Maia News — June 25, 2020
Aggregated from Steam, cross-tracked with Battle.net coverage on GamePatchNote.
About time for an update!
Wildfires.
Raging infernos can now spread through the game world mercilessly incinerating everything in their path.
Keep your base clear of ground cover or risk being caught up in conflagration. These “rapid oxidation” events can be triggered by faulty equipment, explosions, tracer rounds and even the soft landing rockets on the capsules. High winds and sustained droughts heighten the dangers of the blaze.
Desertification
The planet's soil is now even more accurately simulated with erosion, soil stability, drainage, fertility and microbiomes all being computed.
Ground stripped of foliage by colonists, fauna or fire will eventually become desertified as the wind and rain relentlessly ravage the landscape. The dust from this depleted ground makes for poor foundations and can damage equipment.
Balance and AI tweaks
The need for repairs for many items has been adjusted to ensure the colonists are more productive in the early and mid game. Priorities for repairing have been shifted to favour repair bots in the later game to ensure research doesn’t slow down or stop entirely as your base is consumed by entropy.
Interface changes
Removing room tiles now requires holding a right-click. This should reduce issues with accidental misclicks.
A progress bar has been added to loading sequences to give a better indication of time remaining. Several optimisations will mean that loading times are also significantly shorter.
Windowing has been improved to allow for high DPI monitors, better 4k support and Windows scaling options. The missing window icon has been readded.
Graphical improvements
The particle system has been revamped, new effects added and many older effects such as the smoke and fire have been improved to look more realistic.
Several graphical issues leading to stability problems on some systems have been patched to ensure your base building is uninterrupted.
Full modding support.
New game objects can now be created using a fully featured scripting interface. The system uses Squirrel, a language similar to LUA, that looks like C++ and has many modern language features and great performance. I will be releasing more documentation for this very soon, in the meantime if you want to start learning how to make mods join the Discord.
Coming soon:
- Native fauna planting and rewilding.
- Ground water extraction and irrigation systems.
- More colonist variety.
- New equipment and AI.
- Several GUI changes.
- Modding documentation and mesh importers.
The build is already live on Windows and will be going out on Linux later this evening. To see changes as they happen you can check out dev.maiagame.com.
Despite the large changes, older saves are supported. If you have any issues loading an existing map, start a fresh exploration mode, and load, and the game will fix the save.
That's it for now. Join the Discord and come show us your fancy base designs!