Co-op space survival with friends: how COLONIZED plays as a group

Co-op in COLONIZED is a colony, not a lobby. Most co-op survival games are sessions: someone hosts, the others join, and the world waits until you come back. COLONIZED is a space survival MMORPG, so a group of friends lives in one persistent universe on dedicated servers, next to every other group, and what you build stays where you left it. Applications for the closed alpha are open; the first wave is planned for winter 2026-2027.

Everything below carries a label: done is in the main build today, in development is real code not finished or not merged, designed is on paper.

What a group shares

What a group needs	What COLONIZED has	Status
A group of its own	Colonies: player clans with invitations, beds and respawn	Done
A shared home	Bases built piece by piece, with typed sockets and structural integrity	Done
A world that persists	Dedicated servers at 30 Hz with a database for characters, inventories and buildings	Done
Fair firefights	Thirteen weapons in first or third person; every shot resolved on the server	Done
Places worth going together	Fifteen worlds generated from their lore, with weather of their own	Done; under visual review
Roles in a fight	The Compis: one holds the line, one deals the damage, one gets the fallen back up	In a development branch
Something to fight together	World bosses and group content designed around those roles	In development
Something bigger to belong to	Two factions chosen once and for good, and five neutral guilds that keep score	Done

A base that can fall

A colony’s base is real structure. Pieces snap together with typed sockets, and integrity is computed: pull a support and whatever is left hanging comes down. That changes how a group builds, and who is allowed to touch the foundations. In a test with three clients, 5,000 pieces ran at 6.2 ms on average.

Roles, with the Compis

In the lore, a compi is an auxiliary core from the old colony fleet, recovered and put back to work. In the game, there are five companion drones, one per guild, each with a role, a signature ability and a talent tree, recovered through a chain of missions with its guild and built from a blueprint. In a group they share the work: one holds the line, one deals the damage, one gets the fallen back up. The system is finished in a development branch and is not in the main build yet; world bosses and the group content designed around those roles are still in development, and none of it is promised for the alpha. The lore and the detail are in the Compis.

Choosing a side, together or not

When you enlist aboard the Arca Custodia you choose the Zenith or the Nadir, and the choice is permanent. A colony does not have to share a side, but the five neutral guilds measure every member’s trust separately, and working for one can cost you with another. The canon behind it is in the Zenith and the Nadir and the five Global Guilds.

How a group gets into the closed alpha

1. Each of you applies at colonized.work/alpha with a pilot account. Taking part is free, according to the alpha terms.
2. Share your link. Each friend who completes an application with it moves you ten places up the list.
3. Keys go out in waves. The team may also look at variety of hardware, regions, languages and playstyles, so friends who applied on the same day can get different answers.
4. Stay in touch on the Discord, where each wave is announced.

What is not announced

Colony size, players per server, server regions, the release date and the price have not been announced. When they are, they will be on COLONIZED in facts.

Go deeper: four multiplayer survival formats and how to pick one, co-op, PvE or PvP and base building in space survival.