This updates focuses on deepening the gameplay experience with improvements to many core mechanics and user interface. We’ve worked using your feedback to fix all the small issues and to make the game much more accessible, engaging and Fun!

Smart Stockpiling

Colonists can now stockpile building materials on the shelves in the storage room. Allowing you to manually build up reserves for future expansion and also keep your base neat and tidy.

Food Preparation Station

No longer will colonists have to crouch on the storage room floor to consume their necessary nutrients. The preparation station allows hungry colonists to get their meals ready in a better, more sanitary environment. It also allows for fast automated processing and stockpiling of crops and meat, allowing for larger more efficient bases.

UI Changes

A new object cycler has been added to improve the object placement interface. Allowing you to quickly select the items you want to build. Interaction points on nearby items will also fade in and out to better illustrate the most efficient ways to place items in crowded rooms.

Email and notification information has been added as well as several new notification and GUI sounds. Text will appear at the top of the screen to let you know what type of message is being received.

Many new mouse over infotips have been added and several older ones improved for clarity and humour.

Change list:

Greater email complexity and feedback from colonists regarding rooms and base equipment.

Colonists can no longer gorge themselves repeatedly at the ration packs.

Object destruction needs balanced to take into account more than building materials.

Fossils are now taken to storage and are now destroyable by colonists.

The Spathiphyllum plant can now be found in the game. They have also been balanced for atmosphere generation and aesthetic properties.

Landers and Microwave towers can now be removed as intended.

Objects have improved visuals when being placed and cycled through.

Pausing the game now stops the countdown timer.

Megacephalalgia now stay dead.

Several IMP pathfinding issues fixed.

Interaction points interference detection improved.

Many game and UI sounds tweaked and improved.

Broccoli deletion crash fix.

Several instability issues have been solved.

Starting materials fix.

Black Screen crash fixed for a few cases.

Entity name changes.

Spalling and, grammar chunges.

Fix for several mouse over issues.

Object destruction issues fixed. If an object is destroyed it’s parent object is too.

Parent objects now get marked for destruction by their children.

Fix for multipart objects not having shadows.

Fix for offset in pathfinding room physics mesh intersections, this should fix many bugs including walking through door frames.

Fix for “base” being said instead of the correct room in announcements.

Fix for inaccuracy in wall readouts in small rooms.

Wall heater tweaks, build priority now better linked to the temperature at the position of the heater.

Gameworld cleanup improved on loading.

Removed redundant shaders and optimised loading

Several Memory issues fixed.

Memory buffer fixes.

Support for variable refresh rates for Gsync and Freesync monitors.

Code base modernisation to C++11 and C++14 standards.

We’re looking forward to update 0.57 which we’re already working on.The update will focuses on sicknesses, diagnosis, treatment and first aid. To see live development head over to dev.maiagame.com.

We hope you enjoy this update, please let us know what you think over on the Maia forums or on Twitter.