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Number of colonist limit

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Nametab87

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Feb 19, 2021
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Hello all,

So I have been playing this game for the past few days. I am currently on day 231 and I hit a max population of 109 only once. Everyone seems to be dying off and they are not producing kids quickly enough to fill the gap. Is 100 or so the cap for population size? Is there a way to have a large population?

Not sure if it matters but I am playing on the Xbox.

Thank you in advance!
 
The game has two caps. A 'soft' cap at 100 where no additional settlers will show up to join you at your gate (But you can still get more settlers via children, or more via quests and similar events), and a 'hard' cap at 150 where you can never exceed that amount.

People have children more when they're happy, so to boost birthrates give everyone the very best housing, lots of +happiness buildings, the best meals you can give them, and always choose happiness over additional goods when given quest choices.
 
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lonewolfe10 said:
Can this number be made higher i find i never have enough people to do the jobs i need. maybe add 100 to each?
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Agreed. Not sure when this cap was introduced because at one point I had a colony of about 184. Right now I have have housing for 150+ and over 6,000 food stored and I'm stuck at just over 100. I need more workers and carriers and with the size of the map allotted, I can easily accommodate a colony upwards of 500 or more people. 200-250 doesn't seem like asking for too much. If you get too many survivors at the gate and can't accommodate them, you can always turn them away.
 
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It was capped to prevent running issues while in early access, the cap was raised a little while back so at 100 you won't have people arrive at your gate and your birth rate stops but you can still get them from events such as slavers or the sick grandparent event. I think the "hard cap" is currently 150 at which point you can no longer get anymore.

As resource and power hungry as it is, make sure you upgrade all your extractors to be automatic ones as that frees up colonists to do other jobs and I only keep one med hospital staffed with 1 person unless I have a sudden surge in patients or about to experience fallout or pandemic catastrophe.
 
Hey all!

So indeed, for now there is a cap on the population. This is to ensure the game is still working relatively smoothly - while we are in early access, we cannot optimize the game as much as we can so bigger colonies could mean a heavy hit on the performance of the game, even on high-end devices.

We are looking to increase the cap or remove it completely as soon as we can - but for now, it will still have to be in place. The current cap is indeed 100 for survivor groups and 150 for new births - after this you can still get colonists, but only from the random events that spawn at the gate.

Hope this information helps! Thanks all for your comments here and of course, thanks for playing!
 
Joanna_ifs said:
Hey all!

So indeed, for now there is a cap on the population. This is to ensure the game is still working relatively smoothly - while we are in early access, we cannot optimize the game as much as we can so bigger colonies could mean a heavy hit on the performance of the game, even on high-end devices.

We are looking to increase the cap or remove it completely as soon as we can - but for now, it will still have to be in place. The current cap is indeed 100 for survivor groups and 150 for new births - after this you can still get colonists, but only from the random events that spawn at the gate.

Hope this information helps! Thanks all for your comments here and of course, thanks for playing!
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So, this isn't good enough. I'm not enjoying the game at all, thanks to the lack of colonists. I came here looking for a fix, a hope, an assurance that it was noted and being corrected, because as far as I'm concerned, it's a fun-destroying bug. But your whole, "no, it's by design so deal with it," just pissed me right off.
This game is full of bugs. And we put A LOT of our time and effort into this game to help you make it better. So when we come to you and say collectively that this game needs more people, don't tell us where to go. We need more people. Lift the damn cap and fix the bugs.

On a side note. Speaking of bugs, it has been well over what? 18 months since I've been playing this game and we still have the same bugs. It still crashes when I try and save sometimes, it still crashes during meteor storms and it still crashes randomly for absolutely no reason throughout the game. And while it's a pain in the backside to report these on the controller time and again and see you do nothing about them.
We're early access players, we pay for the game and contribute for it to improve and expect it to, you know, improve.
Remove the damn cap. I'm sick of scrounging for people.
 
Fox Emerson said:
So, this isn't good enough. I'm not enjoying the game at all, thanks to the lack of colonists. I came here looking for a fix, a hope, an assurance that it was noted and being corrected, because as far as I'm concerned, it's a fun-destroying bug. But your whole, "no, it's by design so deal with it," just pissed me right off.
This game is full of bugs. And we put A LOT of our time and effort into this game to help you make it better. So when we come to you and say collectively that this game needs more people, don't tell us where to go. We need more people. Lift the damn cap and fix the bugs.

On a side note. Speaking of bugs, it has been well over what? 18 months since I've been playing this game and we still have the same bugs. It still crashes when I try and save sometimes, it still crashes during meteor storms and it still crashes randomly for absolutely no reason throughout the game. And while it's a pain in the backside to report these on the controller time and again and see you do nothing about them.
We're early access players, we pay for the game and contribute for it to improve and expect it to, you know, improve.
Remove the damn cap. I'm sick of scrounging for people.
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We do recognize the issue and have noted it - I am sorry if this did not come across from my earlier message. We are right now working on making some bigger changes to the overall performance of the game - I have mentioned it in other posts already in the forums here that for example, our next patch will include an overhaul of the colonist AI. With these performance updates, we will eventually be able to raise the cap and at some point, remove it completely. We do know that this needs to happen, otherwise you just won't have enough colonists to make any colony run smoother.

These same performance fixes are also being made to address the other issues you mentioned - game crashing during catastrophes and when saving. The main issue that causes these are issues with the memory usage of the game. There have been some improvements already before, but not enough - I fully admit that. And that is why we have dedicated people working on fixing the memory issues that cause the crashes to happen.

While it may not always look like it, we do take the time to read through both the forums and all the feedback we get through the ladybug in the game - and we investigate each reported issue as its own to ensure we don't miss any issues. Sometimes it takes time to get something fixed - a really long time if the issue itself is a more difficult one than it looks like on the surface. Not trying to make excuses, just really trying to say that we do our best.

I'll bring up the cap again and try and enforce at least an increase on it - the overall performance might not be able to take complete removal of it, but with the changes and improvements, we should be able to at least increase it.

Again, thanks for your comments and more importantly, thanks for sticking with us and playing the game!
 
Joanna_ifs said:
We do recognize the issue and have noted it - I am sorry if this did not come across from my earlier message. We are right now working on making some bigger changes to the overall performance of the game - I have mentioned it in other posts already in the forums here that for example, our next patch will include an overhaul of the colonist AI. With these performance updates, we will eventually be able to raise the cap and at some point, remove it completely. We do know that this needs to happen, otherwise you just won't have enough colonists to make any colony run smoother.

These same performance fixes are also being made to address the other issues you mentioned - game crashing during catastrophes and when saving. The main issue that causes these are issues with the memory usage of the game. There have been some improvements already before, but not enough - I fully admit that. And that is why we have dedicated people working on fixing the memory issues that cause the crashes to happen.

While it may not always look like it, we do take the time to read through both the forums and all the feedback we get through the ladybug in the game - and we investigate each reported issue as its own to ensure we don't miss any issues. Sometimes it takes time to get something fixed - a really long time if the issue itself is a more difficult one than it looks like on the surface. Not trying to make excuses, just really trying to say that we do our best.

I'll bring up the cap again and try and enforce at least an increase on it - the overall performance might not be able to take complete removal of it, but with the changes and improvements, we should be able to at least increase it.

Again, thanks for your comments and more importantly, thanks for sticking with us and playing the game!
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Thanks. Apologies for the heavy criticism, I wrote it right after yet another game crash, which happened after I was enjoying the game, but never had enough people. The game can be really good, in fact, if there were no crashes and some minor fixes - such as the above, this is quite easily a 5 star game.
 
