Time to dust off your drill
We're heading back underground!
This major update focuses on the things you use every time you play: moving, aiming, managing your equipment, and getting into your next expedition. We've also tackled long-standing bugs, crashes, and performance issues, with over 70 fixes and improvements across the game.
Your equipment, within reach
Meet the new default inventory: a six-slot Hotbar with a separate backpack. Keep your essential tools and weapons close at hand, switch directly to the item you need, and rearrange your supplies with drag-and-drop and stack splitting.
Select Hotbar slots with 1–6, Q/E, or LB/RB.
Open your backpack with TAB on keyboard or X on controller.
Move items and split stacks with either the mouse or a controller.
Adjust UI Scale to resize your HUD, minimap, and inventory together.
Prefer the original inventory and two-hand setup? Select Legacy in Settings > Controls. Both layouts remember their own button bindings.
Better control, from movement to aiming
We've cleaned up mouse, keyboard, and controller handling to make your miner more predictable in the middle of a fight. Once you move the mouse, it controls your aim while WASD handles movement. On controller, the right stick controls your aim without the left stick turning your character.
We've also fixed input conflicts when a controller is connected, improved switching between mouse and controller, and corrected menu navigation that could skip entries. With the new Hotbar layout, controller players can sprint or dodge using LT or L3, with R3 toggling auto-walk. Mouse wheel switches Hotbar slots, and if your mouse has extra buttons, we support those too.
Quick Play: straight into the caves
Want to dig, build, and survive without setting up a run? Hit Quick Play in the main menu. You'll start a random map with a random objective and starting package, using normal difficulty and map length. Your equipment is ready in your inventory, and the menu prepares a map in the background while you browse.
For a more tailored expedition, the random map generator now offers four starting packages: Classic, Mining, Fortification, and Expedition.
Found a run you want to revisit? Choose Same Map to try again, New Map for a fresh seed with the same settings, or Copy Seed to share your map code.
Performance, crashes, and the fixes that matter
A lot of this update happens behind the scenes, but it addresses problems that could interrupt a good run.
New in Display settings: Render Scale. The world can render at 50%, 67%, 75% or 100% of your window while the HUD, menus, and minimap stay at native resolution - so you gain more frames without turning the interface to mush. If your frames stay slow, the game can step the scale down on its own.
Optimized debris effects, shadow updates, turret targeting, and enemy perception and navigation.
Improved map loading and generation.
Autosave now lets you keep playing after capturing the game state, while the map is written in the background.
Fixed the frame drops that could bring the game to a crawl during heavy waves.
Fixed several crashes, including issues involving co-op and object cleanup.
Fixed freezes related to drilling and enemy spawning.
Made saves more reliable, improved backup recovery, and added clearer feedback when saving fails.
And plenty more
Campaign retries preserve permanent upgrades correctly, co-op saves restore the second player, and several mission progression bugs have been fixed.
Workshops handle upgrade selections and cancelled queues correctly, Item Racks check for a clear drop path, and buried chests reappear when uncovered.
We've also improved Steam achievement tracking and added checks for reachable random-map goals and required objective items.
Random maps received balance adjustments to resource objectives, first-wave preparation time, and Endless scaling.
Thanks to everyone who shared reports and helped us track these issues down.
Grab your drill. See you underground!
One more thing...
What if we made Lumencraft Online - a new multiplayer spin-off in the Lumencraft universe?
It's an idea we're exploring, and we'd love to hear your thoughts. Would you play it? What would you want to see?
Let us know in the comments!
Follow-up updates
Check out this follow-up update, as it changes the Hotbar introduced in this release:
And this one improving co-op split screen experience: