After several months of work Maia 0.68 has touched down. Watch my video below to see a quick overview of some of the new features and fixes.

This is the penultimate development version of Maia. The next update, 0.69 will take the game out of the early access program. This of course won’t be the last addition to the game and there are plenty of new and exciting things to come. (I’ll also be sticking to my no DLC policy, all main game content updates will remain free.)

If you enjoy Maia’s updates, but want to try them earlier, don’t forget to set your game to use the development beta branch on Steam which will give you access to my daily builds. (Right click on the game in your library, click properties and go to the beta tab.) We also have a new Discord server to report bugs and talk about the game. Leaving a review would also help us very much as we approach release.

This update brings the all new fire fighting utility robot. This nifty little machine will dart across your base to extinguish the inevitable conflagrations of your poorly maintained colony. If you need a more hands on approach it is of course fully controllable in first person too.

New AI behaviours have been bestowed on the animals, robots and alien creatures in the game, adding many new avenues for emergent game-play. Chickens now can be startled and will flock dynamically to avoid perceived danger. But don’t worry, they’ll also now nest on many items in the game, providing plenty of annoyance to your colonists and plethora of new and exciting fire hazards.

Colonists are more aware of the actions you take and will sometimes mention if they think you followed their advice and will also comment on what they think of new equipment. They’ll also produce more detailed emails and discuss new topics such as the weather, storms and climate and how it’s affecting the base and it’s inhabitants.

The alien creatures of the planet have had many of their territorial behaviours improved and will now migrate independently in herds on and off the mission area. The changes will also see them attacking your bases in a smarter ways, leading to more dramatic incursions.

Your IMP robots are now more fragile and can be seriously damaged by earthquakes and have their circuits scrambled by solar events. You’ll also want to keep them happy as they can now take action against your poor management, hijack your email system and organise a labour movement. Listen carefully and you’ll hear IMP robot’s new voice-over lines. They’ll comment on the awful state of your base, provide snide but perhaps useful observations of your colonists and go on endlessly about how depressed the doors are making them.

The base announcer now has twice as many lines detailing equipment state and supplies, and several new call outs for the colonists. Several of the announcements note ongoing progress in the base that will save you from watching every unboiled kettle.

The new rename tool allows you to set a callsign for any item, room, animal, plant, colonist or robot in the game. The new name will appear in the quick selection menus and emails to help you better manage your base.

The mouse over information on unbuilt objects now states any recent attempts to build an item and if those are still ongoing or if the colonist has given up and why. The base manifest has had another pass too with a new layout with more information and an easier to read format.

But that’s not all. There are a lot of changes to the game.

