MoteMancer news & patch notes

Even though Art is the focus, there's still room to slip some quality of life and bug fixes in :)

v0.5.044

Quality of Life
• Blueprints now support horizontal mirroring with H. This is rebind-able but not present in the blueprint window yet, it needs a bit of an overhaul.
• In-game windows are now temporarily draggable, they will reset positions on closing.
• Belts have more nuanced crossing logic where they will attempt to detect a middle segment versus an end, bug reports or confusion suggestions welcome.
• You can now choose to limit Music selection to Current Plane, Adjacent Planes, or All. Adjacent is default
• New Victory flow where you can save inside the library and exit a follow-on world selection. There will be a Victory screen added in the near future.
• Copy and Paste configuration functionlity with shift left and shift right click, works on filtered world objects as well as filtered inventory slots.
• MMB with an item in hand will set the filter slot, empty hand clears a filter
• Chest inventories now default to being able to place items in whatever slot you want
• Transmutation window now has hover tips for all the recipes
• Single tile colliders are now circles instead of hexagons so vertical movement is easier.
• Gust Funnels no longer have collision
Tuning
• Blackhole Monoliths now have diminishing returns on stacking monoliths on the same rift. The equation is 10 * (1 - 0.5^count) so 5 for the first 2.5 for the second, 1.25 for the third and so on.
• Blakkhole Monoliths now only feast if one of their center tiles overlaps the Rift footprint. Rifts now have custom 'centers' that guarantee their footprint will land on a Monolith.
Bug Fixes
• Dates are now displayed correctly per region
• Saturation renamed to Satisfaction, more in line with genre terminology
• Fixed a bug that could lock your keyboard or get into a bad state if a text input was not exited correctly
• Streamway Deltas now accept Gripper outputs
• Fixed a bug where reversed Deltas could end up in a stale state during pipette
• Fixed a bug where a followon unshattered plane hides its first research line (you could still research, this was just a graphical bug)
• Fix for fully upgraded quarry collectors placing to the wrong side of the belt
• Chest filter slots will no long move erratically if you make filters in the middle of the slot array
• Weakened Tether now correctly limits Slipway traveral between Air and Shadow planes rather than just blocking placement of the structure

v0.5.042

• Map now has a functional toggle between moving the map and walking with wasd, all locaized and dynamic
• You can now bulk trash with Ctrl. works both on delete press and on drop to trash
• Bunches of localization cleanup

v0.5.040

• Map now moves with WASD
• Opening and closing map sound
• Added a sound effect when adding an item to hotbar
• Quit Context will now prioritize returning held in hand items over deactivating Auras
• Spells no longer show stale entity counts when bound to the action bar
• Elemental Center now shows quick names again (Mana Flare keybind now reflects custom binding)
• Power window progress bar could jump between 99 and 100 if left in a stale fuel state
• Alt overlay no longer flickers when a power node is destroyed
• Mana Roots show grid saturation rather than solar power value when selected in the power window
• Omni gripper stale state cleanup
• Slipway no longer blocks mana flare placement (Mana Flare still does not generate enough power to open a Slipway)
• Better wording on a handful of tooltips across multiple languages

v0.5.038

• Fix for infinite entropy research sometimes loading into a bad state when several infinites are already researched, and preventing additional infinite researches from being clicked.
• Fix for Earth Grippers on other planes dropping off their items more slowly than they should (this was from a performance optimization that optimized for pickup time checks but not drop checks).
• If you load a save where you entered a second plane but never claimed the final tutorial research unlocks, the loaded file will do it for you.

v0.5.037 - Auto Undergrounds v1, plus cleanup

• Smart underground placement for saltways and streamways, and burrow roots
• Underground and Delta blueprints now place ghost tiles in addition to the structure preview images
• Fix for Underground Streams on long chains causing hitches in item flow. Please continue to report any future cases if they pop up.
• torrential streamway tooltip calculation fix
• grid overlay refactor to fix input and output properly showing inside powered areas
• coral pools now properly show their power percentage
• hover research tips will no longer trigger from offscreen

v0.5.033 - Improving QoL for dropping and collecting

• Held items will drop a full stack when control left clicking, half stack when control right clicking, 1 item when pressing Z
• Gathering items with grab the entire inventory when ctrl left clicking with an empty hand, half when ctrl right clicking with an empty hand (no Z)
• All of these behaviors now work when buttons are held while dragging rather than requiring unique clicks
• Z will continually drop an item every fraction of a second while held over the same structure, but will revert to a single item per structure if multiples are covered in the same click session
• Ctrl clicking an empty inventory space will attempt to quick transfer all of the items in that inventory, matching rules apply
• Inventory gather and half inventory gathering also works on grippers
• Held Z items take precedence over Spell functionality toggles, they may become separate keybinds later
• Transfer feedback now shows over the structure that was placed to or picked up from instead of the player
• Transfer feedback shows an icon of the gathered items in addition to their name
• After a Ctrl deposit, the held stack will refill from the original nearby structure (if still in reach) and then fallback to the player inventory if possible.
• Ctrl picking up bundles will show a stacked collection list instead of sequential like from harvesting.
• You can now hand-drop Elemental Fire onto a Lava Generator with the above (Lava Generators being multi-structures was an overlooked path)

v0.5.032

• Fix/better logging for a hard to track down bug where the tutorial corner UI and the tutorial steps could get out of sync

v0.5.031

• Gust Funnels have been optimized (approximately 25% of their original GPU cost) and should all be more unique from each other visually (no more synced strobes)
• Power Accumulators (Charged Lodestone, Scythe, and Sovereign Manaheart) will no longer draw leftover power when they are full
• Umbral Waygate stars can no longer overlap the Spell Hex UI
• Umbral Waygate star instructions are now localized
• Reordered tutorial for clarity, changed loc strings to give more guidance per tutorial path for clearing entropy
• Entering the Library now clears any active spells
• Player no longer blocks lava generators while Levitating or in Sandbox mode
• Fixed a bug that could cause mana leaf to double count canopy adjacency while loading a game
• Fixed a bug where Foundation Cards would dim when moused-over when returning to the Library
• Research Flavor text can no longer queue up repeatedly via spam clicking
• Made Teardown between games a bit faster. Fixed a few teardown-order bugs.
• Fixed a rift cleanup bug for subsequent worlds

v0.5.028

• Plane Title Banner should no longer stick around in rare occasions
• E will close structure windows if inspecting while in oracle
• Tutorial corner no longer shows up if you open the Great Portal but leave to go through another portal
• Fix for Production Structures rarely getting stale inventory data that blocks their outputs. This will heal saves that have crafters not crafting for this case.
• Fix for Incineration Spire retargeting sometimes getting desynced from the tick clock (This should fix incineration spires that 'stop working' after a long time, but there could be another cause)

v0.5.027

• There is now an explicit unique auto save when crossing over to a new plane for the first time in a given seed.
• Umbral Waygates will no longer randomly generate the same name twice, at least for the first few hundred names
• Umbral Waygates now clean up their ichor pool references. This fixes a bug that would make ichor clicks over removed waygates connect back to the global ichor pool.
• Production windows now show a ghost of the last item crafted and keeps the crafting time of said item visible instead of immediately reverting to -
• Collector windows now show the timer before they start (in the case of not powered) as well as a ghost of the item to be collected
• Recipes now show their relative recipe rather than the default when hovering over them inside a production structure window
• Out of range hexes now show purple instead of invisible during spell previews
• Nudge can no longer make chests eat other chests the same way placement can
• Channel spells no longer show cast time bar
• You can now clear keybinds with right click
• Enter now confirms tutorial claims and available research (will make this rebindable and more robust later)
• Fixed an edge case that could lead to a bad tutorial state after playing the tutorial twice in the same game session
• Tutorial corner no longer shows up on repeat runs
• Anchor Stone window now shows the correct hover tip on the replaced reagent when playing a shattered foundation

Happy glorious Monday! First, a huge thank you to everyone that's been playing the Attunement Update and sending in bugs and suggestions. Today I wanted to celebrate some of the discoveries from the last few weeks and share some fun bug stories in case you missed them. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/45567834/54037ec78f081302d9ae52ac2fe3bb25ea6bc0d7.png

Nuclear Launch Detected

There's been an edge-case for Lava Generators for a long time where you can technically make a small triangle of barriers, but it's too small to make any interior lava so it's basically useless. I didn't want to explicitly patch it out because you can still make fun shapes with it. Reasons TM, And it becomes part of the discovery. That said, with the recent updates to show Heat on the lava itself visually instead of just through the UI, the value of the intensity in the shader is proportional to the number of lava tiles in the generator. Guess what happens when you accidentally ask a shader to evaluate 1/0? {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/45567834/404910b99b071468d6c8f930a630f35a35f75f66.png It's so powerful it even pierced through to other planes. It also had the secondary effect of generating infinite negative power and vacuuming up entire power grids. All easy fixes, but super funny to see them slip through to players looking to make their own blackhole suns. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/45567834/54037ec78f081302d9ae52ac2fe3bb25ea6bc0d7.png

Torrential Eureka

This one is a bit technical, but a player noticed that after the update, a Torrential Streamway moving to a regular Streamway was not compressing as expected. This turned out to be a result of the new performance optimizations, where Streamways only evaluate every 3 ticks because that's the length of time required to move from one slot to the next, but Torrentials are 50% faster and so evaluate every 2. The hitch was being caused by the guaranteed timing mismatch between the two. At first I tried swapping their order to make sure the normal streams went first, which solved the Fast->Slow transition (the normal always grabs the awaiting fast), but it did not solve the Slow->Fast->Slow case. I had almost resigned myself to making the entire Streamway network operate on single ticks (which would be 2-3 times as expensive for perf), but then I had a flash of inspiration... {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/45567834/598906476137686f809a9a33334190d98c35d87e.png Since each type worked completely fine on their own, and there's a guaranteed down-time tick on either system, simply changing Torrentials to evaluate every tick solves the problem cleanly. They still operate within themselves, but also have the benefit of weaving in between off-ticks of the regular Streamways as long as their order is processed correctly. This has a super cool side benefit too - there's been an issue for a while of how to handle super long chains of streamways: which goes first? How do you know which one is connected to which? The solution for the longest time has been guesstimating the right length of chain for performance and likelihood, but results in the occasional 'missed' transfer - which manifests as bad compression at an intersection. It's rare but does happen. The eureka moment potentially has implications here too. I can try to process specific sections of the network on 1's while the rest of the system works on 2's and 3's. It'll take a bit more investigation to work through it, and there may be some things about Deltas and Undergrounds specifically that I can do, but I'm super happy because it felt like a very nebulous problem to tackle until now. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/45567834/54037ec78f081302d9ae52ac2fe3bb25ea6bc0d7.png

Pretty Slick

And my last, and favorite anecdote goes to Coolcatt5000 who discovered an emergent use of game mechanics that I hadn't even intended directly, but is absolutely in the spirit of what MoteMancer is trying to be: a sandbox game of logistical puzzles to solve in whatever creative way you can think of. I had originally designed an Underground Ichor Slick, but after early testing and feedback from players, it was honestly too powerful. It was fun for a moment but ended up trivializing so much of what made MoteMancer unique. Slicks are still a player favorite, and are both super powerful and unique in the genre, so giving them a slight handicap also just fits them better. Coolcatt saw the problem on a totally different level though. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/45567834/42b364953fc86d7fec7ef498e26dfc38d7bfe69f.png There's a Runeshroom Ritual called Seep that grows Ichor Slick under affected structures. It was definitely intended to be a partner to Rampant Bloom that allowed you to run Slicks under structures just like roots, and let that be part of your toolbox. You could use entire buildings as your way to do undergrounds, but it's a little awkward to wrangle properly given the organic shape of the Seep ritual. But since any structure is affected, that includes MoteMancer's locked-footprint underground structures, like Underground Saltways. Because the ritual simply checks the footprint of the affected structure, you can use them to piggy-back a slick and get an honest to goodness underground in the process. Amazing. This type of emergence is very hard to create in a game, and I'm super happy that MoteMancer is able to dance in that space. The best part is that this has been in the game for months and was only just discovered. I look forward to seeing what other emergent behavior bubbles up in the future. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/45567834/54037ec78f081302d9ae52ac2fe3bb25ea6bc0d7.png

Onward We Go

Summer Sale is just about wrapped up, and there are a handful of trickling in bugs and QoL that I should address in short order. After that I'm going to do my very best to focus on art, even though you all keep suggesting super reasonable and awesome UI/UX features. It's a balance but animations definitely need attention. One thing I'm super looking forward to is revisiting Mana Roots and Streamways now that the shape of the game and its performance profile are more or less settled. It gives me good paths to chase to improve their look and utility while keeping things performant. Thank you all once again for your time and feedback and helping to make MoteMancer better. Every bug report, suggestion, and unique discovery helps make the game stronger. The future is bright! Back to the Lab 🌿 ~CyanAvatar

Thanks for the bug reports and suggestions!

Hotfix v0.5.025

• Torrential Streamway structures tick twice as often to solve mixed-streamway-chain compression. This could be a slight perf hit for Torrential-heavy bases, but still probably negligible in the scene as a whole.
• Ascendant achievement was reading from the Foundations menu rather than the current active Foundation set. You should be able to claim your achievement by loading the game right before walking through the portal.
• Building an underground segment over an existing chain now shows the pickup feedback like every other harvest

Hotifx v0.5.024

• Enchanted Gripper, Enchanted Delta, and Omni Gripper now respect blueprint rotations relative to the structure's rotation rather than being absolute direction.
• Locking Chest slots now allows locking filled slots
• More robust inventory save state handling
• While in Sandbox mode, clicking on a planar wedge in the Map will swap to that plane
• Clarified Russian string for Scrying
• Clarified English string for Rampant Bloom (may change in the future to just be all adjacent structures, but that's much more complicated)

Hotifx v0.5.023

• Enchanted Grippers respect blueprint configurations again.
• 3 barrier generators will no longer generate negative power (but still generate 0 power)
• Lava ritual refreshes when a power grid is merged which was causing heat loss. Changed it so max heat is calculated in the lava generator tick to avoid subframe add/removes.
• Make sure heat cant update behind the loading screen / when paused or during teardown.
• Destroying a lava barrier could allow you to build invalid configurations because the structure tile was cleared.
• Special belt build logic now respects lava tiles.
• 2 tile lava gen burn time is 75 instead of 100.

Hotifx v0.5.022

• Fix for Scholar achievement not triggering properly, should heal on update
• Dark Reach now contributes to the Mycelial Affinity achievement
• Fixed an issue with Lava Generators not updating properly with their power grid
• Fix some issues with fuel based power generators and entropy.

Hotfix v0.5.021

• World Veins Foundation no longer prevents rifts from spawning.
• Fix for Lava generator lava not always showing up on creation.
• Belt entities were not updating their mask interaction when the player switched planes.
• Fix for Fire Wires that could spawn without particles

Hotfix v0.5.020

• Mana Flare recharging is faster than casting a fresh one by 50%
• Mana Roots and Fire Wires will now change their visuals based on their grid's saturation. Note that the Mana Root visual is temporary, but worth testing in the wild for a few days while I make a nice shader or it.
• Library Tutorial now has more prominent blueprints and glows for highlighted areas
• Safety catch for a player who built over the Grindstone area before the blueprint gets put down
• Can no longer save game while in the library when choosing your foundation card for ng+.
• Portals no longer open in sandbox mode.
• Fix for a crash in Sandbox mode when selecting a Slipway (for the curious we were querying thousands of tiles because of reach range... whoops...)
• Fix isolation interaction with entropy structures
• Visual fix for undergrounds being attached to a portal in a non-straight direction.
• Fix issues with power nodes that are in entropy when 2 grids are merged or split.
• Improvement for lag spikes when walking near a portal by no longer touch every single visual root on a plane when that plane becomes visible or invisible.
• Vortex and cloudspring updated to support new entity visual behavior.
• Vortex and cloudpsring now use vfx sort order so they render on top of the new structure visuals (rather than on the belt entity layer).
• Changing the number of inventory slots that are disabled sends an inventory notify so structures can wake up.
• Locking or unlocking an inventory slot sends an inventory notify so structures can wake up.

Hotfix v0.5.014

• D3D11 is default again. Note - MoteMancer switched to DirectX 12 by default in pursuit of potential performance improvements. After receiving multiple crash reports and seeing only minimal real-world gains, the default renderer has been reverted to DirectX 11 for improved stability. Players who prefer DirectX 12 can still launch the game using the launch option: -force-d3d12
• Reliquaries now reactivate their input grippers when an infinite reliquary upgrade is acquired.
• Added a second input binding to Trash hotkey
• Destroyed rune shrooms never cleared their logistics tiles.
• Gale Generator's item tooltip is fixed and matches the research tooltip
• Power Window was not properly updating the title for power nodes without an inventory
• Fix for action bar counts getting desynced from player inventory.

Hotfix v0.5.013

• Library scene book no longer queues up chats if spam clicked
• Library scene book is re-readable after scroll wheel portion of tutorial
• Reveal UI chime no longer plays on reminder animations
• Can no longer interact with master or book while dialogue is playing
• Surrounding a Mana Flare with 6 structures in the library before the tutorial advacnes to that step will now resolve properly
• Control click from a simple collector to complete the objective in the Library for collecting from a simple collector
• Clear slot sound no longer plays on new game start
• Pasting from blueprints now hides hover tooltip
• Fixed a rare interaction with collectors and infinite research
• Fixed a bug that could cause portals to break if teleporting to a close poximity Umbral Waygate
• Fixed an edge case that could trigger the Harrow achievement early.

Hotfix v0.5.012

• Fixed a variety of bugs around Lava Generators with excessively fast burn rates. (They will now actually cnsume as fast as the tooltip states)
• Lava generator only gains max heat when ritualsed rather than both min and max
• Lava generator no longer double dips from infinite ritual upgrade.
• Converted blueprint runes that don't work on mobile to others. This is mainly so that sharing blueprints between devices doesn't break and is largely cosmetic. Old Blueprints can still be imported without issue.
• Anchor Stone window should now properly show 600 instead of 1000
• Anchor Stone Window allows Quick Transfer with shift if you want to place a few in manually to unjam it from two sources.

Hotfix v0.5.011

• Nuanced UX changes:
  • Q (pipette) over action bar will pipette, but MMB will still clear
  • MMB no longer trashes from player inventory (because it pipettes)
  • Delete key added as a rebindable hotkey for trashing player inventory items and clearing action bar slots while hovering
  • Grid Guide now stacks with Spell Mode, and will always show with belts
• Bug fixes
  • Trash bugs on player inventory close and partial stacks fixed
  • Fixed bugs around Grid Guide tiles fading improperly or not showing at all from conflicting overrides
  • Fix for tutorial banner spam and better clear handling for completed lessons
  • Can no longer descend from Levitate onto Lava Generators

Hot fix v0.5.010

• Excavator and Nudge now start at 1/2 toggleable range, Titanic command now allows 1/2/4 range
• Excavate min harvest speed even faster
• Meteor Shower now will start a lava generator burn cycle for free on impact
• Levihaste can no longer be achieved while in Oracle
• New mote patches generated with the Jeweled Fields foundation will generate twice as many Motes of the Plane's base Element than the other two. Chromatic Fields is unchanged.
• More perf improvements for Power Grids
• Fire Tutorial Quake and Tar order of objectives changed to be more intuitive.
• Fixed a bad tutorial key for fire path
• Hardening just in case you cleansed 1000 entropy before the tutorial beat
• Fixed behavior where pedestals and portals could delay Gripper requests.
• Elemental orb now accepts both entities even if its currently holding one of them.
• Research Teleporter Icon now contextually shows based on whether the player is in the Library or not
• Research Teleporter tooltip is now always centered and will not spill off screen
• Fixed a bug where Lava Pedestal visuals could bleed through to other planes.
• When an entropy rift first spawns, it now respects Shade Veil for the tiles under the rift.

Hot Fix v0.5.009

• Player inventory slots will now highlight if the item matches the active hover tip item
• Crafting corner now has hover tips.
• Runeshrooms were placing ritual tiles just before being destroyed if they were connected to a fully saturated power grid, creating a blocker for future Runeshroom placements.
• Fixed a typo in German for Simple Collector
• A gripper that turns off and then back on in quick sucession could have significant delays before picking up again.
• Pedestals no longer turn off input grippers if they are full. This should make Research throughput back to the way it was before the perf update.
• Theoretical Insight removed from the Foundations menu

Hot Fix v0.5.008

• Craft tip window arrow had a bad aspect ratio from new atlas
• Fix for some in-world reagents showing black nubs due to atlas neighbors
• Forbidden Knowledge was checking for a research that is no longer available. It should reconcile correctly on loading a saved game.
• Consistency pass for Italian translations for Saltways and Streamways

Hot Fix v0.5.007

• Fix for Lava Generator pools sometimes finding their way into other planes
• A 0 lava tile generator (smallest triangle) will look like there is no lava. (it can't generate power)
• Fix german missing symbol in crafting time string
• Spell mode no longer blocks rotating structures
• Fix for some over-aggressive performance work that broke a few Ichor Slick interactions

Hot Fix v0.5.006

• Fixed a bug where right click could cause item duplication
• Fixed bad loading states for post fire/life tutorial save splits (the wrong recipes were granted for motes and elementals)
• Elemental Binder now doesn't grant and elements directly, they are all granted by progression

Hot Fix v0.5.005

• Rifts were regenerating about 8x more than expected (fallout from performance improvements
• Fix a case where an old save could get stuck in the new tutorial flow

Hot Fix v0.5.004

• protect against gripper payload size being > of sprites.
• Streamway delta middle input was pointed the wrong direction on flipped deltas allowing other streams to pull from it.
• Charged lodestone was not using tick time for minimum wait time.
• Player no longer blocks building in sandbox mode.

Greetings MoteMancers!

If the last update shook the foundations of the elemental planes, this update is poised to hone and refine your alchemical journey. The Attunement Update brings character customization, major performance improvements, achievements, power system refinements, and a host of quality-of-life upgrades. Full patch notes are available below, but for now let's talk shop! {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/45567834/54037ec78f081302d9ae52ac2fe3bb25ea6bc0d7.png

Personalizing your Apprentice

I didn't know when character customization was going to sneak its way into MoteMancer, but sneak in it has. Figuring out the level of customization was definitely a challenge, I started with 12 swatch options, but it quickly became too fiddly, so we've landed on 6. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/45567834/e7eb62c19793f5519d5a7d2e5fd2a8e28917d21d.png At the top you'll find 6 presets to start a character from, and there is a 7th that will hold whatever custom kit you like. There is also an optional cloak decal available. Character Customization can be entered from the Gameplay options menu, or at the start of a run. Enjoy! {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/45567834/54037ec78f081302d9ae52ac2fe3bb25ea6bc0d7.png

Performance Improvements

Special shoutout to all of the playtesters that provided bases with tens of thousands of structures. You provided quite a challenge! One of the largest changes in this update is a new internal tick system for factory simulation. Until now, world generation, factory processing, and supporting systems all ran continuously in parallel. By moving the simulation onto a managed tick system, MoteMancer can better regulate heavy workloads and recover from performance spikes when large factories begin to push the limits. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/45567834/6b4f6b268a1d43ec7f52300bea8a456993cc04f0.png That combined with a slew of MoteMancer-specific optimizations landed us in a place that felt almost impossible at the outset. There's an affectionate save file dubbed Final Boss Base, courtesy of @nerever, that was running at 12 fps on my rig. It is now running at 60. The good news too is that this patch was predominantly focused on simulation speed, and there's still more gains to be gotten on the graphics side. Those improvements will trickle in while the rest of the art gets its polish pass. Also one fun surprise. We are finally at a stage where optimizing save file size makes sense. Said Final Boss Base's save file clocked in around 45 mb, that same save is now 7 mb. If you still want human-readable save files, you can start the game with -saveJson and you'll get the old behavior. Everything is backwards and forwards compatible. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/45567834/54037ec78f081302d9ae52ac2fe3bb25ea6bc0d7.png

A Plethora of Achievements

I wrote an entire Musing about my achievements philosophy, so I won't repeat that here. I'm super happy to have achievements live and ready for players to explore. If you have any saves from before completing a run that had Foundations enabled, that should be all you need to trigger those achievements. Loading an end-game save will also likely trigger a slew of already completed ones, so enjoy your pinata of steam notifications. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/45567834/54037ec78f081302d9ae52ac2fe3bb25ea6bc0d7.png

Power Plants or Powered Plants?

