SCUM, the multiplayer survival sandbox, takes archery very seriously. Sure, the latest development video describes an arrow as looking like a "big pink dildo", but the level of detail in its archery system honestly seems astounding. It's definitely a lot more complicated than pointing and shooting. 

First off, there are different kinds of bows. There's the improvised bow, essentially a crafted longbow; a recurve bow, smaller but more powerful; and a compound bow, a modern bow that is easier to use and possible to customise. Depending on your bow, you'll need to change where you're aiming, and you might be more likely to break your string. 

In the video, you can see how physics affects the weapon, as well as its projectiles. When you fire an arrow, for instance, all of its pent up energy is released, making it wobble as it cuts through the air. This mimics the 'archer's paradox', a real archery phenomenon where it looks like the arrow would not be able to hit its target because the bow is in the way. Logically, it should veer off in another direction, but because arrows don't actually fly straight, it bends around the bow and hits a rabbit or convict or whatever else you're trying to kill. 

Different arrow types can also be found and crafted, each with their own benefits and drawbacks, like how stiff or bendy they are. The arrow's spine stiffness is simulated, though it's been turned off until the devs finish the arrow tuning feature, which let you do your best Robin Hood impression, pulling off trick shots and firing around corners. 

I once hit a stationary (wooden) deer with a bow and arrow, but frankly I'm learning a lot more from this video. Just like real life, however, archery in SCUM requires a bit of skill. Thankfully the archery skill is easier to learn in-game, but you'll also want to make sure you're strong and dexterous, too. Like all the game's other weapons, you can half-arse it, firing arrows without any skill at all—just expect to miss a lot.

SCUM is currently in Early Access. 

Scum, the multiplayer survival game with an oddly specific focus on dicks, finally has playable female characters. Introduced in today's Maneater update, the first iteration of women prisoners is still somewhat limited compared to the male characters, but they do have one thing in common. 

"Just like our male prisoners have a penis slider, our female prisoners have a breast slider. It works the same way for both," developer Gamepires explained. "At the moment there are still no tattoos on our ladies! Don't panic, though, because we're adding them ASAP, time wasn't on our side and we had to prioritize." 

Female characters currently have three head variants to choose from, and there are "also some really neat things we'd like you to discover by yourself," the studio wrote. That could include an "uncensored" version of the new in-game models (because of course it does), although "you're on your own when it comes to finding it," the studio wrote. 

The update also promises significant performance improvements that should dramatically cut down on lag and FPS drops, particularly on lower-end CPUs and higher-end GPUs. The first iteration of base-building is in place with "simple defenses and some functional items," although for now they can only be built in certain areas (no building in cities or bases), and the inventory system has been overhauled, which will improve performance and make it easier for developers to implement new features in the future. 

The new Mission System teased earlier this year is live, which is a pretty big thing, and features a tutorial mission so new players can get into the action more quickly. Cars are finally repairable following the update, beards can be grown (each head type has its own hairstyle), and there are now safe zones, complete with discos featuring music from F.O.R.M. and "better security than our servers."   

The update also fixes a handful of bugs, adds a new page to the ongoing Scum comic, and asks players to "be kind and leave some fresh water outside for animals" now that summer is here. Unfortunately, the release of the Maneater update means another server wipe, but the good news is that it also hits pause on a previously-announced plan to boost the price of the game with this update: For now, Scum will continue to be available for $20/£16/€17. 

The latest patch for open-world survival game Scum adds new areas to the world map, including an extensive underground coal mine and 24 islands off the coast of the main island.

Those new islands are bare for now, "but with time interesting things will pop up on them for you to find", the dev team said in the patch notes.

The underground portion of the coal mine is empty too, but the devs have said that it will be filled soon. It looks pretty deep, judging by the photos below, and has a set of buildings above ground that you can explore. 

The patch also adds the lever-action M1887 shotgun, which fires 12 gauge shells, and new colour variations for the pick-up truck.

It also reworks lockpicking to make it harder to bust open doors. The angle you need to unlock a door is now more precise, and lockpicks only have four uses, with advanced lock picks granting six uses. Screwdrivers, which previously never broke, can now only been used 40 times.

Lastly, the patch disables item storing in world containers, which was causing issues for players. It's a temporary solution to the problem, and you can still store items in chests, on your character and in vehicles.

Oh, and the team will be releasing a new Scum comic every week—you can view a sneak preview of the first one here.

The developers of Scum, the open-world survival game with the dressable, growable, uncontrollable dongs, have shared their development plans for the next three months. If those plans go well, they'll bring new vehicle physics to the game, base building, a complete overhaul of the inventory system, and reworks to the cooking and metabolism systems. 

"Right now, the vehicle mechanics in the game are still very basic, but we’re going to try and push more towards realism. For example, the car’s center of gravity will shift depending on the number of people in the car," the update says. The vehicle damage system is also being changed, "which means the car will react differently depending on whether you shot at its tire or the engine." 

