Science in the sun
Following its 1.0 release last July, Half Life-esque sci-fi survival game Abiotic Factor has been having a pretty good run of post-early access updates. That run of is set to continue through to 2027, as developers Deep Field have announced the game's year two roadmap including full support for community mods, a winter update with smaller additions, and the previously teased paid DLC, Entropic Break.
The mod support is pretty exciting, as it means a free mod launcher alongside the regular executable, as well as proprietary tools to create them, and a mod browser to share mods and host game instances affected by mods. Potential moddables include items, weapons, gear, pets, enemies, and "more", which might refer to maps themselves, if "modded sessions" is anything to go by. The update that mod support arrives with, Community Update 5, will also introduce a new 'froggy friend' pet (really hoping that's as cute as it sounds and isn't secretly horrifying, as many beings in Abiotic are), a new multi-quest system to collate objectives in the journal, and various balance adjustments.
The next free update is the considerably smaller winter update, with the most meaningful addition seeming to be the ability to grow trees in soil plots, allowing for self-sustaining farming of apples and "other stuff". That, alongside new recipes befitting the most wonderful time of the year and a brewing bench, which specifies 'fun and festive brews' but might allow for recipes outside of those seasonally adjacent.
The other big highlight here is the Entropic Break DLC, a paid expansion that takes the science team out of their usual claustrophobic nightmare and onto the pale sands of the Leaf Test Facility, which undoubtedly will be just as claustrophobic nightmare once you find your way into another underground lab gone wrong. A collection of new items, enemies, sidequests, pets, boats, fishing, and crossovers (something new to Abiotic Factor) are on the way with this update — the crossovers are paired with the tagline "It'll have you hooked!", so I have to wonder if it'll be another of Dredge's many crossovers. Several new portal worlds are also listed to be added, with only one being named as 'our biggest portal world yet'; from the trailer, it appears to be some kind of Mystery Flesh Pit National Park-like eldritch meat-based dimension. Groovy. I played a little of Abiotic Factor earlier this year, and had a pretty wonderful time struggling to survive and being made fun of by my then-partner for my utterly horrific survival instincts, so I can certainly recommend it, especially with these updates on the way.