It’s update time and Maia 0.62 has been deemed fit for consumption! Here’s a quick video of me showing off some of the latest features I’ve been working on.
Alien Breeding and Parenting Behaviours
More of the alien creatures can now breed and produce a flock of tiny cute murder machines. This will change how they protect their territories, react to colonists, and also feed back into the simulation of the ecosystem in new and emergent ways.
Baby creatures, and animals of all sorts, will now imprint on the first thing they see and follow and copy their new parent. So be sure to keep your livestock room doors locked unless you want your dogs to become unsuspecting parents to your hatchling chickens.
Fear
Colonists will now sometimes break down and run away from something if it terrifies them, such as an alien sneaking into the base or an out of control fire breaking out. They will go cower and cry and feel guilty about how much of a burden they are to the colony.
When trapped in rooms colonists will start getting very upset and start banging on doors to try and escape. Leaving them in the room will deeply upset them, potentially damaging their sanity causing them to harm equipment or themselves!
Fine Dining
Colonists can now sit down at the dining table for relaxing communal meals in the living area, allowing them to rest, eat and socialise simultaneously.
They can can also now deposit raw food supplies in the storage room if there is a surplus of production. These can be picked up later to build ration packs or to fill a food preparation station.
Deep Learning
Colonists can now learn skills by practising them, once a new skill is leant it will allow the colonist to perform the action better, faster or more often. They can also sit at desks to learn new expertise in theory, saving themselves the effort and bringing more exotic skill sets to your colony.
Other major changes:
- Fix for locked doors blocking nearby objects.
- Loads of new detail and variants in colonist activity report emails.
- Colonist activity reports added for building rooms, panicking, and shooting animals.
- New 32 exe for Windows users. Stop using 32 bit Windows, please, join us in the future.
- Turret tracer effect added. Turret PFX updated.
- Several object placement problems fixed (such as nearby blocked objects stopping you placing something).
- Higher density of grass, foliage and creatures on the exterior world map.
- Button flashing added for new emails to grab the user’s attention faster.
- Fusion reactor now requires you to initiate a power up. This will require many fly wheels or super capacitors.
- Fly wheels and super capacitors have a higher capacity to better represent future materials. This now makes a larger solar powered base more feasible.
- Smelting rebalanced.
- Colonist stockpiling needs balanced.
- Rebalancing of lighting.
- Colour grade changed.
- New animated volumetric fog outside.
- Lava fluid simulation optimised.
- Body KJ of energy for creatures changed which should lead to different hunger and carrion behaviours.
- Bug with air vents settings fixed.
- Crop blight tweaked to be slightly less predicable.
- Several maintenance needs tweaked for different items.
- Pips added to the GUI between emails to denote the differences in specific days.
- Fixed several door pathfinding fixes.
- Massive performance optimisations on several core systems. (40% better frame rate in some cases).
- Many small optimisation fixes.
- Fixes for several missing pfx in the exterior and lava.
- Large amounts of code cleanup on game and engine.
- A few potential crash bugs fixed.
Maia is now undergoing very regular changes. Sometimes several a day. Get on the development branch if you’d like to be part of this transition from Alpha to Beta. The 1.0 release for Maia is now set for August so I need all the help I can get with testing.
That’s all for now. If you like these updates be sure to drop us feedback via Twitter and Steam reviews.