It is finally time for a new content update!
You can watch the trailer for the update on Youtube to get a quick summary about the new things: View game page
Let's dive into the details about what's new.
As the name of the update "Deeper" suggests you will get to mine deeper than before. The max depth has been increased from the previous 57 600 (gems/trees) to 691 200 (an increase by 12 times). To accompany this increase there are a bunch of new tiers and some new upgrades for you to conquer the new depth.
The max tiers for the moose capacity and moose saw damage upgrades have been increased greatly with new saw types and carts. There is also a new upgrade to increase the moose unload speed.
There are also new compression upgrades for the storage minecart, balance minecart and the storage boxes. These allow for both more storage and faster transfer rates.
I also added two new upgrade amounts to the upgrade amount selector, 100k and 1M.
That was the new depth part of the update. For this update I have also had a focus on making the game more active to play and lessen the need of playing the game idle to progress.
So there are some quite substantial rebalancing of upgrade costs and some more things to fasten up the progress.
The cost scaling for the moose capacity and moose saw damage has been greatly reduced. The side saw upgrade no longer scales with the other saw upgrades (saw damage and saw speed) as that just made things confusing when upgrading the moose and unnecessarily expensive. Speaking of side saws, there is now a new upgrade in the upgrade screen called Side saw damage sharing. As the name suggests this upgrade enables damage sharing between side saws, so if not all saws are actively being used by the moose the active ones will have their damage increased.
There are also some new processing steps in this update. So instead of the processing progression being unlocking trees and then crafters there are now a few extra ones in between. Gem polishers, Gem coaters, Stick sanders and Stick Oilers. All of these are placed directly after the grinders and they increase the value of the gems/sticks and any wands made from them. This will both even out the processing progression to continue a bit further and increase the money earned. The prices to unlock the forest side and the price of unlocking the crafters have been increased to make this fit well.
This update also introduces quest which rewards money after completing some goals such as upgrading your miners x times, mine x total gems, craft x wands.
Unfortunately in order to fit the new processing upgrades and the new upgrade amount tiers the upgrade UI had to be changed. So sorry in advance for the ones of you that have played the game enough to build up a muscle memory of where the upgrade buttons are. Hopefully you get used to the new UI layout eventually, I have managed to retrain myself now at least after playing with the new UI for a while.
There a few extra things in the update, one being improved spreading of the moose. They will not start to migrate to less occupied areas on the map if the current area they are in is overcrowded. There is also a way to edit the pickup pattern for the moose under the "Advanced gameplay options". In there you can change the default circle pattern when moose are picked up to a line pattern for which you can control the distance between moose on. This should help a lot when you want to manually spread out the moose.
That was the all the big things in the update, I'll leave the full patch notes below and I want to thank everyone that tried out the beta for the update and reported bugs. It has been a great help and really contributed in the update as bug free as possible.
Features/Additions/Improvements
Increased max depth from 57 600 to 691 200
Added quests
New upgrade: Storage minecart compression
New upgrade: Balance minecart compression
New upgrade: Moose side saw damage sharing
Moose should spread better automatically by migrating to other areas if the current area is overpopulated
New upgrade: Moose unload time reduction
Increased max tier of Moose cart upgrade
Increased max tier of Moose saw blade upgrade
Map view now shows storage amount of gems, sticks and wands at different levels
Added Gem polisher upgrade
Added Gem coater upgrade
Added Stick sander upgrade
Added Stick oiler upgrade
Performance improvements on upgrade buttons, both for cost calculation and when pressing
New advanced gameplay control: Moose pickup pattern
New upgrade: Gem storage box compression
New upgrade: Stick storage box compression
New upgrade: Wand storage box compression
New upgrade amounts, 100k, 1M
New UI to fit the new upgrade amounts
Holding shift or ctrl while in the upgrade screen will now change the upgrade amount to 10x (shift) or 100x (ctrl)
Grinder speed info now takes compression level into account
Balance changes
Side saw upgrade cost no longer scales with current saw damage and current saw speed
Saw speed upgrade cost no longer scales with side saw count
Saw damage upgrade cost no longer scales with side saw count
Reduced moose capacity upgrade cost scaling
Reduced moose saw damage upgrade cost and cost scaling
Reduced the upgrade cost for tier 3 and tier 4 storage minecart
Reduced the upgrade cost for tier 3 and tier 4 balance minecart
Increased crafting unlock cost
Increased lumber processing unlock cost
Increased the maximum wands per craft for wand crafting tier 3 and later
Reduced the upgrade cost of grinder compressors
Increased the maximum capacity for the sci-fi moose carts
Reduced the unlock cost of Mine buffer chest tier 4 and 5
Reduced the unlock cost of Base buffer chest tier 4 and 5
Reduced the unlock cost of Better minecarts tier 4
Removed unload reduction scaling from moose cart types
Increased the max upgrade count for grinder compressors
Increased the cost to unlock drinking helmets
Decreased the cost to unlock first moose cart upgrade
Increased the cost of the wand storage upgrades
Decreased the luck reduction when going to Gold, Diamond and Black tiers
Increased the conversion from luck to productivity when applying luck on black tier
Bug fixes
Fixed moose not mining when having more side saws than the width of a control group area
Fixed the map not rendering wands properly in some cases
Wands crafted as a result of productivity is now counted towards Total wands crafted
Fixed dropdown menus rendering wrong when loading the game with graphics setting low
Fixed a bug causing the balance minecart to only pickup sticks from full storage platforms
Fixed values overlapping eachother in some cases in the info window
Fixed select box not working the first time after launching the game
Fixed select box not selecting properly over large distances
Fixed the window not covering the whole screen when maximized in window mode
Fixed grinder speed upgrade showing lower cost than was actually charged sometimes