Finally it is time for another update! I'm sorry it took so long. I planned to get this out quite a bit sooner, but due to some personal health issues I have only been able to work half-time and with reduced capacity the last few months. I hope you understand. First of all I want to thank the ones that helped test the new update on the beta branch. If you want to try out any future updates before they are done, it is all handled on the Discord so feel free to join: [url=https://discord.com/invite/YVNsTCRbC2]https://discord.com/invite/YVNsTCRbC2[/url] Now let's get to the new things in the update! If you are not a fan of reading you can checkout the new trailer for the update here: [previewyoutube=BSDDttqiuV8;full][/previewyoutube] As the name of the update "New Depths" suggests the main thing is that the depth limit has been increased from the previous 4800 (gems/trees) to 57600. The gems and trees past the previous limit now has an additional magic layer causing them to hold even more gems and logs for mining. However, the ones of you that have gotten to the current limit knows that just increasing the depth and the available gems and logs won't work that well since the mining times at those depths with the current upgrade limits would be really slow and not very interesting. So there are a bunch of new upgrade tiers for things and a few completely new things as well to help with that. I will summarise the new stuff here, but all the new things will be in the patch notes at the end of the post. Let's start with some moose upgrades, the game is called Moose Miners after all. The one I'm most excited about is the side saw upgrade, maybe because it looks both cool and ridiculous at the same time.[img]{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/44640025/33bbda0cede72fc8f0715377cd41ceafcaa0689e.png[/img] Side saws works just as expected, the moose can mine more than one gem or tree at the same time. A good way to get more out of each moose, just remember to upgrade the capacity of the moose so they can keep up with the increased amount of gems or logs. Speaking of capacity there are many new upgrade tiers for the "Moose cart" upgrade. Upgrading past the previous max will now upgrade the carts to high tech carts that can compact the gems and logs to hold much higher quantities. So now the moose can reach really high capacity levels without your GPU catching fire due to rendering millions of gems at once. There is also new tiers for the saw upgrade as well as for the speed upgrade. The drinking hats could only make the moose run so fast so I had to find some new things to make them go quicker. The first one is roller skates, which you can see if look closely in the image above. The moose can really high speeds with those, but to push it further some external force was needed. So I just strapped some really large jet engines on their backs. This should get them to a maximum of 75 m/s which is quite fast for a moose. Besides the moose there are also some new things for the minecarts. Both the vertical minecarts and the storage and balance minecarts have gotten new tiers to upgrade to. A completely new thing however, is the buffer chests. They come in two versions base buffer chests and mine buffer chests and are an upgrade to the railway. The base buffer chests are placed between the grinder slopes and the rail and the mine buffer chests are at the end of the railway. [img]{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/44640025/9bd3bb71de2d4a0552763dbf4e0190468a0135ad.png[/img] As the name suggests these chests are used a buffer. The moose can unload to buffer chests whether the minecarts are there or not and the minecarts unloads to the base buffer chests, which most often is quicker than waiting for the grinders to process the gems. All in all the buffer chests makes the usage of minecarts more efficient since they can often just move between the mine and the base with little wait time. [img]{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/44640025/d3750f1b778d66af95a7d02bb5e34e7747c197bb.png[/img] There is also a merged chest upgrade for the base buffer chests that merges chests that are next to each other. This allows one minecart to unload to a wide chest which then can unload to more than one grinder. There are a few other new upgrades as well, storage boxes that increases how much can be stored in a storage tile, new crafter (wizard moose) tiers allowing for faster wand crafting. And two new upgrade categories, Price reductions and Bonuses. The price reduction upgrades reduces the cost of a specific type upgrades by a percentage, for example the moose upgrades. So you can invest money into making the moose cheaper to buy and upgrade. [img]{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/44640025/f186055d7aeaf5e8cc02ce3afbc0b23615c0dab6.png[/img] The bonuses comes in two types, production and luck. Production increases the output of the upgraded entity type by a percentage. For example a production bonus of 50% for miners gives an extra gem for every 2nd gem mined. Or a production bonus of 100% for grinders would give two sticks for each log processed or 2 gem dusts for each gem processed. It basically outputs more resources than what was put in allowing for some really nice boosts in the factory. [img]{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/44640025/e62b79130ac3449f38240d168f409a57d0a38f67.png[/img] Luck gives a chance for a resource to be upgraded to the next tier. If you have 25% logger luck and a moose is cutting the pink trees there is a 25% chance it gets a blue log instead. The chance is reduced when going to the gold, diamond or black tier. There are also a bunch of balance changes. You can see them all in the detailed patch notes, but I want to bring up a few extra important ones here. in this update I have increased the cost scaling of moose and grinders by quite a lot. I felt that you ended up with the maximum number of moose and maximum width of the base way too quickly before you had the chance to appreciate the balancing of everything else. So the best strategy was pretty much just buying more moose and going wide. Due to this rebalance and some infinite gems/trees glitches causing a lot more money than intended for some saves there will be an option when loading an existing save on the new update (in case you have gotten far enough for these things to matter). There you will be able to choose between keeping your save as it is, but then not being included on the leaderboard with this save. Or rebalance the save which will set you in probably a rather high negative amount of money. Selling moose and grinders is the way to get back to positive and there is an option to just sell grinders and moose automatically until you are in the clear again. I have also worked quite a lot on performance improvements to make it work well with the new things and a lot of bugs have been fixed. If you have read this far I just want to thank you for the support on the game, I hope you will enjoy the update and if you have not already please consider leaving an honest review of the game. Here comes the full patch notes: Features/Additions/Improvements [list] [*] Increased depth limit from 4800 to 57600 [*] Moose will now spread out better when unloading gems/trees to minecarts [*] New rail upgrade, Base buffer chests [*] New rail upgrade, Merged base buffer chests [*] New rail upgrade, Mine buffer chests [*] New moose upgrade, Side saws [*] New moose upgrade, Roller skates [*] New moose upgrade, Jet engines [*] New upgrades price reduction [*] New upgrades productivity [*] New upgrades luck [*] New upgrade Gem storage boxes [*] New upgrade Sticks storage boxes [*] New upgrade Wands storage boxes [*] 2 new storage minecart upgrade tiers [*] 2 new balance minecart upgrade tiers [*] 3 new minecart upgrade tiers [*] 2 New moose cart types [*] 7 new crafter upgrade tiers [*] Added coordinates UI [*] Added toggle to follow balance or storage minecarts [*] Improved simulation performance [*] Improved balance minecart AI [*] Grinders can now be sold without selling crafters and rails first. Everything on the grinder will be sold at once [*] Storage boxes now show what type is in them [*] Improved resource loading speed when starting the game [*] Improved rendering performance at the base [*] Removed moose unload mode setting, unload behaviour is now always closest unload station [*] Unified throughput numbers to all be per minute to be easier to compare between [*] Removed max limit of selection count for crafters, grinders and rails [*] Improved the performance of price calculation for upgrade buttons [*] Overlay windows can now be closed by clicking outside them [*] Improved formatting for info and money values [*] Upgrade buttons now show calculating cost when disabled due to cost not being done calculating yet [*] Improved performance of calculating cost of rail upgrades on max amount [/list] Balance changes [list] [*] Moose unload speed now scales with the cart type [*] Moose acceleration now scales with maximum speed upgrades, such as the drinking hats [*] Gem and tree minecarts now have better acceleration with upgraded minecarts [*] Increased the cost scaling of buying moose [*] Increased the cost scaling of adding grinders [*] Leaderboard has been cleared and old saves gets a choice of being rebalanced with a debt or keep playing as before without going on the leaderboard [*] Selling something now gives full refund of the cost [*] Balance minecart can now pickup sticks from all storage rows instead of just the third [*] Wand storage for first storage box tier has been reduced from 512 to 128 per wand storage upgrade [*] Reduced rail length cost and minecarts cost [*] Reduced moose capacity upgrade cost [*] Reduced moose saw damage upgrade cost [*] Reduced storage minecart speed upgrade cost [*] Reduced balance minecart speed upgrade cost [*] Decreased the cost of upgrading capacity for storage and balance minecarts [/list] Bug fixes [list] [*] Fixed a bug causing moose to leave some columns behind [*] Fixed a bug causing moose to deliver gems or trees at the very end of the minecarts when a closer position was available [*] Fixed minecart speed upgrade cost being wrong for some saves [*] Fixed saw blades not being rendered properly in some cases when zoomed out [*] Fixed selected crafters speed being presented as rpm instead of wpm in info box [*] Fixed upgrade minecart speed button being enabled for selected rails when speed was already at max [*] Fixed a bug causing the cost shown on the upgrade button to be wrong on rail upgrades when using 10x, 100x or 1000x multiplier [*] Fixed control group menu for selected control group not being aligned properly [*] Fixed a bug causing moose to end up in the control group on the tree side when placed on the gem side [*] Fixed a bug causing infinite gems/trees to flow from collection points sometimes [*] Fixed moose turning weirdly after mining a gem/tree when mining fast [*] Fixed some issues causing bad performance when selecting a lot of moose [*] Fixed balance minecart speed not being reset properly when going from one save to another [*] Fixed an issue with rail length cost calculation [*] Fixed navigation buttons not cancelling camera follow on balance or storage minecarts [*] Fixed gems/logs floating around moose sometimes [*] Fixed group flag having wrong positions on later moose carts tiers [*] Fixed a bug causing gems/trees in minecarts from another save could appear in a new save [*] Fixed a crash issue when rendering minecarts right after loading a save [*] Fixed a bug causing grinders to be selected sometimes when selecting crafters [*] Fixed moose not being selected properly when selection box was larger than the screen [*] Fixed upgrade buttons showing wrong prices and being enabled when they should not sometimes when the price calculations take a long time [*] Fixed a bug causing the game to hang sometimes when upgrading max on all moose [*] Fixed minecarts on tree side going past the rail when new rail is building [*] Control group buttons can no longer be pressed behind an overlay window [*] Fixed lighting transitions not being smooth between some areas [*] Fixed grinders moving sometimes when not grinding [*] Fixed grinder saws not moving while sawing [*] Fixed crafter storage upgrade costs not being saved [*] Fixed 10x, 100x and 1000x calculating wrong visual cost for moose upgrades [*] Fixed some moose upgrade achievements not being awarded in some scenarios when they should [/list]