buildings, reaching Growing switches on two things that follow the growth curve below: births and the claim bonus.

The gift table is what the Gratitude Cache rolls.

The growth curve#

A colony grows slowly at first, then faster, then levels off. One number drives it:

score = population + 2 × structures
g     = 1 / (1 + e^(−0.15 × (score − 20)))

g is close to 0 for a new colony, exactly 0.5 at a score of 20, and close to 1 for a large one. Three things scale with it, each capped by a configuration key:

With the default configuration (growthMaxBuildMultiplier 3.0, breedingBaseChance 0.08, growthMaxClaimBonus 32):

So a colony that has just become Growing builds nearly twice as fast as a new one, and by the time it is Thriving it is within a few per cent of the cap.

The build speed multiplies constructionBlocksPerCycle. Supply, and Builders on site, multiply it again — see Construction.

Claim growth#

A colony's claim radius is claimRadius, plus whatever RANGE modules in the beacon add, plus the growth bonus above. With the defaults that is 48 blocks at founding and up to 80 for a large colony.

The beacon re-works the figure every 100 ticks. It follows the colony's current population and structure count, so a colony that shrinks gives a little of its bonus back; the stage itself never goes down. Before Growing the bonus is zero.

A wider claim is more ground for the colony to build on, more ground the housing sweep reads, and more ground its guards cover.

The growth bonus never reaches into a neighbour. It is trimmed so that the claim stops one block short of any other colony's claim in the same dimension. Only the growth is trimmed: the base radius and whatever RANGE modules add are always kept.

Arrivals, births and children#

A colony gains people in two ways.

Arrivals work at every stage: while there is a free bed, food in the store and life support holding, a newcomer walks in. Before Growing that is one per colony cycle. See Colony basics.

Births start at Growing, and from then on the colony grows mostly from within. Once per colony cycle the colony checks all of these:

If they all hold, it rolls the birth chance from the table above. On a success a child Neran appears near the beacon.

Arrivals and births draw on the same free beds, and births come first: each cycle the colony rolls for a child before it considers a newcomer, so a child has first call on a free bed and one free bed is enough.

Once a colony is Growing, with breeding switched on, newcomers also slow down. One arrives only every immigrationIntervalCycles colony cycles (default 6), and never on a cycle in which a child was born. Set the key to 1 for an arrival every cycle, as before Growing. With breedingEnabled off, every cycle is an arrival cycle at every stage.

A child:

• counts as population straight away: it eats, needs a bed and counts towards the stage thresholds;
• has no trade and does no work. During the working day it heads for the colony's gathering place and wanders; at night it sleeps at home like everyone else;
• grows up after childGrowthDays in-game days (default 2), and is given a trade on the next colony cycle that has a place open. Set the key to 0 and children are born grown.

/nerocolonies colony info reports how many births a colony has had. The beacon's People tab shows how many children it has now.

Births need the colony's chunk to be loaded. Offline catch-up brings neither arrivals nor births.

When a colony is not growing#

Open the beacon. Two tabs each carry a line that names the reason.

People tab: why nobody is arriving#

The reasons are checked in that order and the first one that applies is shown.

Colony tab: why nothing is being built#

A line reading Fabricating <building> is not a stop: the colony is building at the unsupplied rate. Put the materials in colony storage and it speeds up.

The stage is not advancing#

• Look at the Needs tab's Next stage: line and compare it with the People tab's Neran count and the Colony tab's structure count. Both targets have to be met.
• Population is capped by housing. If the colony has stopped building homes, the usual cause is that it has enough: it only starts a new house when fewer than two beds are free.
• Structures are capped by stage (12 at Settled by default) and by each blueprint's own maximum. The Growing threshold of 6 is well inside the Settled cap.
• No children yet? That is expected before Growing, and after it a birth still needs spare food, morale of 50 and a free bed.
• Beds filling more slowly than they used to? From Growing on, newcomers arrive only every immigrationIntervalCycles cycles; the free beds are being left for children.

See also#

• Buildings — what a colony builds and where
• Nerans and professions — the people, and how trades are handed out
• Construction — the build loop and its speed
• Gratitude cache — the gifts that improve with each stage
• Config — every key named on this page