Scum expands map with coal mine and 24 new islands

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.

Samuel is a freelance journalist and editor who first wrote for PC Gamer nearly a decade ago. Since then he's had stints as a VR specialist, mouse reviewer, and previewer of promising indie games, and is now regularly writing about Fortnite. What he loves most is longer form, interview-led reporting, whether that's Ken Levine on the one phone call that saved his studio, Tim Schafer on a milkman joke that inspired Psychonauts' best level, or historians on what Anno 1800 gets wrong about colonialism. He's based in London.