Chickens, as they stand, could use some improvement. I usually improve them with the addition of bacon and barbecue sauce, but Maia developer Simon Roth has made them more intelligent, given them their own wants and needs, and convinced the birds to socialise with other chickens. Oh and he's also added scenario missions to his sci-fi sandbox sim, and changed a load of other stuff too.

Patch 0.51 is detailed here, and also makes better use of 64-bit operating systems, adds stations out in the wilderness that you can refill colonists' suits at, chucks in colonist animations to let you know when they're hungry etc, and lets robots delegate jobs to other robots, the workshy gits. There's a lot of other stuff, but the main takeaway, apart from the chickens, is those three scenario missions.

"In addition to the existing sandbox, Maia now has 3 standalone scenario missions with directed gameplay. Fleshing out Maia's hard science fiction narrative and lore, players now have several hours worth of missions with many more hours to be added in the upcoming months."

Those three scenarios have you building a colony (you should be pretty good at that by now), surviving an arctic winter on a remote research station, and studying an equatorial jungle.

Maia seems to be coming on leaps and bounds, or as leapy and boundy as a game that's been in Early Access for around a year can be. It's not quite cooked enough for me to take a bite yet, but I do like checking in on it now and again. If you're the same as me (or if you've actually bought the thing), you'll be pleased to hear that another biggish update has just been applied, adding a 3D printer for 3D printing little robots, a botany station for researching plants, bodybags (for there not being rotten bodies everywhere), and various bug fixes and tweaks.

The most sizeable addition appears to be the aforementioned botany stuff, which will let you send your little people and robots out into the wild to harvest plants. Plants can be researched to unlock new technologies—technologies such as the 'Caesar Salad'. Probably. Look, I'm no biologist, but I do know food.

There aren't nearly enough ugly molerat creatures in this latest update, but it sounds like there's going to be an even more monstrous addition to the game next time. Developer Simon Roth says that we can "expect colonists to show their emotions, write useful base reports and even look forward to a new terrifying creature to sabotage your base" in update 0.47. Great, thanks a lot Simon, cheers for that.

Roth details version 0.46 in the above video. (Ta, PCGamesN.)