More than workers: giving villagers a social life

Right now, our villagers are basically workaholics with zero social life, clocking out only to march straight home like it’s the most exciting part of their day.

So today, we’re changing that by taking a closer look at how villagers spend their free time and how we can make it far more engaging and believable. We are introducing a broader free time system by expanding the range of amenity buildings:

Tavern
Theatre
Church

Additionally, amenity buildings will function more dynamically. They can operate similarly to workplaces, e.g. the tavern consumes beer in its production cycle to create amenity and wealth.

This change adds depth and realism, emphasizing that these buildings rely on active participation from villagers rather than functioning passively.

Free time Decisions

Villagers will no longer automatically return home after work. Instead, they will actively decide how to spend their evening. These decisions are based on personal interests and individual characteristics, e.g. a villager with an interest in music may choose to visit the theatre. This creates more varied, believable, and emergent behavior.

Architectural Changes

As mentioned earlier, we are currently working toward enabling amenity buildings to also function as workplaces, but this is not a finished feature yet. It’s part of a broader architectural shift we’re in the process of implementing.

Previously, our Building architecture relied on a strict inheritance-based approach, where each building had a single, clearly defined role. While this worked for simple cases, it quickly became limiting as soon as we wanted buildings to fulfill multiple purposes. To address this, we are transitioning to a component-based system.

This shift is still in progress, but the goal is to move away from defining what a building is, and instead focus on what a building can do. In this new structure, buildings will be composed of modular components that provide specific functionality. This means a single building can now simultaneously act as:

Workplace
Housing
Amenity

This shift will give us far greater flexibility in design. It allows us to create more complex and believable interactions between systems, reduces rigid dependencies, and makes it significantly easier to extend or iterate on features in the future.

BaseStation System

To support the new free time behaviour, we are generalizing the previous workstation concept into Base Stations.

Amenity buildings (e.g. taverns) are assigned Guest Stations
Each visiting villager receives exactly one station (e.g. chair, bench)
This defines where they stay and interact within the building

How Buildings Grow With Your Village

Building Upgrades As your village grows, so should the buildings that define it. A static settlement quickly becomes a stagnant one and that’s something we want to avoid entirely. Our goal is to create a system where every building evolves over time, adapting to your priorities, your playstyle, and

Profession Experience

We are introducing a new progression system: villagers now gain experience in their respective professions and improve their skills over time. Each time a production cycle is completed, the assigned worker earns experience in their current profession. As experience accumulates, efficiency increases. Importantly, experience is profession-specific, working as a lumberjack

A Living Village: Economy, Society, and Social Progression

Today we want to give you a deeper look into the economic and social systems of our villages. One of our core goals is to make your settlement feel alive, not just functional, but socially evolving. To achieve this, we are reworking the current villager “level” system into a clear

The Road Ahead 2026

Looking Back at 2025 2025 marked an important step forward for Colossus. With the release of a new version, the project moved beyond pure groundwork and began to show clearer shape and direction. Core systems were expanded, new layers of depth were introduced, and the game took a noticeable step