Hello everyone! The time has come for another update to the best game featuring mining moose on Steam!
Let's start with the main addition in this update, the balance minecart. A way to move around resources to fix imbalances between the amount of sticks and gems in the storage for wand crafting has been requested by a lot of you in different forms, but the idea of having minecarts redistribute sticks I first saw as a suggestion in the Lingon Studios Discord server.
The balance minecart is a train of minecarts that will pickup sticks from crafter areas that have a surplus of sticks and deliver them to crafter areas that have a surplus of gems. It is unlocked as an upgrade in the upgrade window. When unlocked it can be upgraded under its own upgrade tab with the same type of upgrades as the storage minecart, i.e. speed, storage, cart count and load speed. Keep in mind that the balance minecart is not meant to be a complete solution for balancing gems and sticks for crafters. You will still need to somewhat plan where you place your moose on the gem side vs tree side.
This update also comes with some additional upgrades that helps solve bottlenecks you would run into when the base was fully upgraded. There is a new tier of the storage minecart to unlock to further increase its speed and storage capacity since the current one simply can't keep up for a fully upgraded base.
The next is the new upgrade, Grinder slopes, which upgrades how much the slopes just before the grinders can store. This also increases the unload speed of the minecarts as well as increases the maximum available grinder speed. With these new upgrades you should be able to mine and process the gems and trees in the last rows of the current depth limit at much better efficiency.
Please note that some tiers of these upgrades are in preparation for the next update which will increase the depth limit, so you will most likely not be able to max out all these upgrades with the currently available gems and trees.
There are also a few quality of life things in this update. To begin with, the toggle fences buttons have been reworked a bit. Now instead of simply flipping the current state (fence on/ fence off) of the storage areas, they will set all the selected storage areas to the same state. The state they are set to depends on how many of the selected are currently on, but the first press of the button will sync them all up to the same state and then simply pressing it again will flip all of them to the other state if that was not the one you wanted. In addition to this, the buttons now also work with nothing selected and will then act as if all are selected. So now you can turn all the fences for the crafters on or off at the same time. This was a feature requested by many of you.
Two new navigation buttons have been added. One that moves the camera to the storage minecart and one that moves it to the balance minecart. The balance minecart button is unlocked after the balance minecart upgrade has been unlocked.
Then there are also a bunch of bug fixes, you'll find the full list of changes at the bottom of this post.
I hope you all enjoy the update and thanks for all the bug reports and suggestions you are writing on both the Steam discussion forums and on the Discord server. Even though I am not replying to all posts I am reading everything you write on the Steam discussion forums and in the moose-miners-bug-reports and moose-miners-suggestions channels on Discord. I just don't have time to reply to most things unless I need some additional information to figure out a bug or an issue. That's the life of a solo dev, so much more you want to do than there is time in a day.
Features/Additions/Improvements
- Improved rendering performance of moose
- Improved simulation performance for large bases
- Replaced the wand and sticks boxes with new ones
- Added a new upgrade "Grinder slopes". Upgrades the capacity of the slopes before the grinders increasing the unload speed of minecarts and increasing the maximum grinder speed upgrade
- Added a new upgrade "Balance minecart". A minecart that will transport sticks from crafter stations that have a surplus of sticks to crafter stations that have a surplus of gems
- Added a new storage minecart upgrade tier. Increasing the maximum speed and storage upgrades
- Both toggle fences buttons no longer flips the current state of each selected storage, instead all gets set to the same state (fence on or off) depending on how many is currently on
- Both toggle fences buttons can now be used without anything selected to toggle fences on or off for all storage points
- Added a button to move the camera to the storage minecart
- Added a button to move the camera to the balance minecart
- The storage minecart now has acceleration
Bug fixes
- Fixed "Bought miners selection" setting dropdown rendering under "Warning icons" button
- Fixed performance issue with crafter buttons
- Fixed storage platform not being rendered blue when selected
- Changed miner to moose in a few places
- Fixed render glitches with transparent materials
- Fixed some cases causing gems or trees to appear from nothing into minecarts
- Fixed upgrade screen buttons not showing max when max upgrades were unlocked
- Fixed gems and logs staying in the air if moose were picked up while unloading
- Fixed time per craft for some crafters sometimes having corrupted values
- Fixed rails on the tree side looking like they are selected when rails on the gem side are selected and vice versa
- Fixed a bug causing some gems and trees to disappear on lanes with rail built right up to them after loading a save