Cars can be claimed, locked, lockpicked, hotwired, and refueled. Damaged cars—because you know that's going to happen—will be repairable. Players will also be given a new, upgradeable "driving skill," which will impact their abilities behind the wheel, and eventually they'll be able to shoot from within vehicles as well, although that's further down the road. 

The initial run at base building will be "very basic," with players getting the ability to build a house from a blueprint, the same way they currently build shelters. But the developers are also working on other "urban assets" including a quarry, a mine, a mental hospital, an old castle, a salt mine, an observatory, and a whole new city—exactly the sorts of things you'd expect to run across on a desert island dumping ground for psycho killers.

Updates to the "clunky and unintuitive" inventory will be both visual and mechanical: The new system will enable players to stack and rotate items, the "vicinity function" is changing, and cars and chests will also get their own inventory space. New skills and weapons are also coming, as are Scum's first missions, a proper tutorial, and achievements, which will be either funny or cringey depending on how it all shakes out. 

The one bump in the roadmap is that the plan to add female characters, which the developers had hoped to have in place for Valentine's Day, has been postponed. There's an obligatory "too hard to animate" joke in the update, but the developers said that the job really is a lot bigger than they initially expected. 

"Along the way we realized there’s a lot more to the whole thing and we can’t just stick a female model on the male mechanics and call it a day. Remember how we have this elaborate metabolism system and how I already mentioned that Bruno is reworking the cooking skill which also ties into the metabolism? Yeah, that. Every piece of clothing needs to be adjusted for the female body, too," they wrote. 

"This doesn’t mean we stopped working on the female characters—we still are, but we really don’t want to half-ass this, so we’ll just postpone them for a bit. I said for a bit, so please stop screaming, time is a social construct anyway." 

The team warned that all of this is contingent upon everything going to plan, which doesn't always happen, so don't take it as carved in stone. 

"We have calculated the amount of work we can do and we’re going to try our hardest to stick to it. That’s something we’re usually good at," the developers wrote. "However, any dev anywhere can confirm that you just never know. Life happens. People get sick. There might be an alien invasion and we all might die. Let’s hope that doesn’t happen, but if it does, don’t say we didn’t warn you."

Early Access Survival game Scum's winter update has landed and it's full of holiday cheer, complete with a snow-covered map, snowball fights, snowman-making, and even sleds you can find (or craft) to slip and slide down frosty hills. 'Tis the season! Even on an island filled with violent murderous criminals.

There are some other exciting goodies, too, like the first iteration of fortifications. Find a house you like and now you can make it yours by locking doors and barricading windows. You can purchase up to three locks per door using fame points, and there are three different levels of window barricade that take different amounts of damage to destroy. Naturally, with door locks comes a new lockpicking feature, though other players on your team can come and go as they please.

The winter update also comes with some bug fixes and balance changes, a new emote (heart hands), and if you happen to be a Scum supporter (meaning you not only own the game but also purchased the supporter pack) you'll get an additional gift in the form of a few different outfits you can put on your naked dick. How cute! I'm sure these banana warmers will look just spiffy combined with your human skin mask. 

And with all that fresh snow, it's best to bundle up. Here's a few more pictures from the update, and the complete patch notes are here:

Last week's Wild Hunter update to the online survival game Scum added bow and arrow skills, new animals to use them on, new musical instruments, and user-definable dongs. Amusingly, they weren't purely cosmetic: embiggening your wang requires the use of attribute points that could otherwise be put toward more useful characteristics, or you could shrink it up in exchange for a boost to your brain or biceps. 

As sometimes happens with such complex, interlocking systems, the rollout didn't go perfectly smoothly. Because of that, Gamepires released a hotfix today aimed at addressing some of the most pressing issues, including: 

• Bug fix where penis would get bigger with each login
• Fixed a bug where urinating would lock hands and penis if interrupted
• Fixed a bug where it was possible to increase penis size without it affecting other attributes

There are other, less phallus-focused (and phunny) changes, of course, including visual improvements and tweaks like decreased candle heat radius and increased sodium loss while urinating, and a wider frequency range for musical instruments. There's also a new "participation prize" of ten fame points for prisoners who stay in  game events until they're over, and new administrator commands that enable weather effects, visual bullet trajectories, and improved drone access.

The full rundown of Scum's dong nerf hotfix is available on Steam.

Videogames, broadly speaking, handle dongs in one of two ways: There's randomization, such as in Rust, and there's the user selectable, as seen in Conan Exiles. The multiplayer survival game Scum will be taking the latter approach in its upcoming Wild Hunter update, which will enable players to customize their wangs using the same attribute points that determine strength, stamina, and intelligence. 

A standalone slider for adjusting the size of your dong from one to ten inches can be seen in the peen screen up above, but a Devolver rep confirmed—because these are the kinds of questions I get paid to ask—that increasing the size of your package will require points that could otherwise be spent on more practical character attributes. But the opposite is also true: You can shrink your dink to boost those attributes beyond what they'd normally be. 