The Power systems in MoteMancer have needed some love for a while. They serve their purpose well, but some of the pacing and incentives felt a little off, so they've gotten some much needed attention.

• Air has had the most change. Wind Turbines now operate over a larger area, but with less power per tile, they are about even baseline, but require more open space. The master-tier upgrade however increases their range 3 extra rings instead of 1. Both Updraft and Howl From Beyond now add significant gains to Turbines, and the Circulation Ritual triples the power generation of all affected Turbines. Gale Generators are no longer network-wide but affect a huge area, quadrupling the baseline power per open air tile. The main goal of all of these changes is to give air networks a better shape and incentives to build strategically and synergistically.
• Life mostly has pacing changes. It was always a little silly that your very first canopy doubled your solar output, but the exponential nature of solar still feels right for life. Also Canopies never really had any sort of spatial component to them. Both edges have been addressed. When Canopies unlock, they generate 55 power per Adjacent Mana Leaf, and the Master-tier unlock retains their old behavior of additionally generating power per leaf in the entire network. This should provide a smoother power curve in the mid and end game while retaining its identity.
• Fire was actually already in a pretty good spot but there were some weird incentives around pedestal and pyroclastic chamber placement that should be resolved (both will increase your burn rate more than they used to). Heat will also now accumulate And drain depending on whether the generator is active or dormant. Also Fire has a couple of aesthetic improvements - Heat is now represented by the lava color so you can see it at a glance, and Lava Generator pools are now meshes instead of sprites, which both makes them more performant, and removes the occasional weird hole that could happen from an acute angle.

{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/45567834/acbbaf50777394e267980f893ac9743768a7b897.png {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/45567834/54037ec78f081302d9ae52ac2fe3bb25ea6bc0d7.png

Plus Some Extra Goodies

There are a bunch of extras as well, two of the most notable:

• Revamped Tutorial - The Library portion of the tutorial has been significantly extended to help players find their footing a little better. Feedback always welcome.
• Sandbox Mode - You can now play MoteMancer in creative mode at the start of a new game if you want to test out some shapes or builds for your blueprint machinations.

Check out the patch notes below for a full list of additional Quality of Life improvements. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/45567834/54037ec78f081302d9ae52ac2fe3bb25ea6bc0d7.png

State of the Game and the Future

Well last time I said I was going to focus on art and look what happened. Proof that priorities can constantly evolve. The new tutorial and achievements serve new and old players very well, and with the new advent of Foundations, players were pushing bases much harder and so performance became a significant priority. Working on art also revealed how much performance groundwork needed to be laid to make room for FX. The Character Customizer and the UI did get some significant art attention, but there is still more to be done. While working on perf, we found a great solve for the Alchemists Journal, and laid the groundwork for controller support. Those two features along with continuing to polish animations, sound, and overall presentation will be what consumes the next leg of the journey. Thanks to all the players who already have spent hundreds of hours with MoteMancer, Here's to hundreds more 🌿 ~CyanAvatar PS - This patch represents the largest architectural shift MoteMancer has ever had, please use F1 to post bug reports, localization issues, or other suggestions. And thank you so much for your patience and support. I will be around as always actively working on the game and hanging out in MoteMancer's Discord if you need anything. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/45567834/54037ec78f081302d9ae52ac2fe3bb25ea6bc0d7.png With the addition of Achievements, MoteMancer now offers hundreds of hours of content to chase. Additionally, MoteMancer will be 20% off through Steam's Summer Sale - If you’ve been waiting to jump in, now’s a great time! https://store.steampowered.com/app/3320980/ {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/45567834/54037ec78f081302d9ae52ac2fe3bb25ea6bc0d7.png

Steam Reviews

Sharing your thoughts about MoteMancer in a Steam Review is one of the best ways to help the game grow. Understanding what is working, what could use improvement, and most importantly what you hope to see for the future is and always will be what drives the game forward. Your voice matters, and directly affects decisions made throughout the development process. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/45567834/54037ec78f081302d9ae52ac2fe3bb25ea6bc0d7.png

MoteMancer has a Wiki!

If you are ever feeling stuck, check out the MoteMancer Wiki for additional information, or join our Discord and introduce yourself. There are plenty of friendly alchemists there to help. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/45567834/54037ec78f081302d9ae52ac2fe3bb25ea6bc0d7.png

Full Patch Notes - v0.5.001

66 Achievements fully implemented Sandbox Mode

• All spells unlocked
• Mana disabled
• Building from pointer is infinite
• Speed is unique to sandbox mode and scales based on zoom level
• Fixed the craftable items that had 0 ingredients
• Crafting window filters are available by default
• Option to instantly unlock any single or all research

Quality of Life

• Better color language previews for out of reach, polish on tilemap preview colors and states
• Research tree fog collider is now the outer rim only
• Tilemap area of effect previews will show even if the structure build is blocked
• Mouse wheel scroll now will push and pull single items between inventories
• Grippers now have a cheap pseudo round robin implementation
• Ichor slick now allows F pickup even when not full
• The Master can now be re-clicked at any time with custom lines for reminders of beats
• Structure configuration can now be exported as part of blueprints Lodestone, chests, omni, filtered deltas.
• Mana Flares can now be freely built over
• Character Customizer supports undo
• Umbral Waygate no longer affected by entropy
• Mouseover spells on action bar buttons shows spell tip window
• Save games now use compression and are about 15% of their original size.
• Prisms sorted in craft menu

Tuning

• Everything in the Production tab is now affected by Tailwind.
• Rampant Bloom now works on Sovereign Manaheart.
• Free grants from research completed are now disabled unless Clean Hands is enabled
• Theoretical Insight removed.
• Keystones can no longer be hand crafted
• Player movement speed adjustments ease in to new speed rather than abruptly changing per tile
• Phased Pockets free initial grant is now per plane
• Air grippers will alternate if input throughput is lower than internal cooldown time.
• Great Portal orb tuning down to 600 from 1000
• Research tiles visible on the Research Tree increased from 12 to 18
• Excavator research is now a direct tutorial objective
• Other production category structures are affected by echo catcher.
• Howl from beyond and wind surfing positions swapped in the research tree

Power Fire

• Lava pedestals count for 2 lava tiles for burn time.
• Pyroclastic Chambers count for 15 lava tiles for burn time.
• Heat rises and falls depending on fuel.
• Heat is shown visually on the lava pool inside the Lava Generator.

Life

• Mana Canopies now generate 55 power per Adjacent Mana Leaf by default
• Mana Leaf power per leaf is now 21 from 20
• Mana Canopy Synergy now generates 8 power per Mana Leaf in the entire network.

Air

• Wind Turbine range increased to 7 baseline, +3 on upgrade.
• Wind Turbine Open Air value reduced from 3 to 1 baseline.
• Gale Generators now grant +3 bonus power to each open air tile within a range of 18.
• Circulation ritual is no longer tile based and now affects Wind Turbine structures, each affected Turbine triples its power output.
• Howl From Beyond grants 7 bonus power per Open Air tile
• Updraft grants 3 bonus power per Open Air tile

Aesthetics

• New recipes now show a chaser on the crafting menu's header
• New logic for revealing crafting menu headers
• Dimmer tabs that are not yet available to open
• Icons added to all tutorial objectives
• Character now a single Material and Customizable
• Hover tip snapping tech
• Water doodads have been colored a bit more blue to separate them from Life Flora a little more.
• Mana flare disabled during library cut scene
• Mana flares no longer run out while in the library, but drain when the rifts show up
• Lava generator now uses a mesh instead of a tilemap.

Optional Launch flags

• -forceLocalBlueprints to always load the local blueprint file even if the cloud save version is newer.
• -clearAchievements will clear Steam Achievements. It also stop achievements from accruing, so you must restart without the flag in order to start getting them again
• -saveJson to save a human-readable file. Saves are forwards and backwards compatible from the new format.

Performance

• Default to DirectX12 (This caused a crash once in testing, but resolved itself on restart, please make a thread on the forum if you need help).
• Significant cleanup around Structure Mana performance
• Bastions can now search for targets over multiple frames. They will also not search again for a few seconds after not finding any entropy.
• Chunk Manager is now smarter about requesting calculations based on the rest of the factory's performance.
• Allow hex mesh generation to break up over multiple frames to keep us within our allotted time for chunk gen.
• Better sound performance especially while moving.
• Significant Gripper performance improvements.
• Significantly reduced the cost of character hybrid rendering
• Aggressive culling on all off screen or off plane objects
• Non-visible planes' ticks are offset from the currently active plane
• Garbage Collection optimization
• Structure in Entropy detection significantly cheaper
• Structures now turn off their inputs if they are full
• Power Grid Optimizations
• Only draw one arm per side for air grippers.
• Visibility objects can now opt to turn off when above a zoom threshold.
• Gripper arms and gust funnel swirls disable above the threshold.

Bugs

• Fixed a bug with overgrowth pillar failing to search for new growth locations.
• Altar FX were not culling
• Fix for Lava barriers not clearing their map tiles.
• Fix for going to foundations menu and back clearing portal tiles.
• Fix production structures not starting if you change their inventory too quickly after powering them.
• Tutorial banner should no longer swap its title on fade out
• Fire path tutorial objective wasn't allowing for shadow of fire doodads to complete
• Loading an infinite research with 0 cycles remaining is now confirmable
• Elemental Orbs no longer keep taking items once the orb is capped out.
• Fix biorhythm bad interaction with blueprints.
• Portals are no longer triggered while in Oracle mode.
• Quit context now works when mouse is over ui
• Fix for being unable to build belts over belt blueprints.

I've always been a super math nerd, especially when it comes to color math. I used to say "Math is my paintbrush". While working as an FX artist I used math to shape and sculpt procedural textures like clouds or fire or water to great effect. And so this week while creating the character customizer, I found out that the color picker I'd come to know so well wasn't a standard thing available in Unity, I had to make one from scratch. I thought today I'd share what that looks like and we can finish by going back to an old friend, the Mana Flare. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/45567834/54037ec78f081302d9ae52ac2fe3bb25ea6bc0d7.png

UVs are Magical

For the uninitiated, a UV is simply a color gradient that goes from 0-1 in two directions. If you imagine coloring a sheet of paper and wrapping it around your arm, a UV is just that square sheet of paper. They come in many flavors, and i've written in the past about how to use that information in very clever ways, but for today's trick we're just going to reference the most common two: standard (square) and polar (circular). Both have two axis - x and y; radius and angle. Our character color picker needs a hue ring, so let's start there. The easiest way to make a ring is to grab a circle and subtract a smaller circle from it. The "Step" function just says:

• "True past this number" - 1, white
• "False before that number" - 0, black

The radius value feeds our Step. Once the subtraction is done we end up with a white ring and now we can leverage the V value, If we simply tell V to drive a Hue Rotation, we end up with a perfect rainbow that loops back on where we started. Multiply these two together, and we're home! {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/45567834/b3b5589bcbc725f4b46d4cfd2a2a8d28fb4216f2.png The next thing we need is a Saturation Value triangle, which is my interface of choice because it gives the most freedom in the smallest space. Here we're going to leverage a standard UV layout. Using that same Step function, we can get clever and use the U and V value together to drive the Step rather than a constant value. If we just did U and V straight, we'd get a perfect diagonal line, but we need to make a triangle, so we can divide by 2 to give us some breathing room. Use that same trick on the opposite side and the bottom, multiply them all together again and we get a triangle. For the color we actually already have everything we need. V - left to right, multiplied by our color gives us a clean gradient there, and U bottom to top is already just a black and white gradient. Linear blend between the two and it maps perfectly to our triangle. My favorite part about this is its literally all just math, no textures, just numbers, which means its super fast, but also just really clean and elegant. Definitely took me by surprise that there wasn't a built in widget for this, but also it was fun to create one from scratch. Plus I get the benefit of rotating the hue wheel to match the elemental layout of the game. Small touch, but worth it. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/45567834/54037ec78f081302d9ae52ac2fe3bb25ea6bc0d7.png

