Alpha 0.60 is here! Lava can now rain down into your base, incinerating anything in its path. Here’s a video of me showing off the new features and changes to the game:

Lava

Lava, (perhaps more accurately, magma) is now in the game! Maps with high tectonic activity will run a huge risk of lava breaches, that will pour into your colony and destroy anything in its path. Watch as your equipment and colonists die gloriously in the all consuming fire. The system is a full 3d fluid smoothed particle hydrodynamics simulation so has realistically simulated viscosity, density and pressures all running in real time.

 

Memories.

All intelligences in the game now have a detailed long term memory, allowing them to to remember their actions, moods and feelings. In their emails, colonists will now comment on what they did in a day, why they did it, how they felt about it, how important it was and even details down to what the bases conditions were like at the time. Domestic and alien creatures will use their memory to make better choices in the future, such as returning to a place they found food or warmth.

 

Relationships

Colonists can now make friends, build relationships, fall in love and make enemies. The relationships will change their attitudes towards each other, their moods and their behaviour in the base. New interactions, such as arguments, following and shoving will come about as colonists get to know each other.

Interface improvements

The game’s zoom has been improved substantially to allow you to get in close to the action, and also to allow you to pull back for a wider overview of your colony.

Many small changes have been added to the user interface to improve object placement, such as wall-snapping auto-rotation of items and object-type rotation memory, to allow for consistent placement when placing several duplicate items. A small amount of latency has been reduced from the mouse movement which will also make things feel more responsive.

The new mission-day counter on the top right of the screen will give you a better feel for your base’s progress as you track the passage of time.

 

Other notable Changes:

• Plants can now be harvested earlier if needed. Priority is given to plants that are fully matured.
• Colonist food preparation priority increased.
• Extra detail added to colonist emails regarding food and base planning.
• Pressing escape from the options menu now takes you back to the game.
• IMP digging cancel requests no longer pop up if there are no dig orders.
• Colonists can now request to disable the alarms for a short period of time.
• Game window buffer swap now performed before the frame end sleep, to improve responsiveness.
• Tweak for world gen to prevent jungle worlds!
• If water need is higher than food need, the colonists may now eat to fulfil it too.
• Colonist water need only hijacks food need if need is greater than 50%
• Eating now gives a bit more water.
• Solar arrays now correctly advertising food need to the vox nocturna.
• Geothermal generator now repairable by robots.
• Twilight Zone mission ending and some text fixed.
• Colonists will no longer go outside without suits to shoot or inspect downed aliens.
• Fix and tweaks for medical room items build priority.
• Chance of leg or arm fracture from earthquake reduced down to 2% for each.
• When choice to torch medical beds is given and dismissed colonists will only have a 25% chance of getting gastric distress instead of 100%.
• Fix for geothermal generators causing colonists to go outside without suits on.
• Sitting on the floor was not giving colonists enough rest. Therefore if you did not build colonists beds before they got tired your base would become very unmanageable.
• Entire world object placement generation code updated. Must faster now, and you will always have some creatures on the map.
• Colonists have a little more water in their bodies now.
• Sweating reduced when dehydrated.
• Sweating reduced to two litres per hour equivalent. If a colonist has one litres of sweat on their body, sweating now stops.
• Fix for announcer bugs.
• Food prep priorities tweaked a little bit.
• Object destruction order priorities tweaked on many objects. Fossils are rarer. So less likely to jam up your storage room in the early game.
• Gaps removed from emails.
• Multithreading improved for systems with four or more cores.

As you may be aware, we are rapidly approaching beta, so do send us all your bugs and issues. The estimated date for the 1.0 release of Maia is now the end of May.

That’s all for now. If you like these updates be sure to drop us feedback via Twitter and Steam reviews.