I would like to think that's what all players would do—make their dongs as small as possible in order to be stronger, smarter, and tougher, which actually count for something—but the thing about that particular piece of anatomy is that it doesn't always inspire rational thinking. I can't help but wonder if all of this isn't actually some sort of bizarre psychosocial experiment: What percentage of Scum players will prioritize their endowment over more practical attributes and abilities that can actually help them survive in a violent, unforgiving world?   

Owners of the Scum Supporters Pack will get an additional two inches on their unit, which they can swing around as a badge of honor or sacrifice for bonus points elsewhere. Not even kidding.

Ironically, the dong dilemma may not matter for most players anyway, as it's not currently clear whether beefy tackle will even be visible through pants. I asked the rep and was told that "guys at Devolver don't know about bulges." Okay then, sorry I brought it up. 

The Wild Hunter update features quite a number of of non-dong-related new features as well, including bow and arrow skills for hunting and combat, new boars and goats that can be killed and then crafted into clothing (or territory-delineating heads-on-spikes, if that's your thing), and new musical instruments including a banjo, guitar, and harmonica. In fact, the rep said the new hunting mode and clothing are the real "meat" of the update, but the link to the asset archive was labeled "key art and dick pics," so I'm not sure that's actually true.   

In any event, the Scum: Wild Hunter update goes live today. Enjoy some more new screens down below. 

Butts are big in Fortnite (and James likes them, he cannot lie) but it's not the only game to see glory in the glutes. Scum, the survival game that's getting a heart attack mechanic to deal with a guy who just won't stop stuffing his face, will also soon embrace the power of the posterior. 

Developer Gamepires didn't expand on exactly what's in store in this Wild Hunter update or how it will be imposed (exposed?) but it's reasonable to assume that bare backs also means bare fronts, which as any Rust player could tell you is something we all need more of. 

A rep declined to provide further information about what what's in the butt update. "More details coming in the next update," they said. "But categorically speaking that’s a good butt right there."

Honestly, it's a little surprising that full-on nudity isn't a part of Scum already. After all, this is a game that lets players eat people (and then barf it up after), drop a deuce from the top of a dam, and fashion masks out of human skin. By comparison, running around with your ass (and all the other bits) hanging out seems pretty tame.

Of course, that's assuming Gamepires and Devolver aren't just messing with us, and honestly you can never be entirely sure about that—butt you can be sure we'll let you know when we find out.  

Last month we told you about one player's quest to become the heaviest character in Scum, testing the limits of the simulationist survival game by chowing down on the undead. He's up to 400 kilograms now, by the way.

Speaking to PC Gamer at PAX Australia, Devolver Digital co-founder Graeme Struthers explained that Scum's creators are well aware of this heroic effort. "There is one guy on Reddit who has attracted quite a lot of attention because he's trying to figure out the most efficient way of getting fat," Struthers said. "The implication of that will be a heart attack, because in real life you'd reach that point. Those kind of things will start to be added in, so that's probably going to be the end of eating zombie fat."

At the moment it's possible for characters in Scum to die of hypothermia or overexertion, but a heart attack purely from overeating would be new. "This doesn't necessarily mean the end," Struthers went on to say. "He might go on a diet. He might take the view that if there's gonna be heart problems he might find another Reddit opportunity. How does he lose that weight? What exercise regime does he undertake? There could be a Scum diet book. Imagine that: Scum Diet and Exercise Regime."

Heart attacks caused by overindulgence won't necessarily make it into the next patch. What will be is a feature many more players have been asking for. "There's gonna be vehicles coming in the next update," Struthers said. An SUV and a tractor have been confirmed.

A date for the update has not been announced. "They're making sure things work before they deploy them," said Struthers. "In the background there's a great deal of testing and QA going on."

Set a bunch of convicted felons loose on an island, and things are gonna get pretty dark, pretty quick. You can already butcher other people into meat hunks and eat them in Early Access survival game Scum, but today's update gives you a grisly new fashion option as well: masks you can craft from human skin.

Along with skin you'll need some rope, a sewing kit or needle, a knife, and two magnifying glasses (to make those ghastly eye-holes). And sure, you can use animal skin instead of human skin, but let's get real: if you want to be a proper monster, you're gonna want to use human skin. There's just no substitute.

To help you achieve the real boogeyman experience, 30 new caves have been added to Scum's island for you to lurk in while wearing your flesh-mask. The patch also includes a craftable .50 cal handgun and improvised shotgun which require resources like scrap metal, duct tape, nails, and wood. There's also night vision goggles which will spawn in military zones and bunkers. A handful of taunts round out the update (now you can give someone the finger before they kill you and wear your skin on their face), along with some optimization tweaks, bug fixes, and sound design changes, and a few other improvements. Full patch notes are here and there are some images below.