Making a Mana Flare

Mana Flare is really just a natural extension of the lines of thought above. It's true that I use textures for the flare itself, but only for the parts in motion. The sphere look, the flat pool, the radial lines all use the same techniques from above to create the shape for the textures to flow inside of. I won't go into all the super mathy details, but you can recognize a lot of the techniques even from this simple split-shot. There are radial glows, some squashed more than others, there are rings with textures flowing through them. The main ball is a circle with a fresnel edge (basically just whiter at the edge), and then the surface is another squashed circle. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/45567834/13ca654a47efa4779f4ae89d8f1817f5e4b94cff.png The only real tricky bit there is making the ellipse scale appropriately with the Y height to complete the illusion. There's even a simple Above/Below Step function determining whether the mana liquid is visible, but the ellipse neatly hides the transition so you never see the hard edge. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/45567834/54037ec78f081302d9ae52ac2fe3bb25ea6bc0d7.png

State of the Build

The v0.5 update is nearing completion. You can play the latest version of it in the Experimental branch right now! I'm probably going to let it bake for a week or so to find extra bugs and bits of polish here and there, but with it comes the largest Performance improvements to date, Character Customization, Achievements, a new Tutorial, and a slew of quality of life improvements. Lots more to do, and so back to the Lab! 🌿 ~CyanAvatar

When I teach design, I often reference Quantic Foundry's Gamer Motivation Model, because it is one of the most concise images I know of. I play tons of games in just as many genres, but Completion is definitely one of my primary motivators. I want to see everything a game has to offer, and fully explore the space. Naturally that means I have some very strong opinions on what makes a good suite of achievements. Happy Monday! Let's talk about designing achievements for MoteMancer and a couple of fun tidbits from the journey. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/45567834/54037ec78f081302d9ae52ac2fe3bb25ea6bc0d7.png

Being Thoughtful

My primary philosophy on achievements is they should reinforce the game's core identity, teach as often as possible, and be largely attainable to anyone who actively tries. As a completionist, if I see an achievement that I don't even want to attempt, I will often not care about the rest of the achievements on offer, and will probably check out of the game earlier than I otherwise would have. Things like enforced no-hit runs or speed runs are easy examples that can fall into this category. That's not to say there's not a time and place for them. If you make a racing game, speed achievements are totally in-line with what the game is about. If your game is already pretty lethal, a no-hit achievement can be very on-brand. But if you have a stealth puzzle game where the core gameplay is patience and planning, a timer is antithetical to the experience. If a platformer is multiple hours long and demands perfection the entire time, that hill may be too high to climb for the vast majority of your players. I think a significant note is that even without a player facing achievement system, players will still speed run and flex on their own terms. The distinction for me is that those players live in a different space than someone trying to show their love for a game through full completion. I think one other thing here is worth underscoring. Just because an achievement is easy to implement or seems obvious because other games do it, does not necessarily make it right for a game. Achievements should make the most fun way to play also the way to win. MoteMancer is primarily about solving puzzles and thoughtfully taking your time while doing so, thus there will not be a time-based canonized achievement. Similarly, there will be no achievement for the Marathon Foundation, nor completely maxing out the difficulty for a run. I do think those are important inclusions for the game as a whole, but that doesn't necessarily mean it's a great achievement experience for a completionist. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/45567834/1e0be924b9f9aade635db9cd9edd440bd917ce86.png {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/45567834/54037ec78f081302d9ae52ac2fe3bb25ea6bc0d7.png

The Breakdown

I think of achievements in a handful of categories:

• Play - These are the simple "play the game" achievements, you don't need that many of them, but it's both a way of getting a player's feet wet on the achievement feature itself, and assuring them that they are on the right path. It can vary from game to game, but for a game whose average playthrough is about 100 hours like MoteMancer, some signposting absolutely has value.
• Mastery - I differentiate Challenge from Mastery in that I don't want a player to show me they executed a specific hard maneuver, I want them to demonstrate that they understand how to wield all the tools at their disposal. MoteMancer happens to have a very clean mechanism for this which is Shattering elements (which removes an element entirely from your playthrough) - if you lean too hard on void chests, complete a run where Shadow is removed. I think mastery is just as much about removing crutches as forcing specific use.
• Silly - Life is too short to be serious all the time. Throwing a handful of memes and embracing silly edge cases is just as important as the serious ones. For all those EA testers that discovered you could Levitate and Haste at the same time (nicknamed Levihaste) - I've added an achievement that mimics the behavior for stacking Wind Surfing and Wavedash while Levitating. As a side bonus I can teach new players about the gameplay, and for the veterans, it's a nice wink.

There are some sub-categories too like teaching specific interactions that may be slightly off the beaten path like conducting interplanar warfare with rifts, or growing your own mote patches. In general I try to have about 30% be play the game, 30% exploring the edges of what's possible, and 30% significant obstacles to overcome. The remaining 10% largely depends on the game, and is where things like silly achievements can go or extras that make the other suites feel more complete. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/45567834/54037ec78f081302d9ae52ac2fe3bb25ea6bc0d7.png

Cultivating Immersion

One of my main design philosophies is that everything in your game should tell the same story. There is a reason MoteMancer is built on hexagons, and has 6 elements, and each crafter makes 6 recipes, and there are 6 action bar buttons on left and right. That level of cohesion is what creates immersion - you feel like you are in a space with its own set of rules, there for you to explore. Some of our players have even suggested that you should craft 6 items with right click instead of 5. Maybe before launch I will find the courage, but 5 is a Very strong number piggybacking for humans, so it's a tough tradeoff. To that end though, MoteMancer clearly needs 60 or 66 achievements :) Did you know that as of writing, Satisfactory has exactly 44 achievements and Factorio has exactly 88 achievements? Both are also fully shipped, so odds are they will not change. Clearly the universe is telling me MoteMancer needs 66, and so shall it be. That's another thing I care deeply about. MoteMancer may add more content in the future, more Foundations etc. But, I will not be changing achievements ever once they are released. Again personal completionist bias, but when a game has a full achievement suite that I 100% complete, and then find out later that a dozen or so were added, it really takes the wind out of my sails. New players get more content, but existing ones get robbed of their accomplishment in some sense. Once someone has truly 100% completed MoteMancer, I don’t want to move the goalposts on them afterwards. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/45567834/54037ec78f081302d9ae52ac2fe3bb25ea6bc0d7.png

It's Under 9000?

So I have to share this. MoteMancer is localized in 14 languages, and the achievements will be too. Since I reference plenty of the culture that influenced me - Magic cards, beloved games, TV shows - one of the achievements is naturally titled “It’s Over 9000!”, which you unlock for generating a fairly respectable amount of power. The funny thing is - in the original Manga and script, the line was "It's over 8000!". I was stunned. Apparently the voice actor just decided to change it in the booth because of the animated mouth movement. It's even 8000 in most of the subbed versions across all languages. Reflecting on this earth-shattering fact, I was fully prepared to localize and trigger the achievement for different numbers based on the language you were playing from. It's actually not that hard to code and the difference between 8000 and 9000 power is pretty minimal in the grand scheme of things and what the achievement is trying to get you to do. In the end though, apparently this crazy cultural schism is well known enough in circles that care that it's now a layered inside joke, and 9000 is the accepted meme of choice, so we're sticking with it for all languages :) {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/45567834/54037ec78f081302d9ae52ac2fe3bb25ea6bc0d7.png

Update Soon!

Ok enough rambling for today. The upcoming patch is full of performance optimizations, a new tutorial, Achievements! and a handful of other goodies. But the remaining bugs are not going to fix themselves, and so with that... Back to the Lab 🌿 ~CyanAvatar

Happy Monday! I'm still knee-deep in tutorialization and performance, but I thought today it would be fun to talk about how MoteMancer fell into using both 2D and 3D pipelines simultaneously, and the opportunities it ended up providing. There are definitely both upsides and downsides, and I'm not sure I'd do it the same way again, but I also definitely remember how I got here, so let's go on a journey. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/45567834/54037ec78f081302d9ae52ac2fe3bb25ea6bc0d7.png

Obviously 2D

I knew from the beginning that MoteMancer would present as a 2D game. One of my favorite parts of the automation genre is the local logistics puzzle itself, and realizing that every space has an opportunity cost. MoteMancer definitely focuses on that gameplay more than anything. 3D factory games have great spectacle, but can get hard to read very quickly, especially once you layer several stacked lines over each other. Certainly that has its own advantages too, but being on a Hex Grid is already complicated enough to wrap your head around, so 2D it is. This means theoretically everything can be a single image, or sprite sheet, and originally I thought that was going to be a huge performance boon. The jury's actually still out on that, because while not rendering 3D objects certainly saves a lot up front, Many of Unity's engine optimizations have been targeted at 3D specifically (looking at you DOTS), and I was not aware of that from the outset. Still though, 2D provided a great framework to start from and aligned with my design goals so that's where it started. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/45567834/54037ec78f081302d9ae52ac2fe3bb25ea6bc0d7.png

The Player Character

The first major hurdle came from having a player character that needed a variety of animations. Typically you can solve this with sprite sheet sequences, but given how many angles and animations I had, the sheer amount of texture space needed to give the character everything needed was not going to work. Not for lack of trying mind you, I did build the full 2d sprite pipeline before realizing it just wasn't going to be the path. I even did this cool lighting trick you can do where you film the character with pure Red Green and Blue lights, so you can change lighting after the fact. Let's say your staff light is Red, but you want to cast a shadow spell, you can take the Red information and change that color to whatever you want (say purple) after the fact and fake real time lighting changes even on a 2d sprite image. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/45567834/ca20ba857d85e9b01ac0c606d9624b1e20989cc9.png Anyway, suffice to say I did not pursue that path, and opted for a full real-time 3D character. The main issue now was - the game was already rendering and sorting in 2D, so I needed a way to marry the two into a cohesive result. Thankfully unity provides the ability to make a separate render camera from your main camera to achieve just that. The actual character is sitting on a tilted plane far in the distance with a camera pointed at them as if from game view. Plus a special camera that captures the cast shadow only. Did you ever notice while playing that the character's shadow will rotate around them as the day passes? That effect is achieved with yet another camera capturing the cast shadow as a fake light rotates around throughout the day cycle. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/45567834/5e2a1444a5e54faaac8e2fce057be86a9a3df91f.png {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/45567834/54037ec78f081302d9ae52ac2fe3bb25ea6bc0d7.png

Perf and Opportunities

It turns out rendering a character with a unique camera or two is not cheap, it's actually one of the more expensive persistent taxes MoteMancer pays for. And it has to be done because a 3D character won't sort properly with the other 2D objects in the scene without the camera trick. The nice thing is, there are a bunch of optimizations that can be made, and one of the big ones is making sure the character uses a single mesh for everything. This would normally be an issue for materials, but we can leverage something pretty awesome here that will also set ourselves up for future success. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/45567834/4635fc8364c54ba6de2dfae227ace47b4e327379.png In the image above, we can map a swatch to a given portion of the character, and even better, expose the colors themselves so they can be edited in real time. Yes this means the door is open for character customization! Exactly where this lands in the game flow is a little up in the air, it'll likely either be an early research unlock, or a pre-game selection probably. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/45567834/54037ec78f081302d9ae52ac2fe3bb25ea6bc0d7.png

Terrain Chunks

The character alone is not enough to push the hybrid rendering setup over the edge though, the real lever was terrain rendering. MoteMancer originally used tilemaps for everything, and while the game could have found success there probably, having an infinitely large world of tiles is also much more expensive than low-resolution meshes, at least for the constraints MoteMancer has. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/45567834/392911c14de01a52bbc7d53fb5be1036adac3376.png Each vertex here samples the noise texture to create coast lines and RGB masks that drive the terrain texture. I wrote pretty extensively about this in a past devlog, but suffice to say, this approach helped give MoteMancer its soft painterly terrain look while massively improving performance along the way. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/45567834/54037ec78f081302d9ae52ac2fe3bb25ea6bc0d7.png

