Unshallow Development Update: The Mineral System Is Nearly Complete
We have been spending a lot of development time on one of the systems that will sit at the center of exploration and progression in Unshallow : the mineral system. The goal from the beginning was to avoid a world filled with obviously hand placed resource nodes. Instead, we wante
We have been spending a lot of development time on one of the systems that will sit at the center of exploration and progression in Unshallow: the mineral system.
The goal from the beginning was to avoid a world filled with obviously hand placed resource nodes. Instead, we wanted minerals to feel like they belong to the environment, with deposits distributed across the terrain in a controlled, deterministic way that still feels natural to the player.
That system is now very close to being finished.
Newhaven currently supports seven mineral types: Aeralite, Ceradite, Cuprium, Ferrite, Magnite, Silica, and Voltride. The framework responsible for placing and managing those resources has gone through several development stages, including terrain sampling, slot generation, deterministic population, runtime presentation, depletion, mining integration, and save state support.
A major part of the work has been making sure deposits are not simply scattered randomly. The system evaluates valid terrain locations ahead of time, respects spacing rules, supports different surface orientations, and can place resources across floors, walls, cliffs, and cave surfaces. It is also designed to avoid areas where resources should not appear, including structures and player built spaces.
Once those valid locations are prepared, the game can populate them deterministically based on the world seed and resource type. That means the system can create a consistent world without us manually placing hundreds or thousands of individual mineral actors.
We have also integrated the system with the Armguard mining experience. Deposits now have their own capacities, extraction progression, depletion behavior, inventory checks, and feedback while the player is actively mining them.
If the player’s inventory becomes full, extraction stops immediately and the game communicates that state through the HUD. Different minerals can also require different amounts of extraction before they are depleted, which gives us room to make rarer or more valuable resources feel meaningfully different.
The presentation side is also in place. Deposits can now use their actual meshes instead of placeholder geometry, and the system handles when those resources should be prepared, rendered, or hidden based on player distance.
At this point, most of the difficult foundation work is done.
What remains is largely refinement, additional visual tuning, broader validation across the world, and making sure the final player experience feels consistent before we consider the system complete.
This has been one of the larger technical systems we have built for Unshallow, but it gives us something extremely valuable going forward: a reusable resource framework that can support the game well beyond Newhaven.
We are very close to wrapping up this phase of development, and once we are satisfied with it, our attention can shift more heavily toward the next gameplay systems that depend on these resources.
Thanks for following the development of Unshallow.
Rapture Ready Games