• Meteors can now break up and hit your outdoor equipment.
• Fresh meteors produce more research data when sampled.
• Colonists body bagging corpses now pick up food and building materials from the dead.
• Colonist food preparation need increased when there is little food.
• Colonists looking for somewhere to shiver (show hypothermia) will tend towards warmer places.
• Colonists no longer wait for an escort if there is a turret within 30 metres of the destination.
• Colonist choice of airlock when suiting up fixed on complex multi entrance bases.
• Fix for colonists getting stuck in a panic cycle when patrolling towards creatures.
• Change for colonist power generation needs balancing due to bug calculating current wattage.
• Earthquakes now need to be a little stronger to hurt colonists.
• Placement of objects that colonist need to get on and off now requires more space to stop players boxing colonists in accidentally.
• Research generated from sleeping reduced.
• Colonists will no longer come up with new research data if they already have 64mb of data on them.
• Wait added to dog movement to make them more likely to follow move orders.
• New research perk: HUMAN BODY LANGUAGE AI ANALYSIS. To allow utility bots to move faster down corridors.
• Biosythesised Antibiotics research perk hooked up.
• Ablative armour research fixed.
• Creature lure research added for sight and scent lures.
• Flywheels, turrets, wind turbines and solar stills, degrade slightly slower depending on conditions.
• IMP first person labels updated.
• IMP mineral drops now limited.
• IMP method for finding storage space now requires a larger clear area.
• IMPs no longer use incomplete body storage.
• IMP first person now uses camera movement key bindings.
• Minerals complaint email now takes into account contents of the hopper.
• Minerals in hopper now tracked (Manifest screen now includes hopper Minerals.)
• More information added to the colonist identity structure.
• Power report emails now include a maximum theoretical output.
• Wait between colonist popups choice increased.
• Fix for missing electricity graph label on wall screens.
• In game crew selection added.
• More colonist misc inventory items.
• Turret range increased up to 20m.
• All first person text now has shadows for easier reading
• Email for when megacephalalgia and other creatures destroy surface equipment.
• Creature lure scent added for Megacephs.
• Synapsid creature eating code clean up.
• Synapsid creature now more susceptible to lures.
• Fix for molerat contaminating livestock with millions of exterior plants.
• Protobird will now ignore items that are on fire when invading your base.
• Sounds for colonist pistol bullets hitting metal or meat added.
• Rewrite of code dealing with reactions to invading creatures for more dramatic attacks.
• Creature wander position generation bug fix.
• Nitrate boost mode added to crop planters.
• Portable solar array’s now close when clicked.
• Solar energy generation now more impacted by settled ground snow on panels.
• Countdown for power and colonist report emails now written to and loaded from save file.
• World generation cleaned up.
• Chickens panic when near fire.
• Chickens send a new transmission when dead.
• Creatures placement changed to ensure better placement.
• Plant sample container now requires a click to transmit collected data to the terminal computer.
• Placement of various items tweaked on world generation.
• Create colonist landing issue fixed with ignoring airlock pos.
• Dining table now tracks how many meals have been eaten.
• Message system brownout warning fixed.
• Infotips cleaned up for many items.
• Super capacitors, Fusion and Fission reactors now need associated research to build.
• Fix for megacephs incorrectly performing actions when they had not reached their target.
• Removed error from megaceph for distant attacks on wind turbines.
• Circuit breaker room detection fixed.
• UI focus fixed with several pop ups.
• Fission reactor shutdown on low fuel and damage.
• Fission reactor output reduced to that of a experimental system.
• Fusion reactor interaction points moved out.
• Subtle vector screen flickering effect added to UI borders.
• Utility robot movement fixed so it’s no longer backwards.
• Power requirement for scanner added.
• Agent path to targets optimised.
• Corrections in warning emails.
• Materials hopper resized.
• Research tape pick up bug fixed.
• Email for when the game can not find a lander location.
• More famous (British) author names added to generation list (Kickstarter names coming soon!).
• Fix for ascii rendering error on text glitch effect.
• Fix for unbuildable aesthetic plant pots due to no propagator.
• Lava code cleaned up and optimised for different system types.
• IMP invisibility fix and NAN glitch.
• Colonists no longer wait for an escort if there is a turret within 30 metres of the destination.
• Large sections of game and engine code cleaned, modernised and made more portable.
• Save compatibility lock set to new 0.68 save implementation.
• Load times have been greatly improved with several save optimisations.
• Mission saving expanded.
• Check to see if building facility is valid before making build order.
• Async thread waits on load to ensure no data corruption.
• Sound options menu added with slider interfaces.
• Objective tracker no longer culls objectives that are waiting on a countdown timer to launch an event.
• SN1572 mission start made easier.
• Potential crash to AI player fixed.
• Escape can now be pressed to go back from a menu.
• Text input in the console and in game improved.
• Escape can now quit out colonist selection screen.
• So many spelling corrections.
• Tutorial line switched from double click to middle click to prioritise builds.
• Tutorial now ticks off keypresses and scrolling faster.
• Change so game does not force a screen native resolution when saving a windowed screen state.
• Fix for crash caused by pathfinding cache corruption.
• Updated to a new Microsoft compiler to fix the random crash bug plaguing the game caused by their broken Async implementation.
• SDL update to 2.0.8
• [There were a few more but I’ve maxed the character limit on this post!]

If you’re playing the game for the first time I would suggest watching the 0.67 video guide, as it will help you pick up many of the things the tutorial has to skip in the name of brevity.

Remember you can read every single commit I make to the repo on dev.maiagame.com. If you are enjoying the huge amount of work going into the game, don’t forget to update or leave a review and send me your feedback.