Wrapping Up

No plan survives contact with reality, and knowing what I know now, I could see a world where MoteMancer leaned much more heavily into 3D assets as a whole just for the sake of the DOTS and ECS Unity pipeline, but that also would have come with plenty of other tradeoffs. Despite having a clear vision for the game, much of MoteMancer's journey has been a sculptural process of letting the game reveal its own idiosyncrasies and leaning into them rather than fighting them. On the other side of the dev space, the revamped tutorial is moving along steadily, and I'm more and more convinced that the Alchemists Journal feature is worth making. Achievements are also coming soon on the horizon. The future is bright :) Back to the lab 🌿 ~CyanAvatar

Greetings Mancers! Experimental has been pretty stable, so the updates to help performance are being rolled into the live game. There are more coming, but it's a good break point to migrate what's working well into the main build. There's also a fix for old saves having rare odd research tree states, and some polish to post-portal tutorial beats. Updates

• Presentation updates to post-portal Tutorial corner.
• Fix for a rare bug when loading old save files creating bad research tree states.
• Structures now run on a fixed simulation tick rate.
• VFX and Sprites have improved culling logic.
• Improved batching on Structure rendering.
• Player shadow should render smoother now.
• First music track on the Fire plane is now appropriately a Fire track instead of Life.

v0.4.041 update A handful of behavior bugs caused by performance improvements should now be resolved:

• Streamway Deltas should no longer seize or throttle
• Player Inventory should be back to 9x9 instead of 6x12
• Charged Lodestone should now work as expected

v0.4.042 update Additional edge-case bugs caused by performance improvements should now be resolved:

• A delta connected directly to a slab could stop processing if the slab trickled slowly but never fully fell asleep.
• Anytime a belt is placed and it modifies one of its neighbor chains, the neighbor chain may need to split itself.
• Sometimes if a belt entity became culled, its position would stop updating and it would appear invisible on the belt.
• Unlocking a recipe will wake up all production structures to see if they can now create things.

v0.4.044 update

• Fixed a bug that caused Czech default language (and possibly other languages) to not be able to load saved games.

Thank you for your patience and bug reports!

Happy Monday! Many players have been asking about MoteMancer's specific plans for performance improvements, I'm happy to say the current Experimental branch is live with the opening salvo. No plan survives contact with practical reality, and MoteMancer has had quite a journey in that regard. I'd love to share some learnings today. If you want to experience the improvements for yourself, jump in and check it out! What follows is going to get gritty. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/45567834/54037ec78f081302d9ae52ac2fe3bb25ea6bc0d7.png

More DOTS

Unity has this super cool system called DOTS or ECS (Entity Component System). I'm not going to get into the nitty-gritty details other than to say - yes it is quite magical, yes you can get insane performance gains like 1000x or better. The way it achieves this is by having very specific rules about where processing happens on your hardware and what objects it is allowed to affect. Even at the start of MoteMancer I had tagged this technology as my future. A few months ago I dove right in, having built up the confidence and programming chops to tackle the new coding style and found out... ECS officially only supports 3D objects, which is not MoteMancer's pipeline. This may not have been a problem except that needing to render multiple planes simultaneously makes extensive use of stenciling, which is natively supported by Unity's Sprite Renderer, and not by the new system. Suffice to say, many significant hurdles were found for the specific cocktail of rendering that is MoteMancer, much less all the fancy UV scrolling effects that are already present, let alone what’s planned for the future. We need another approach. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/45567834/54037ec78f081302d9ae52ac2fe3bb25ea6bc0d7.png

Back to First Principles

The most important thing you can do for solving any efficiency problem is identify ways to optimize over 50% of the work. What can you skip, how can you improve the most expensive part? MoteMancer's frame rate holds up very well until you get to about 40,000 structures, give or take. And most of the slowdown comes from just the sheer number of belts and arms checking things every frame to see if there's something to move. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/45567834/b7f6b84eae46f1ebd7f63f4ed41e016e84d935e6.png The first thing to notice, now that the logistics system is largely complete, is that the transit time of a given entity does have a floor - the time it takes for a single item to transit a single slot in a Streamway (.125 seconds). Ok there's one structure that is faster, which is a torrential streamway (.08333 seconds), but we'll get to that in a minute. This means that we can finally nail down a tick rate for the game, albeit a strange one. Many games land somewhere between 4-15 ticks per second depending on their needs. Using the information above, MoteMancer is going to use two different tick rates, 8 and 12 per second, which nicely have a common denominator of 24. 24 is super close to 30 frames per second (which would be close to negligible) but its not a number we're using directly, it just ensures that there's commonality in the system. This means we only need to calculate 40% of the frames for Torrential Streamways and 27% of the frames for everything else. This has some other large benefits because any background processes like garbage collection can happen during shorter load frames, giving the system an opportunity to drain the cache before it compounds faster than it can alleviate. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/45567834/54037ec78f081302d9ae52ac2fe3bb25ea6bc0d7.png

Idle Hands

Ok, that was a lot. Let's zoom out for a second. Another super deep cut we can take is realizing that in many cases, your Factory is not actually doing anything. Belts are saturated, structure outputs are full, you are spending time thinking of ways to expand while the factory eagerly awaits kicking into motion again. Apart from Infinite Research, all production lines will come to a halt eventually. There is no other endless sink in the game. Crucially though, that wouldn't stop every machine from trying to do its job - even checking whether a Gripper should pick something up starts to add up when you have literally thousands of them. That is, until now. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/45567834/9d27d0922de80373e30c0eb2751bca995c48940e.png Fundamentally, production structures already tell grippers not to pick something up if the result would overfill the input inventory. We can simply take this one step further and have the production structure literally turn an input gripper off until it needs to wake it up again. When any structure has a full output inventory, there is no reason for a gripper to keep trying to fill the input inventory. This does get scary, because there are many edge cases that need to be accounted for. Telling a vital part of your factory to just turn itself off risks the trigger to turn it back on breaking in some way. But, realizing that at any given time, a double-digit percentage of your factory is probably idle means you get a framerate much more in-line with what parts of your factory are actually operational rather than being taxed just because something has been placed. Both of the above are great examples of our initial goal of finding ways to skip large swathes computation before it even starts. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/45567834/54037ec78f081302d9ae52ac2fe3bb25ea6bc0d7.png

Looking Forward

I’m going to be shifting to fewer, more meaningful deep dives while I finish the game. So much of the work left on MoteMancer is in this space - very specific, very technical. I will still be updating the game regularly with whatever is hot off the press, whether the full retail build or experimental, so be on the lookout for updates there. Thank you for being along on the journey, we're officially in the home stretch. Back to the Lab! 🌿 ~CyanAvatar PS - One last huge thank you to players that are providing the final-boss bases to performance test against. If you have a large base with a low frame rate, send an F1 and it'll be added to the testing pool!

The Experimental branch is now live with a series of performance improvements implemented. Many of these came with significant refactors of existing systems. If you'd like to test your game in experimental, the transfer should be safe and backwards compatible, nothing about saving has changed. Thank you in advance to anyone testing and submitting any bugs of feedback through F1! 0.4.033 incremental update

• Fix for grippers not properly waking back up from reliquaries, void chest, planar portals, bastions

Changes

• You can get an onscreen fps indicator by launching the game with -fps in Steam Properties.
• Structures will now smartly disable themselves and any Gripper pointed at them while their inventory is full.
• Entropy spread is now less taxing on the queuing system.
• Lots of work around managing Structures both off Plane and out of frame more efficiently.
• Aggressive culling of VFX calculations that are not in the main field of view
• Reduced Structure batch thrashing, bringing draw calls for Structure rendering down by ~50%
• Also testing a new presentation for post-portal Tutorial Corner, feedback welcome.

Have a great weekend! {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/45567834/06dafa33f06ba05e43fbb27a149e9c4576da70bb.png

I spent some time recently just watching players hit the opening of the game and reading feedback about early experiences, and it’s been illuminating. Nothing is fundamentally broken, but players are getting in their own way, and that’s on me. So rather than layering more on top, I’ve been going back and reworking the first 10 minutes with everything I’ve learned over the past months. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/45567834/54037ec78f081302d9ae52ac2fe3bb25ea6bc0d7.png

Teaching, Not Adding

The biggest shift is in the tutorial. One of the best critiques I've heard is that the first thing you learn in the library is not the first thing you do out in the wild. The library feels safe and forgiving. Stepping into the world adds stakes, and that shift can be overwhelming while you’re still learning how to interact with everything. Most of the early friction is clarity, not difficulty. Players need to feel comfortable interacting with the world before they’re asked to solve problems inside it. There are a few surgical moves I can make in the tutorial to set the table better before the feast begins. I have plans. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/45567834/54037ec78f081302d9ae52ac2fe3bb25ea6bc0d7.png

Choosing Battles (Borders)

Over the last couple weeks I took a serious run at reworking structure borders. The goal was to shrink the borders in an attempt to clean up visual noise and isolate their silhouette better. When structures are tightly packed, it can be hard to read each one cleanly. In practice, this change cascades into a huge amount of art rework edge cases, so I’m shelving that direction. The exercise wasn’t wasted though. It revealed a handful of specific culprits (like grindstone salt shards and simple gripper fingers reading too similarly), and there are meaningful gains to be made by targeting those directly instead of attempting a full art rework. This is one of those cases where the ideal solution doesn’t survive contact with reality, but the exploration still produces a better, more focused plan. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/45567834/54037ec78f081302d9ae52ac2fe3bb25ea6bc0d7.png

Livening Up Your Base

On the lighter side, I added birth animations to Saltways and Streamways. Small change, but it does a lot of work. These are foundational logistics pieces, and having them smoothly slide into the world instead of popping in improves both readability and feel. The animation also reinforces travel direction, which helps immediately. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/45567834/65a7426748488346ff381db54ef5a5922401b61b.png It’s a bit of polish that shows up in the first 10 minutes and carries through the entire game. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/45567834/54037ec78f081302d9ae52ac2fe3bb25ea6bc0d7.png

Controlled Clutter

Another major axis of first impressions is environmental detail. The terrain shader is strong, but it’s missing some ambient depth via pebbles, grass, seashells and the like. I took a swing at GPU instancing for this and ran into issues with MoteMancer’s specific rendering setup (split 2D/3D, heavy stencil use for portals). It’s not playing nicely there. Not done with it yet though. I have another approach in mind that borrows from how terrain borders work, which might get a similar result without the same constraints. I’ll come back to it after the tutorial work is further along. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/45567834/54037ec78f081302d9ae52ac2fe3bb25ea6bc0d7.png

Stable Footing

The biggest holistic takeaway is that players will tolerate hitting edges, but that’s not a reason to leave them in. MoteMancer opens up once you get past the learning curve. My job is to make sure the path there is smooth and readable enough that players actually reach it. More soon, back to the lab 🌿 ~CyanAvatar

Polish and Behavior * Inventory items will now highlight contextually depending on the active structure window. * All structure and research progress bars have new elemental art. * Timers and %'s are shown as well on progress bars. * Collectors now upgrade speed by .25 intervals based on research, tooltip changed to 8% to reflect this, this whole system will be going away in favor of Elemental Binder speed increases per element soon. * Transmutation Engine now respects Shattered Elements for Salis Mundus and Spiritus mundi * Frame Rate near portals should be improved. Bug Fixes * Fixed a bug where ichor slicks could overflow and break * Fixed a bug with Shattered Water Foundations * Fixed a bug where selecting an item with an already held item in hand could cause weird behavior later. * Shear now correctly listed as an Aura everywhere.

