The Automation update for Volcanoids adds some serious new toys to play with

Volcanoids certainly mixes up the survival genre, giving you a great big mobile drillship base to build up and the Automation update looks seriously good.

Set on a volcanic island that has frequent eruptions, your drillship is your main lifeline. You need to get underground quick at times and now things are about to get much busier. This update adds in a huge amount more for you to build and tinker with, the developer said they were going for a style of making your drillship "look like the inside of a WW2 submarine". Check out their update overview trailer:

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Release highlights:

• New machines and gadgets for the drillship
• New explosives with multiple ways to detonate them
• Hacking tool for hijacking enemy drillships
• New eruption effect
• Photo mode that lets you slow/stop time to take pictures
• Inventory improvements suggested by the community

You're going to want to ensure you've got a good 8-9GB free RAM for this one, loading it up today it's quite heavy on resources. If I didn't have 16GB RAM it would have probably caused some issues. Not a mark against it though, just a warning for those with less. It will stay at 100% loaded for a little while too, hopefully they can optimize the loading a bit once it's closer to being finished.

The Volcanoids team also announced that the multiplayer update is well underway! This I'm quite excited to see, as the gameplay is very interesting and now they've expanded it quite a lot having another person to build with should make it quite a lot more interesting. Might take a while but they said some smaller updates will appear before multiplayer is pushed out.

Find it in Early Access on Steam where it's 20% off for another day.