Maia was one of the first Early Access games I covered, appearing on Steam way back in 2013. My brief, disastrous playthrough of the colony management sim stuck with me for a long time, mostly because my colonists kept sending me haiku. Maia hits 1.0 today, and the haiku are still there. 

I started a new colony last night and was already in trouble by the end of the tutorial. It was too chilly, there wasn’t enough power, my colonists were sleeping on the ground—the tutorial had told me how to fix most of those problems, but it’s easier said than done. The only thing keeping the colony going was this cat dressed up as a bee. 

Haiku, cats in costumes—Maia is a bit silly. It’s full of disasters and crises and people dying because apparently humans need oxygen, but it just about managed to avoid being grim. Not that I didn’t feel guilty when one of my colonists keeled over and just had to lie there because, whoops, I still hadn’t constructed beds, let alone a medical room.

There are loads of extremely important things a colony needs, even to just get through the first few days in tact, but you begin with almost nothing. Some supplies, a storage room and an airlock are all you get. Straight away, lots of space needs to be carved out of the rock and rooms need to be built, along with all the stuff that goes in them, from workshop tables to repair robots.  

With all these demands, it can verge on hectic, but the only things you can directly control are machines. Colonists can be influenced, but they’re also at the mercy of their bodies—simulated down to how sweaty they are—and moods. In my experience, they rarely rush. That’s probably because most of them were tired and freezing. 

There was light at the end of the tunnel, though. Beds were finally being built, I’d figured out why I kept running out of power and the hydroponics room was finally producing food. Things were looking up! Then I got a message from one of my colonists. The scanner had picked up something anomalous in the potatoes. My poor, tasty potatoes. It could have been nothing, but I wasn’t willing to take the risk. 

We burned all of the potatoes. 

The launch version includes a story-driven campaign, more rooms and systems, and multiple bases. I think the latter might be a bit ambitious for me; I’ll wait until I can keep a few humans, a cat and some chickens alive first. 

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.)