There are so many places to add FX and polish, and this week I found myself drawn to the unassuming progress bar. It’s a great warmup before tackling heavier pieces, and it’s always worth adding a bit of delight wherever you can. These bars use a technique I like to call frequency fighting. I’m a sucker for color math, and it’s amazing how far simple adds and multiplies can go. Even better, some of the nicest results come from frequencies based on the golden ratio (1 : 0.618). I figured I’d share a bit of that rabbit hole. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/45567834/54037ec78f081302d9ae52ac2fe3bb25ea6bc0d7.png

Mod 2x

“Mod 2x” is a term from way back (not sure what the modern phrasing is), but the idea is simple: Texture A × Texture B × 2 Quick refresher for thinking in color:

• Black = 0
• White = 1
• Everything else = a value in between

This has some super cool properties already:

• Anything * Black = black
• Anything * White = itself
• 0.5 grey * 0.5 grey = 0.25 grey (mid tones get darker)

{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/45567834/c34c67734cbdef85c4f85000cc3a203ade9d8674.png That last bit is where the magic happens. All we have to do is multiply by 2, and what was .5 * .5 now gets you .5 back. That means instead of just darkening, you get a contrast-preserving blend with energy in the highlights. This is a core building block behind a lot of MoteMancer’s FX. If you think in curves: the input value (x-axis) becomes the output (y-axis). A straight line means no change. Bending the curve shifts brightness and contrast across the range. That mental model helped me more than anything else. Here’s a quick visual: {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/45567834/c31645a7db3d41ee46a2f63120a8f7d8819a728a.gif {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/45567834/54037ec78f081302d9ae52ac2fe3bb25ea6bc0d7.png

A World of Color

The above examples are just black and white, but color is where things get even more fun. MoteMancer has 6 Elements, plus Salt and Entropy as the core kits for the game. Each of these kits has a unique mechanical style, and so while making progress bars for each, we aren't just capturing color, we're capturing the emotional and textural vibe as well. Here are a few examples: {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/45567834/1e592381279e5eedfa2a6b61a124bbe8c5965bc4.png (Steam was being temperamental so you'll have to see the animated versions in game) There's a small trick I do here too where the bar slowly gets brighter towards the end of progress, just to elevate the anticipation a smidge. Lots of little details go a long way. There's no end to the amount of effort you can throw into these, but your focus should always be on big broad strokes first and then fine-tuning the details after all the pieces are in place. Usually I like to get things in a spot that I like and then come back to it later to see if I agree with my past decisions with a fresh set of eyes. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/45567834/54037ec78f081302d9ae52ac2fe3bb25ea6bc0d7.png

All That Glitters

There are lots more FX coming, and soon I'll get to leverage this technique into another one of the most powerful use cases: multi-texture particles. I might even do a full dive on the golden ratio at some point, making this reminded me of that personal fascination. We'll save those for another day though, for now back to building. Back to the Lab 🌿 ~CyanAvatar

Polish & QoL * Tutorial games now only allow Twinseed, World Veins, and Ancient Spindles (this change is to lower complexity for first-time players). * Tutorial ? helpers now only show on the currently active step if available. * Pipette now contextually grabs the correct runeshrooms from ritual previews. * Active Rituals have updated and colored constellation lines in the Runeshroom Window. * Blueprint tiles are now more responsive to clicks (was fighting with scroll logic). * Manaroots and paths have light versions of them that will likely get their own treatment. * Saltways and Streamways now have placement and rotation FX. Bug Fixes * Fix reliquary shear interaction. * Ritual Window now properly shows rotated matching rituals. * Did a game-wide pass on structures that could get over-lit, please bug report if you still see any. * Ancient Chest window now contextually extends out to 9x9, showing the full 81 slots.

It's so wonderful to have a community invested in modding, sharing blueprints, and theorycrafting. Earlier today, the community took a step further and added MoteMancer to FactorioLab. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/45567834/9c534d29331ac64c93103b5ae77e67380085e398.png It’s a small thing on the surface, but it means a lot to me. MoteMancer now sits alongside some of the games that inspired it, as part of the same ecosystem of tools, planners, and shared knowledge. One of my favorite parts of this genre is that the game doesn’t stop when you close it. Making a system worth exploring, pondering over, and gradually mastering was always the goal for MoteMancer. Becoming part of that broader ecosystem is incredibly rewarding. Huge thank you to everyone who helped make this happen, especially @nianeyna. I’m excited to see the builds that emerge from it. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/45567834/54037ec78f081302d9ae52ac2fe3bb25ea6bc0d7.png

Short Term Targets

The past few weeks have been about letting the dust settle after Foundations and getting the project organized for the final push toward 1.0. That means atlassing, consolidating experimental shaders, and refactoring logic for performance. Stability is a big priority for me, so the game will continue to update regularly. Rather than pushing frequent standalone patch notes, I’ll be maintaining a rolling patch roundup at meaningful breakpoints, updating it as fixes come in. One of the advantages of being small is that updating the Steam build takes minutes, so it makes sense to lean into that. Multi-texture particles, structure animations, achievements, an improved tutorial, and adding more delight to the UI are all top of mind as we move forward. I’ll likely dive deeper into a few of these in upcoming Musings. Thank you all again! Back to the lab 🌿 ~CyanAvatar

* Mod icons now fallback to the ? icon instead of a white square. * Infinite reach mod no longer breaks Meteor Swarm * Fix a few bad icon references in tutorial banners * Shift clicking a crafting button will now queue the maximum number of crafts possible for that item. Right click still queues 5. Shoutout to MissedFrizzle for uploading our first community mod! Sandbox Mode

Quality of Life * Blueprint creation now has 3 selection modes: Rectangular, Diamond, and Radial. Use X to swap modes or click the HUD icon. * Copy mode shows grid like connected structures do * Blueprint shader is now a little more legible * Blueprint mode now suppresses world hover tips * Pipette now allows grabbing from structures even if you have 0 of them in your inventory * Pipette on a mote field will automatically set the matching collector to your pointer * Pipette will favor build structures before mote patches when sampling * You can now place ghosts of structures even if you have 0 of them in your inventory * Somehow the change from alt to shift for ghosts got reverted, reimplemented * Pass on Left Ctrl and Shift to also work with Right Ctrl and Shift * Map now uses hexes instead of rectangles * Grindstone and Saltways have swapped colors on the map to make Saltways a little more visible * Feedback key is now rebindable Foundations/Modding * Foundation menu shows link to workshop landing page if no mods and connected to steam. * Mods now have a "hover" field in their meta data which will be displayed when you hover that item in the foundations menu. * Load/Save screen shows mods in foundation list * Side card shows mods in foundation list Bug Fixes * Ancient Chest inventory was getting recreated by power node on load, causing Stonebound to stop working. * Fix for Blackhole Monolith feasting before the upgrade is unlocked * Failing to harvest a structure mid transfer will refund all the transferred items to the player's overflow inventory. * Fix for old infinites showing up in research tree * Blackhole monolith no longer counts as Fire structure (used to be a combo) * Blackhole monolith default crafter fixed * Fix orb icons on great portal window * Can no longer pipette portals

I received a very fair critique from multiple sources: If your game is all hexagons, why are you using that tired old rectangle selector for blueprints? I love this kind of feedback because it points directly at one of the most important north stars in any creative work: immersion. A longer way to say it is that everything in your game should tell the same story. In MoteMancer that shows up everywhere: 6 Elements, 6 Planes, 6-sided cells, 6 keybinds on either side of center, 6 recipes per structure. As much as possible, every part of the experience should rhyme with itself. And it's not just for aesthetics (even if that's a nice perk), it’s about building a world that plays by its own rules. When that holds, players start thinking within the system instead of translating it back into something familiar. That’s where immersion really takes hold. So when people tell me to get those squares outta here, they’re absolutely right. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/45567834/54037ec78f081302d9ae52ac2fe3bb25ea6bc0d7.png

Blueprint Footprints

Because MoteMancer’s hex-grid language takes time to internalize, players naturally start by building in straight lines, even if they are diagonal. Over time that shifts toward more radial designs that take advantage of adjacency, and eventually into more expressive, mandala-like layouts. Each of those stages is valid. It's super important to recognize that players will live in all of these stages though, so changing the blueprint system to something specific is not the best solution. We can instead offer a tool for each stage of familiarity. To that end, Blueprints now have 3 selection modes: Rectangular, Diamond, and Radial. You can swap between them with X, the same way you swap between freeform and locked belt placement. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/45567834/3364a1c4a9e006fc9884f53289cd1bde679571a8.png Note that Diamond mode is basically a freeform parallelogram, and works in all 6 directions, long corner to long corner. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/45567834/54037ec78f081302d9ae52ac2fe3bb25ea6bc0d7.png

Return of the Map

Back when the Map feature first found its way into the game, it used a clever technique of offsetting every other row by half a pixel (yes I know that's not a thing) to achieve the offset look. Honestly that was pretty successful, but as I was wrapping that up I realized a way to actually get hexagonal pixels on the map, it just takes a little clever uv-math hijacking. For anyone unfamiliar, UVs are just coordinates that tell the renderer which part of a texture to sample. Normally you map a square UV to a square texture and call it a day, but the system doesn’t really care what values you feed it, it just performs the lookup. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/45567834/e903795d410abd93174fb8bde1ccf50ad93671a3.png In the simple case, we can reduce the UV texture to a small 32x32 and just used those values to correspond to the grid coordinate which gave us a very nice pixelated grid vibe. From there, it’s just a step further to define hex-shaped regions that all point to the same UV coordinate. The result is a map made of true hex “pixels,” even though under the hood it’s still just sampling a texture. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/45567834/54037ec78f081302d9ae52ac2fe3bb25ea6bc0d7.png

Sanding off the Correct Edges

There will always be rough edges in any system, and not all of them should be removed. Some edges create space for player creativity. They invite clever solutions, unexpected patterns, and a sense of discovery. Those are worth preserving. The edges that need attention are the ones that break the internal logic of the world. When something feels out of place, it pulls players out of the experience. Replacing rectangular blueprint selection and reinforcing the hex language across the map are both examples of sanding down those kinds of edges. They don’t change what the game is, they make it feel more like itself. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/45567834/54037ec78f081302d9ae52ac2fe3bb25ea6bc0d7.png Happy 50th Musing! Thanks to everyone who’s been part of the journey so far. We’re firmly in the downhill stretch now, and the focus is on refining the experience and removing the friction that breaks immersion in your alchemical gardens. Back to the lab! 🌿 ~CyanAvatar

Steam Workshop Mods are coming to MoteMancer. Happy Monday! Mods have been part of the plan for MoteMancer from the beginning. The automation genre itself was born from mods, so it only feels right to pay that forward. I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about what role mods should play here, and I’d like to share some of that philosophy today. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/45567834/54037ec78f081302d9ae52ac2fe3bb25ea6bc0d7.png

A Platform for Creativity

First, I want to underscore what mods have meant to me as both a developer and a player. Modded Minecraft isn’t just a player’s vision brought to life, it’s a playground where many people first learn how to make games at all. In every role I’ve had, a core thread has been carrying forward the tradition of innovation and craftsmanship so it can inspire the next wave of developers, the same way it inspired me. My developer friends and I often joke that the modern engines are Unity, Unreal, Godot, and Minecraft. The last one comes with world generation, established systems, and a massive canvas to build on. It’s far easier to expand on something functional than to start from nothing, and even small changes like tweaking rules or swapping assets can be the spark that gets someone started. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/45567834/54037ec78f081302d9ae52ac2fe3bb25ea6bc0d7.png

The Role of MoteMancer Mods

Players have had a wide range of ideas for how they want to play and evolve MoteMancer. Some fit cleanly into the base game, some come with tradeoffs, and some don’t align with the core experience I want to preserve. But those ideas are perfect seeds for mods. A simple example is No Chasms. Some players want complete freedom to build without terrain constraints. I want the default experience to embrace those constraints, but that makes this a perfect mod. It’s straightforward to implement and serves as a great learning example. Alongside that, I’ll be providing starter mods like Infinite Reach and Ignore Plane Blocking as templates to build from. One of the big advantages here is that mods don’t need to maintain systemic continuity. Infinite reach as a research upgrade doesn’t make much sense if you can toggle it on instantly. Power systems interacting with chasms don’t matter if chasms don’t exist. When a change breaks the internal logic of the game, that’s often a sign it belongs in mod space rather than the mainline experience. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/45567834/54037ec78f081302d9ae52ac2fe3bb25ea6bc0d7.png

The Where and the How

This is my first pass at building a modding ecosystem, so I expect to iterate on it. For now, mods live alongside Foundations, since conceptually they occupy similar space. I’ve also set up a GitHub page with example mods so you can test and develop locally. Creating a mod is as simple as adding a folder next to your save files. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/45567834/6bb2d6714e08511714c055aae8a06b5fae3edfc8.png Uploading is handled directly in-game. If you’re working on a mod, an icon will appear that lets you upload it to Steam Workshop and link everything together. As long as it works locally and your files are named correctly, the process should be smooth. Mods are tied to your account, so your work is safe and won’t be overwritten by others. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/45567834/54037ec78f081302d9ae52ac2fe3bb25ea6bc0d7.png

So Without Further Ado...

