Devlog: what exists in COLONIZED today, and what does not yet

This is the first devlog on the new colonized.work, so it does one job: put every system of COLONIZED in one of three boxes, with the evidence for each. Done means it is in the main build, with tests or validated by playing it. In development means there is code, but it is unfinished or not merged yet. Designed means it exists on paper. Only the first box counts as a feature.

Where COLONIZED stands in October 2026

COLONIZED is a space survival MMORPG for PC, built in Unreal Engine 5: one persistent online universe, planets with atmosphere and ships you can walk through. It is in development. Applications for the closed alpha are open, and the first alpha wave is planned for winter 2026-2027. It is not in alpha yet, and we will not say it is until the first wave has its keys.

The current build runs on Unreal Engine 5.8, on Windows with DirectX 12, against dedicated Linux servers.

Done: what the main build has today

System	What it does today	Evidence
Planets you walk on	Spherical terrain with radial gravity across the whole sphere; you can walk out of the atmosphere into zero gravity	Validated by playing; deterministic collision, identical on Windows and Linux
Sky	Day and night cycle and eclipses; our own volumetric clouds, seen from the ground and from orbit	Clouds cost 3.5 ms per frame at 3440×1440 native on an RTX 5070 Ti
Survival	Survival stats on the character, damage by body zone, death and respawn decided by the server	Tests in the main build
Crafting	90 recipes in four places: by hand, workbench, fabricator and furnace	43 item recipes and 47 building-piece recipes
Base building	Pieces with typed sockets and structural integrity: remove a support and what depended on it falls	5,000 pieces with 3 clients at 6.2 ms on average
Combat	Weapons in first and third person; shots resolved on the server with lag compensation	97.7 % of hits registered with 150 ms of latency, against 8.2 % without compensation
Creatures and enemies	Alien fauna and hostile humans driven by AI	111 of 111 tests passing
Your character	Character creator built on MetaHuman, first and third person with motion matching	The character you create is the one you play
Persistence	Dedicated servers at 30 Hz with a persistent database for characters, inventories and buildings	24 hours with 100 bots: p95 of 12.48 ms against a 33.33 ms budget
Social	Player clans (create, invite, expel, beds and respawn) and reputation with the five Global Guilds	Five reputation ranks, from Paria to Leyenda
Sides	You choose the Zenith or the Nadir when you enlist; the choice is permanent on the server	Enlistment screen in the main build

Two words of caution on that table. The numbers are development measurements: they tell you the system works and what it costs on our machines, not what your PC will need. And “done” does not mean “finished”: it means the system exists and works, and it will keep changing.

In development: real code, not finished

These exist as code, but they are unfinished, not merged into the main build or waiting for the owner’s verdict. We can talk about them; we cannot promise them.

• The worlds of the Aurin system. A generator turns the canon (radius, gravity, atmosphere, biome and places of each body) into a world. The fifteen bodies with a surface have been generated, with terrain from real elevation data and physics; the generation closed with all fifteen on 12 October, and the visual review continues body by body.
• Dynamic weather per body. Rain, snow, dust, fog and wind for each world, with wet or snowy ground that follows the clouds drawn in the sky. Its development task is finished; the last adjustments go through the visual review.
• Resources. Five ores with their own geology and deposits placed across the universe map. The generator places them; the gameplay around them is still being built.
• Ship flight and combat. Flight, landing, jumps between bodies and combat inside a moving ship are built and tested in the engine on a test ship. The seven ships on this website are modelled inside and out, but they are not integrated in the engine yet.
• The Compis. Five companion drones, one per guild, each with its role, signature ability, talent tree, mission chain and voice script with subtitles. Their development epic is finished; the code lives in development branches and is not in the main build yet.
• The first hours. A shared transport mission takes new colonists to their first job; it lives in a development branch.
• NVIDIA DLSS. The development build integrates DLSS Super Resolution and DLAA, Frame Generation and Reflex. What the released game will offer has not been decided.

Designed: on paper only

The economy and trading (the Solmera Credits exist only as lore), faction warfare, sieges and player-versus-player conquest, groups and instances, music and voice acting, and the integration of Steam into the game’s login. None of these is promised anywhere on this site, and they will not be until they can be played.

Two things we got wrong, and how we fixed them

We turned off Lumen because it made the desert darker. The measurement was right: with Lumen on, 86.7 % of the image was pure black. The premise was wrong: the sky light was running at the intensity meant for starlight, in broad daylight. With almost no ambient light to bounce, Lumen could only take light away. Once the ambient light was fixed, the same A/B test reversed: with Lumen, rock has shape, cracks occlude and sand returns warm light. Lumen is on, and the lesson is in the configuration file next to it: a conclusion measured under a broken premise has to be measured again.

Two background textures used more video memory than the whole planet. A planet test scene needed 12,480 MB of video memory at 3440×1440. The resource dump showed two sky cubemaps of 384 MB each: 8,192 × 8,192 pixels per face, with no mipmaps, for a starfield nobody can see at that density. Capping the sky textures, fixing five memory pools and packing the terrain better brought the process down to 5,256 MB, with no texture demoted. We tell that story in full in the PC optimisation guide.

What comes next

Update, 14 October: what happened on the next day of work is in the devlog of 13 October.

The priority is the closed alpha. That means finishing the review of every world, bringing the work from the development branches into the main build, and the systems a tester needs on day one. Dates are published when they are firm: the first wave is planned for winter 2026-2027, and the roadmap shows the work as it moves.

If you want to be in the first wave, apply for the closed alpha. If you want the details as they happen, the conversation is on our Discord.