How am I suppoused to rebuild civilization with only 100 people?! I need more citizens, no cap! This throws a wrench to my youtube series D:

But I understand the devs, the game needs more time in the oven before that can be demanded from it. If they say they want to make it no cap but are unable to right now, then I trust them and I will wait :) from now, I will keep building and expanding, in order to be able to take the extra people once the time comes :D
 
Thanks to both for the added comments - and I totally do understand the frustration that comes from losing progress when a game crashes - definitely something we want to get fixed as soon as possible, but just has proven to be a lot more difficult than originally thought (more on this in the other thread).

Thanks for the trust! We really are doing our best and it is awesome to hear that you do enjoy the game, even now with all of its bugs and issues :)
 
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Hi!
I got troubles too with the lack of people and found the answer here..
So with the elders and the kids (at school !) I don't have a lot of valid workers ..
After made alls the research tree , it was very frustating to have finally only above 75% of the production chains of this tree..
With the maintenance, the workshop and the tailors , that took soon above 10% of the active people..

if my 5 poors mines works alone ( only one is uppgraded ! ) ... i lost too much production and must upgrade ALLS the mine of the map ??
whithout talking about the electricity and the maintenance..
Anyways , i will try a way to test the others productions.; and hope that's cap will be removed the more quickly possible !
To me ,actually , the game works very fine, never got a crasched , the save are very quick ! ( too !may be ?) it is a Banished'like with the fun of the Specialisst and a lot of others things ... but I am far away from 5000 people around a market ! :)
Today 05/04, after read a lot of critics about "Endzone" , I may qualified my decision because this game was unplayabled after more than 150 people... and seems very randomness and very less fun than this one .!!
Sorry for my english, it was not my native langage.
 
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@Wuik Hi! First of all, welcome to the forums and the Aftermath!

Thanks for the feedback - we do know that the softcap can affect the colony in a big way and we are working hard on improving the performance of the game and the colonists so that we could increase the colonist limit soon! And hopefully eventually remove the limit completely!

Really happy to hear you are enjoying the game, thanks again for the feedback and of course, thanks for playing!
 
As a suggestion, perhaps there could be an option to turn the cap off in the settings, with the warning that "turning off the cap might trigger performance issues"? That would allow people with more powerful rigs to have larger colonies, while also sparing performance on less computationally-powerful machines.
 
@Shadowstrike Thanks for your suggestion! While this in theory is something we could add, we want to focus our energy more on fixing the performance issues so that the softcap could be extended for all or even removed - while the suggestion itself is a simple one, implementing it would take time and resources away from other features in the game.

I'll bring it up with the rest of the team nonetheless - just no promises or guarantees!
 
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This was a great help reading all of the posts here. I'm playing on xbox atm. I'm sitting at 162-170 depending on death to born ratio. And thought it was odd that im not getting anymore survivors at my gate now I know why. The game is also running great. I have the occasional colonist getting stuck or even in a loop. Like they go to pick something up then have an ADD moment and walk away without it then run right back to it and do the same. Its an easy fix tho I just reload the game and it's fine. It would be cool if we could get some colonists from other groups. Does this cap also affect the ability to get more specialists? I sent 2 away to make outposts cause I didn't need 3 scientists anymore but the spits haven't been filled.
 
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Neeeewah said:
This was a great help reading all of the posts here. I'm playing on xbox atm. I'm sitting at 162-170 depending on death to born ratio. And thought it was odd that im not getting anymore survivors at my gate now I know why. The game is also running great. I have the occasional colonist getting stuck or even in a loop. Like they go to pick something up then have an ADD moment and walk away without it then run right back to it and do the same. Its an easy fix tho I just reload the game and it's fine. It would be cool if we could get some colonists from other groups. Does this cap also affect the ability to get more specialists? I sent 2 away to make outposts cause I didn't need 3 scientists anymore but the spits haven't been filled.
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The cap doesn't affect the Specialists coming in - they have their own cap of 10 (as you can see the slots in the Specialist selection bar on the top of the screen). If you have reached the population softcap already but don't have 10 Specialists, a survivor group with only the Specialist should arrive at some point - it'll look a bit funny, as it'll look similar to the normal one but just show 0 at Adults, Elders and Children, but it should show you the Specialist as before though :D
 
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