Steam Workshop is already live with a set of CyanAvatar Approved (TM) starter mods. They’re fully functional and meant to serve as clean templates to learn from. You will need to be on build v0.4.014 or beyond to use them. I’ll be pushing a patch alongside this post with full support, and will follow up with a more formal guide and improved presentation soon. But it’s Monday, and this is what I’ve been musing about, so here we are. It’s just as important to see dev works in progress as it is to see finished results. Everything starts simple and grows, including your future mods :) Go forth, create, inspire, and have fun. Back to the Lab 🌿 ~CyanAvatar

Polish & QoL

• Change single blueprint ghost placement to Shift from Alt, no longer requires blueprint tech.
• Control click on a structure can once again refill from your inventory repeatedly using successive stacks (regression from Foundations update).
• You can now set keybind from the crafting menu by hovering and pressing a number in addition to inventory.
• Extended grippers no longer have increased travel time for fling or Shadow/Earth upgrades.
• Coral pool production speed tuned to 30 seconds from 60 seconds.
• Research tree and Entropy tree icons are now visible on their sister menus
• Menus that scroll have more responsive button clicks.
• Plane selection removed from gameplay menu (now that Foundations is the main hub)
• Tutorial skip removed from gameplay menu (might bring it back to skip halfway through a session)

Bug Fixes

• Fixed an issue where Altars could lose Pedestal information from saves (research could fall a few short on load)
• Power node Fire tooltip fix
• Flora scale is now calculated like color hue and not saved as part of its save data. Hopefully the final sledgehammer for Flora scale issues.
• Flora could be destroyed by a miner and their dissolve would be stuck on when that flora was used again.
• Fix for Lava Pedestals going back to regular pedestals if harvest was canceled.
• Fix for Nitor vfx visible through planes
• Echoflare no longer exclusively builds on the player's plane.
• Echoflare respects Phased Pockets if enabled.
• Information overlay output grid can no longer toggle itself on while near a portal boundary.

The new Foundations update brought a lot of great discussion about all of the new game modes available, but one of the conversations in particular reminded me of the greatest question you can ever ask yourself or others while discussing solutions: "What problem are you trying to solve?". It sounds so trite and obvious, but if you take that question seriously, I find the value of the exercise incomparable. I’ll try to unpack it through one recent example and the broader concept it points to. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/45567834/54037ec78f081302d9ae52ac2fe3bb25ea6bc0d7.png

Best Laid Power Plans

The Foundation in question is Islands of Power, which has a simple idea - Power costs increase with each structure in the same network. I made this Foundation because Power systems in MoteMancer are a little atypical in that each system has some form of exponential growth. On the face of it there's a world where I 'fix' this, but the result is just building more power structures, which isn't that interesting. Plus you need to create at least a handful of power systems in a given playthrough because you are jumping from plane to plane, so solving power for a given plane serves as its own benchmark and I think on balance that actually works out well. But so back to Islands of Power, this is a direct assault on the exponential scaling of generation, by creating an exponential tax per structure in a network. My first thought was a simple flat tax-per-structure so that the Foundation does what it says on the tin. The cost is simple and understandable. I even had 13 different equations in the running before I settled on one. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/45567834/2b33506f5639f9822c1ffc9ee429b9087f845e0c.png How many equations do you need? At least one more... {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/45567834/54037ec78f081302d9ae52ac2fe3bb25ea6bc0d7.png

Player Pain and Problem Solving

But I got feedback that Islands of Power was too painful, too punitive. It was doing it's job, but even in its simple form, it didn't feel good to puzzle around. My first instinct was simply to cut the tax by some multiple (half or a quarter), but then the correct honest question was asked: "What is the design intent?" I want to pause here - I'd been circling intent, but was so deep in the problem-solving weeds that simply asking the top level question brought everything into sharp focus. It reminds me of what my old boss used to say whenever he needed more information or wanted to gently push back on some solution I was presenting "What problem are you trying to solve?" This matters because there are so many useful immediate implications:

• Is the solution you are proposing actually addressing the problem directly?
• If you are collaborating, do you agree that it's the correct problem to solve in the first place?
• Are you solving the problem at the correct level of player cognition?

There are more, but simply stepping back from the solution itself and evaluating the problem-solving meta state you are in is always a useful exercise. It's so easy to jump right in at the point of pain and trying to address the pain itself, but that can lead you to thrashing in the fog without a purposeful direction. So back to design intent. Really what I want experientially is for players to make several discrete power sections for their base per plane, avoiding the runaway effect of exponential power growth on a single base. And just as importantly, it does not mean wanting players to agonize over whether a single gripper is worth the additional power draw opportunity cost. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/45567834/88e0e7c7a39da7bf0bbcf074699e627d3a474df2.png {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/45567834/54037ec78f081302d9ae52ac2fe3bb25ea6bc0d7.png

Focus on the Goal, Not the Task

In reality, the right level of cognition for this Foundation is not per-structure scrutiny. It's an intuitive "This is getting expensive, I should start a new power network after this cluster of structures". Per-structure cost is not inherently bad, it just introduces a series of micro stutters in your thought process where every single structure placed has an added cognitive burden, and that isn't worth it. So to solve this for real, a new 14th equation was added that simply takes the maximum potential demand from a system and uses that to tax power consumption. The trade-off is that you don't necessarily have an intuitive "this next gripper will tax 8 additional power", but that is also the benefit. You aren't thinking about the cost of a small add, you are thinking about the overall cost of the cluster. And, hungrier structures will add a higher tax than less demanding ones, matching how an organic power cluster grows naturally. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/45567834/54037ec78f081302d9ae52ac2fe3bb25ea6bc0d7.png

Zooming Out

Sometimes you can just solve a problem where it lives and move on, but if you ever catch yourself spinning your wheels or a collaborative conversation isn't quite flowing smoothly, take a moment to step back and ask "What is the actual problem are we trying to solve?" Shed all of the details, reframe from a clean slate, assess which of your current thoughts/solutions are relevant or not, move forward with a clearer, more zoomed-out perspective. The details matter, but only after you’ve framed the right problem. That’s true in systems design, collaboration, and most kinds of craft. I’ve got a bunch of cleanup and bug-fixing to do this week. As soon as the reports dry up, it’s back to full swing art and performance work. Happy Monday! Back to the lab 🌿 ~CyanAvatar

Fixes from reports from the weekend:

• Large number display no longer throws an exception if "Infinity" or > 1trillion gets passed in.
• Fix a rare case where mote patches can be destroyed mid Sovereign Manaheart burst.
• Capture doodad size at creation time (another random guess fix for large doodads and doodad nudge interactions).
• Fixed a rare case where hitting x while you had no entity held could cause an exception.
• Fix for Shear not be able to bind it to your action bar.
• Fix issues with saves where stale references to Echo Tracer or Wavedash were in your action bar.
• You are no longer affected by entropy while in Oracle.
• Bunch of windows are using PowerStat but were not set up to use their tooltip.
• Fix for Altars being able to desync progress if it fails to load pedestal information.

Thanks everyone! Back to the lab. 🌿

Thanks for all the reports, have a great weekend! Bug Fixes

• The Action Bar should now correctly save when you clear a button.
• Collector UI when World Veins is active now shows the Collector inventory count again.
• Change how tutorial detects if you've gone to a second plane. (fixes Fire tutorial automatically claiming in certain cases)
• Fix lava pedestal tweens fighting if you destroy/build lava gens too quickly.
• Various fixes to make the Action bar counts and above player text more reliable.
• Fix for life tutorial not correctly tracking the two Synergy researches. Loading a saved game should automatically heal the tutorial state.
• Russian localization update - number counts added to a handful of foundations that were missing them
• Simplified Chinese update - Prisms have been changed for clarity
• Was accidentally using the old Echoflare string, fixed.
• Handful of other small loc fixes

Thank you for all the bug reports and feedback on the Foundations update!

Foundation Fixes and Tuning:

• Jeweled/Chromatic Fields - Icons for Multi-Mote Patches on the Map now match the Foundation icon. Miner displays (tooltip and window) support more than 3 mote types at once.
• World Veins - Mote Field tooltip were decrementing the max count even though it wasn't actually decrementing. Changed all the cases where mote counts show up in with World Veins active to just show the Mote type.
• Marathon - CraftCount (ui display for crafting) was not using crafting cost multiplier for Salt Crystal and Aether.
• Islands of Power - math changed to scale with the maximum draw of the network rather than Structure count. Current math is (Maxpower/200)^3 as a permanent tax to the network. Power Window now truncates large power amounts, and has a hover tip for detailed power amounts.
• Foundation side card was not displaying some of the active Foundations, fixed.

Bug Fixes & Tuning:

• Eternal Feast tuned to 5 Entropy Research per second.
• Clear reliquaries in ng+. Don't allow loading reliquaries if you don't have it unlocked.
• Reliquary stack size caps at 9999 (equates to ~200 infinite upgrades).
• Oracle mode now blocks research tree and entropy tree keybinds.
• Biorhythm and Overgrowth pillar could try to grow on a mote tile that was destroyed by a miner shortly before the coroutine wakes up.
• Structures in blueprint strings with invalid rotations will be ignored.
• Destroying a Lava Generator will harvest its inventory.
• Many fixes for localization strings.

MoteMancer's third Major Content Update is Live!

Foundations are modifiers that change the rules of the world and open the door to endlessly varied playthroughs. With the new Enduring Research system, your most optimized factories can now fuel infinite upgrades that carry forward into future worlds. Whether you want to sculpt a unique new challenge or push your alchemy further than ever before, the tools are now in your hands. Welcome to Foundations. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/45567834/54037ec78f081302d9ae52ac2fe3bb25ea6bc0d7.png

Foundations Make the World

This update comes with 23 unique Foundations that all change the rules of your automation garden significantly. Each Foundation is handcrafted to provide a unique challenge for a playthrough, and allows you to cater your world through deliberate choices rather than sliders. Fling will double the reach of all Grippers whether you want it to or not - changing the geometry of your base dramatically. Chromatic Fields will create a rainbow of Motes on every patch, giving you access to every element early, but requires careful management. Miasma blankets the world in Entropy when the game begins, forcing you to carve into the cloud to stake your claim. Elementalist lets you begin with Elemental research, but prevents you from using any Salt-based logistics. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/45567834/476639d88047d83c9ac8461b52103420b76199a9.png Not all Foundations make the game more difficult either. Twinseed makes Mote Patches spawn in pairs to aid early base development. Ancient Spindles prevent Entropy spawning outright, and can be broken to unleash massive Rifts exactly when you so choose. There is also a randomizer that generates curated sets of Foundations in case you are looking for inspiration, using the same logic as a continued run. Each random set was designed to teach something new and provide a unique challenge. Full patch notes below for all the gritty details :) {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/45567834/f699c46edd9437f5ff7375a43fe2ef2c133520e2.pngChromatic Fields, Miasma, Fling, Elementalist

Eternal Research

Elemental Synergy Research has been overhauled in a variety of ways. The new early research recipes are now unique, and the max-tier structures are available as soon as you start farming entropic shards (usually plane 2, unless Foundations affect that). Each Synergy also has an Enduring Research capper node that can be researched indefinitely, providing benefits to your current world, but also a subsequent world if you choose to continue your quest of balance. Echotracer (the blueprint filling spell) has been removed and Echoflare (that allows filling blueprints from Mana Flares) has moved to very early in the Entropy Research Tree. This guarantees that you can start filling blueprints early instead of having to wait until you get to Shadow. Shadow has received two new Rituals: Seep and Scrying as well. Wavedash has been replaced with Oracle, allowing you to remotely view any plane from anywhere, and Wavedash now treats all streamways as Paths passively. A new sister research has also been implemented - Wind Surfing - that also passively increases movement speed while in a wind corridor, so enjoy levitating through your gusty grid of wind power.

