Farming game Staxel gains features, leaves Early Access

Voxel-based farmlife sim Staxel has left Early Access. There's a blog post summarizing the features it's gained for those who haven't kept up with Staxel's evolution, and they include a magic crafting system, new lands "from the depths of crystal-laiden caverns to floating mushrooms in the sky", an arcade for playing minigames, new dogs and rabbit pets, more festivals to take part in (one involves catching fairies, another exploring caverns for treasure), and changes to everything from the fishing minigame to the calendar.

Staxel seems like Stardew Valley without the combat, given a Minecraft makeover. If catching bugs and befriending villagers while upgrading farm tools is your kind of thing, it's available on Steam, Humble, or direct from the developer.

Jody's first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia's first radio show about videogames, Zed Games. He's written for Rock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue, GamesRadar, Zam, Glixel, Five Out of Ten Magazine, and Playboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody's first article for PC Gamer was about the audio of Alien Isolation, published in 2015, and since then he's written about why Silent Hill belongs on PC, why Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale is the best fantasy shopkeeper tycoon game, and how weird Lost Ark can get. Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame.