Moose Miners news & patch notes

This update focuses on fixing and improving some things around the Deeper update.

The first main thing is increased cost scaling for productivity and luck upgrades, as those ended up too powerful after the Deeper update. Your luck and productivity upgrade level will be automatically adjusted to new values based on the new cost scaling.

Then I have added a new upgrade called Sell portals. This can be unlocked after the storage minecart has been fully maxed out and replaces the storage minecart with sell portals that sells any wands (or gems and logs if the fences are down) directly without any need for transport. This is to solve the storage minecart becoming a bottleneck in the pipeline at the end as the only limit with the sell portals are how fast you can craft wands.

There is a bonus upgrade in this update as well, saw lasers. The saw laser allows the moose to mine more than 1 tile deep at a time. This is an upgrade I wanted to add to the game a while back, but did not have the time to look into as it seemed to need quite a lot of work. But when I took a look at it again now due to some other changes and improvements I had made to the game, it was a pretty quick thing to add. It comes as an upgrade in the upgrade screen, where you can increase the maximum laser length. And then if a moose is mining a gem or a tree and has more damage than is needed to mine it completely the damage left will be used to send out a laser to mine the next gem or tree. It speeds up the mining a lot whenever a moose has more saw damage than could otherwise be used in the area it is mining.

There are a couple of other things in the update and some bug fixes as well. Here are the full patch notes:

Features/Additions

• Added new upgrade, Sell portals. It replaces the storage minecart and lets crafters sell the wands as soon as they are crafted

• Added new upgrade, Saw lasers. It allows laser to extend beyond the miners saws if they deal more damage than the mined gem/tree has health

• Increased the maximum level for wand crafters

Balance changes

• Increased the cost scaling of productivity upgrades and luck upgrade, existing saves will be automatically adjusted to the new corresponding level on load

• Increased the gem and tree count on the nodes after depth 57 600

Bug fixes

• Fixed sticks and gems not being properly cleared when resetting a save sometimes

• Fixed shown price of Add crafter on max being calculated wrong sometimes

• Fixed wands not getting loaded properly for PCs without AVX2 when on high levels of the storage minecart

• Fixed a bug causing Minecart count upgrade to always behave as if Max amount was selected

• Fixed a bug causing wands of different refinement levels to not be tracked properly in the storage minecart

• Added 10k to the amount selector
• Fixed moose not mining when an area was overcrowded
• Fixed Mine gem type and Cut down tree type quests going down in count to mine/cut down sometimes
• Fixed Min value for buffer chest in rail info box not taking rails with no buffer chests (capacity 0) into account
• Fixed a bug making cost calculations for buffer chests taking a lot of times in some cases
• Fixed refinement upgrade tooltips showing from values sometimes
• Fixed grinder speed tooltip showing wrong value after unlocking the gem and log compressors
• Fixed some potential causes for the moose upgrade quest getting a high value on new save files sometimes
• Fixed minecart count upgrade not buying as much as it was supposed to when on max amount
• Fixed some cases that could cause upgrading too much when on max amount causing negative money

• Improved performance of storage minecart loading in late game

• Reduced the productivity per level from 2.5% to 1%

• Fixed a bug causing the upgrade buttons getting stuck on calculating costs
• Fixed cost calculation for buffer chests being wrong when not all grinders have rails
• Fixed a bug that could cause money to negative after buying rail on max

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:

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

Hi all moose enjoyers! It's been a while since I wrote an update here on Steam (besides answering in the forums). My initial plan was to have an update ready about now, but it is taking a little bit longer so I thought I might as well share some info on what is coming in it.

I'm currently running a beta for the update in the Discord channel so if you are interested in trying it out or just some more regular updates on how it is going come join it here: https://discord.com/invite/YVNsTCRbC2

The main focus on the update is increasing the max depth limit from the current 57 600 to 691 200 with some large rebalancing on different costs to make the progress more active on less reliant on just waiting idle for things.

To help make the progress feel better I have added quests to the game. If you have played my new game Moose Diver you might recognise the quest menu from that game. These will give boosts of income that will make sure you can afford larger upgrades at once.

There will also be new tiers of upgrades to a lot of upgrades, below is a preview of new tiers for saw damage and capacity for the moose. There are also new compressor upgrades for the storage minecart that will help get rid of bottlenecks in loading and transporting wands for sale.

I have also started working on some new upgrades that adds steps to the resource processing pipeline. Gem polishers, Gem coaters, Stick sanders and Stick oilers are the ones I have added so far. Each of these increases the value of the resources passed through them resulting in much higher sell values for wands in the end. This should make the progression of the game a bit more interesting at least.

These are the main new things coming in the update, there are a few smaller things as well such as:

• An upgrade to share damage from unused side saws to the ones that are used

• An upgrade to decrease the unload time of moose

• A migration behaviour for the moose to better spread out from highly occupied areas to less occupied areas

I can't promise a date for when the update is going to be ready, but I hope to have it ready for sometime in February.

Thanks for reading Moose News and keep moose mining!

Moose Diver is now available!

An incremental game about a moose diving in the ocean for coins!

Get it here on Steam! You can get all four of our games with a discount in the Lingon Studios bundle. And if you own any of the games already you get the remaining games with the bundle discount. 

• Improved map render performance
• Increased zoom level from camera y-position 1500 to camera y-position 5000
• Added moose group areas to map rendering
• The game now saves the window position and what monitor it was last on when in windowed mode, and it will now start on the same screen and position it was when it exited

• Fixed an extra empty moose cart appearing for certain moose carry capacity upgrades
• Fixed the last capacity upgrade sometimes being reset when save game is reloaded
• Fixed buttons being disabled after right clicking when holding a control group flag
• Fixed a bug causing the cost calculations for moose upgrades to be slower than neccessary in some cases
• Fixed a possible cause for some moose upgrades upgrading past the current money causing negative money sometimes
• Loading a save with negative money now resets the money to 0
• Made the game turn off Nvidia driver setting "Threaded Optimization". This seems to have a driver bug causing the infamous yellow screen issue on some Nvidia gpus. It also seemed to not have a noticable affect on the performance.
• Added check on load for any moose upgrade related achievements that should be unlocked that have not been unlocked
• Fixed a bug that could cause some save slots to end up in a state where they would not save anymore
• Fixed a bug causing minecarts to lose resources when loading a saved game when carrying above a certain amount
• Fixed a crash issue that could happen when a lot of moose tried to unload to the same minecarts
• Fixed some storage points moving gems and sticks at double speed
• Fixed a crash when using -lowGraphics on a GPU that doesn't support OpenGL 4.5

The demo for Moose Diver is now available! Go try it out now and try to claim the highest score on the leaderboard!

Hi, it's time for another update. It's been a while since the last one and this one is not that big unfortunately more info on that below, but let's get into what is in this update.

This update is the achievements update, it brings the total number of achievements from the previous 28 up to 80. It is mostly to bring new achievements for the new stuff added in the new depths update, but also a few new achievements for the earlier parts of the game as well. So if you have a far along save and was thinking about starting a new save at some point, now might be a good time, unless you like getting a bunch of achievements unlocked at the same time.

Now let's talk about the future of Moose Miners. If you have been following along on Discord you already know that I'm currently on parental leave and have been that since a few months back. That is the main reason there has not been happening much update vise lately. That will continue partly during the summer and I will be back full time working again after summer.

The other thing is that while Moose Miners has been a financial success and has selling good in general it is not selling enough anymore for me to be able to continue to work on it that much longer. I simply need to start making new games to make sure I can continue with this as my full time job. From that came Moose Diver, a new game I announced two weeks ago that I have been working on with my limited free time the last couple of months. It will be a smaller game than Moose Miners was but check it out here on Steam if you are interested, wishlisting it really helps me out. There is also a playtest that you can register for if you want to try an early version of the demo. A promo window for Moose Diver has been added in Moose Miners in this update that will show up the first time you exit the game after the update, then it should never show up again.

With that said, there will still be some new things coming to Moose Miners before I feel done with it (if I ever will). So when I'm getting back from parental leave I will start working on the probably final content update for Moose Miners (it might be split in two to not delay the release of it too much depending on how much work it ends up being). The main thing of that update will be to fully utilize the capacity of the engine I built for Moose Miners by having the gem/tree depth limit be practically infinite (in reality it will be around 2 billion deep but would likely take 10s or 100s of years of 24/7 playtime to mine through). There will be new tiers for upgrades and some new things that will scale with the "infinite" depth.

After that update there might still be updates sometimes especially bug fixes as needed, maybe also some qol features that I did not have time to add, but likely no major new things.

That was all for today, now go and get all those new achievements!

Here are the full patch notes:

Features/Additions/Improvements

• Updated lighting calculations a bit for more vibrant colors

• Added new achievements

• Added promo for Moose Diver on exit (happens only once)

Bug fixes

• Fixed camera not being centred on the moose when starting a new game

• Fixed tooltip for some moose upgrades to be wrong when you could not afford them

• Fixed moose saw damage and moose carry capacity max being 1 less than intended

• Fixed cost being shown as 0 for some moose upgrades sometimes when max amount was selected

• Fixed resources on storage platforms disappearing in some areas sometimes
• Fixed resources on the storage platforms greatly favouring spreading to the right
• Fixed mine buffer chests not being properly sold when selling rails

• Using the Graphics setting Low will now load lower res textures to reduce vram usage and improve performance
• Added launch option -lowGraphics that overrides the Graphics setting and sets it to load on startup

• Fixed a bug with storage minecart loading that could potentially cause a crash
• Fixed a bug causing the loading of wands to the storage minecart to load the wrong wands type and loading some wands more than once or not at all.

• Fixed last tier of balance minecart not moving
• Fixed cost of compressor upgrades 16 and beyond costing 0