Extra Highlights

There is a brand new option to play the tutorial from the plane of Fire in addition to Life, allowing you to immediately choose your challenges and benefits. The world of logistics puzzles in MoteMancer is massive, and as always, the path is yours to decide. The Free Demo for MoteMancer has also been updated, and while you cannot choose Fire from there, Twinseed and Apprentice Cache are automatically enabled to give players a taste of the system.

State of the Game and the Future

Now that MoteMancer has an incredibly rich and replayable endgame, the focus turns to art, polish, and quality of life additions. There are still improvements to be made for onboarding, controller support, and modding as well. The current plan is to continue Monday Musings and drop a small update every other week with improvements, since all the changes will be either cosmetic or surface level as opposed to structural changes. Which Foundations are you planning to try first? Which Foundations would you like to see added in the future? The system was made to be easily extended as your ideas come in. Time to respec back to an FX artist and bring the world alive 🌿 ~CyanAvatar {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/45567834/54037ec78f081302d9ae52ac2fe3bb25ea6bc0d7.png With the addition of Foundations, MoteMancer now offers hundreds of hours of unique logistics puzzle content. Additionally, MoteMancer will be 20% off for Steam's Spring Sale - If you’ve been waiting to jump in, now’s a great time! https://store.steampowered.com/app/3320980/ {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/45567834/54037ec78f081302d9ae52ac2fe3bb25ea6bc0d7.png

Steam Reviews

Sharing your thoughts about MoteMancer in a Steam Review is one of the best ways to help the game grow. Understanding what is working, what could use improvement, and most importantly what you hope to see for the future is and always will be what drives the game forward. Your voice matters, and directly affects decisions made throughout the development process. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/45567834/54037ec78f081302d9ae52ac2fe3bb25ea6bc0d7.png

MoteMancer has a Wiki!

If you are ever feeling stuck, check out the MoteMancer Wiki for additional information, or join our Discord and introduce yourself. There are plenty of friendly alchemists there to help. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/45567834/54037ec78f081302d9ae52ac2fe3bb25ea6bc0d7.png

Full Patch Notes - v0.4.001

New games will now always begin through the Foundations Menu, you can simply choose a starting plane and go, or cater your world rules as you see fit. Note that the challenge for combining Foundations increases significantly!

New Foundations Available

Starting Plane - You can now choose to start your journey on any Elemental Plane. Shattered Elements - Permanently removes an Element from the world. World

• Twinseed - Each Mote Field spawns with a second kindred field.
• World Veins - Mote Fields are smaller, but last forever.
• Jeweled Fields - Mote Fields spawn with 3 intermingled Elements.
• Chromatic Fields - Mote Fields spawn with 5 intermingled Elements.
• Naturalist - Flora cannot be destroyed.
• Prism Portals - Planar Portals are repaired with Prisms instead of Keystones.

Progression

• Apprentice Cache - A small cache of basic logistics tools awaits you.
• Clean Hands - Hand crafting is disabled.
• Theoretical Insight - Research no longer grants free Structures.
• Phased Pockets - Player inventory is unique per plane.
• Elusive Knowledge - Research requires double ingredients per cycle.
• Deep Research - Research requires {0} times as many cycles.
• Marathon - All recipe costs are doubled.

Entropy

• Ancient Spindles - Mote Fields spawn with an Ancient Spindle that prevents Rift incursions.
• Nascent Entropy - Rifts spawn from Mote Fields on the starting plane.
• Drifting Rifts - Rifts slowly drift after spawning.
• Miasma - Entropy surrounds the Great Portal at world generation.

Structures

• Elementalist - Begin with all basic Research unlocked. Salt Logistics cannot be placed.
• Fling - All Grippers have double reach.
• Gripper Claustraphobia - Grippers cannot be placed next to other Grippers.
• Isolation - Structures cannot be placed next to opposing Elements.
• Weakened Tether - Structures cannot be placed on any opposing plane.
• Islands of Power - Power costs increase with each structure in the same network.

New Spells & Rituals:

• Shear - Destroys a Structure and its contents, reclaiming 50% of their Raw ingredients to your inventory. Multiple researchable upgrades.
• Oracle - Remotely view any revealed location on your Map.
• Windbound - Allows Player Inventory to reserve item slots for Vortex.
• Wavedash - changed to a passive that increases movement speed by 30% while on any Streamway, does not stack with Paths.
• Wind Surfing - new passive that increases movement speed by 30% while in a Wind Corridor, does stack with Paths/Wavedash.
• Levitating over chasms has a passive 50% movespeed boost for you Levihaste fanatics.
• Excavator now starts at double harvest speed (and still gets faster), Shear does too (without getting faster).
• Seep - Affected Structures grow Ichor Slick under them.
• Scrying - Affected Infusion Altars research every 3 seconds instead of 5.

Research & Recipe Updates:

• Echoflare - moved to the Entropy Research Tree
• Shadow has received significant changes following the migration of Echotracer/Echoflare, the addition of Shear, and new Rituals.
• Enduring Research - Infinite research is fully implemented and will carry over subsequent playthroughs for the same save file.
• Elemental Synergy branches have been restructured, with new research requirements.

Behavior Tuning and Bug fixes

• MoteMancer's Free Demo has been updated with the two Foundations enabled: Twinseed and Apprentice Cache.
• There is a brand new Tutorial path to start on the Plane of Fire in addition to Life (Retail only).
• Mote patches will start spawning a little further from the Great Portal to avoid early Entropy overlap.
• Planar Portals no longer require a Reaching or Whipping Grippers to repair them.
• Nudging a chest will no longer lose stonebound locks.
• Rift spread now has a little bit of noise to the edges so we get fewer straight lines.
• You can now harvest while you have a blueprint selection.
• Excavate + Raze now works when placing blueprints.
• Production Structures now have a contextual image for when a recipe is not yet researched; clicking will teleport you to the target research.
• Tutorial Corner now supports click to go to research tree for specific helper ?'s

Shifting Slab has been renamed to Saltway to make it more intuitively aligned with Streamways.

The recipes for Salis Mundus and Spiritus Mundi have moved lower in the Entropy Research Tree and will need to be re-researched if you were using them in a current factory. Additionally, MoteMancer's Unity version has been updated which has fixed a few users that were crashing on startup. -- Enduring thanks to all of MoteMancer's Alpha Testers, you make the game better every day :) Thank you! {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/45567834/9ce26dca113673d95bb791457c33cfd9519d9ad7.png

Happy Monday! I wrote an extensive post about Runeshroom Rituals in the past, and recent design developments got me thinking about extending the ritual suite. With the Foundations update arriving shortly, I want to talk through 2 new rituals that will be part of the update and a few thoughts on future opportunities. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/45567834/54037ec78f081302d9ae52ac2fe3bb25ea6bc0d7.png

Seep and Scrying

On the heels of the Echotracer and Echoflare suite (blueprint filling) moving to the Entropy tree, many Shadow research nodes were left open. The new Shadow spell, Shear, was able to flavorfully fill many of them, but it left a wonderful opportunity to add to the ritual repertoire. Shadow still favors prime numbers in its design (because I'm a nerd), so Shadow is growing from 3 rituals to 5. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/45567834/80e29e154a64f869081a2bcf48ec5fa253dfa087.png The two new Rituals on the block fill two niches that have always been loosely discussed in the community, and finally have found a kit-appropriate home.

• Seep - Affected Structures grow Ichor Slick under them. The community has long discussed whether Ichor Slick should have underground options, but omitting the simple bridge made for better puzzle solving. Combining ideas from the Entanglement upgrade (placing ichor under waygates) and Rampant Bloom (growing roots under structures) hits a sweet spot. Seep has a lot of unique implications and allows for very dense and surgical logistical solves.
• Scrying - Affected Infusion Altars research every 3 seconds. Altars default to 5 seconds per cycle, which encourages clean 2-altar setups early on. Once grippers upgrade, though, there wasn’t a clean way to scale research speed further. As a ritual, it fits perfectly - both mechanically and geometrically.

{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/45567834/54037ec78f081302d9ae52ac2fe3bb25ea6bc0d7.png

Divining the Future

One design that didn't make it into this patch but I want to explore in the future is rituals from additional elements. There's a foundation named Arcanum that has a few extra structures to build - notably Void Chest: Abyss and Grotto for water and earth coded options. That space feels like a natural home for Wavecaps and Cragcaps, opening a new ritual suite for Water and Earth. I haven't nailed down what the new rituals do yet, so if you have fun ideas, by all means share them! That same flexibility is why Rituals feel like the perfect modding surface. Modding has been on my mind throughout the development process, and especially where to leave an open invitation for modding. Players will of course mod whatever they like, but I think Rituals specifically are ripe for it, so making sure that they are easy to extend is one of my goals. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/45567834/54037ec78f081302d9ae52ac2fe3bb25ea6bc0d7.png

Wrapping Up

The Foundations update is nearly complete, so I should get back to completing it. I’ll touch on this more soon, but modding is likely to follow quickly once Foundations is stable. Foundations may even become the backbone of the mod-loader, if it proves as extensible as it seems. Thank you everyone who has been playtesting experimental and giving feedback! Back to the lab 🌿 ~CyanAvatar

Happy Monday! Today I want to talk through a unique opportunity that presented itself when it came to tutorializing MoteMancer. MoteMancer is going to get two tutorial paths. It is not something I would typically do, much less advise, but there are some very MoteMancer-specific reasons for it. The question is always how to make a game the best version of itself that it can be, and sometimes that means doing something you normally wouldn’t. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/45567834/54037ec78f081302d9ae52ac2fe3bb25ea6bc0d7.png

Why Fire?

I had always imagined Life being the starting plane because of its access to conveyor-like Streamways from Water, familiar chests from Earth, and an intuitive fuel to solar power path via Life. There's a lot of intuition building you get for free, especially in a game that has little real-world language to latch onto. Mana Roots as the power distribution method were a large hurdle for some to overcome though. A significant strength of MoteMancer is the unique identity of each element and how they play, so removing roots as part of Life didn't feel like the right solution. Growing your own tree of power is a wonderful fantasy when you embrace it. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/45567834/419179a3172000e6044a1edc8e6668e53f23738c.png Fire, on the other hand, gives the ultimate freedom of power distribution with crackling wires that tower above your base, leaving you much freer to build beneath. The cost here comes from the power generation itself, which needs to be carefully managed - fire power consistently needs fuel and will never throttle itself for demand. Modular Lava Generators are extremely flexible and have plenty of vectors for creativity, but are much more attention intensive than Life's solar engine. One other feature of Fire is you do not have access to the logistics power of a double-lane belt from Water's Streamways (opposite elements are strictly forbidden from placement, even if you could find a Mote of Water in the scorching lands of the Fire Plane). You do get access to the enigmatic Ichor Slick though, which has been described as a 'paintable chest'. Ichor Slick is among the more unique contributions to the automation space - it can only hold one entity type at a time, but its throughput is effectively infinite. Fire reduces spatial friction at the cost of resource friction, and that trade is easier to teach. The learning curve is not harder than Life, but is orthogonal in a very healthy way. Fire as a tutorial path also mirrors the spirit of Foundations - not easier or harder, but a differently shaped challenge. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/45567834/54037ec78f081302d9ae52ac2fe3bb25ea6bc0d7.png

The Contract of Choice

I've designed many systems where players choose their path - class selection is an obvious example. Class selection is a contract with the player. You are giving them an imaginary fantasy that appeals to their emotional core, and once they select it, you need to make good on that promise to further earn their trust. MoteMancer's Elements are all designed to synergize and weave with each other, but stand alone in their identity. Choosing the Trail of Fire or Tree of Life is as much emotional as mechanical. You’ll master every element eventually, but choosing your home gives you a meaningful foothold. There's an important bit about emotional design as well - players will invest more in a character that feels like it is their own. It's one of the reasons so many games have character customization (and MoteMancer likely will have a little bit too in the future). But unlike an rpg, in an automation game, your base is your character. Your base and the elemental tools you use to build it are just as much a reflection of you as the armor you wear or hairstyle you choose. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/45567834/54037ec78f081302d9ae52ac2fe3bb25ea6bc0d7.png

Elemental Structure

MoteMancer is a very deep game with a lot to learn, and the elemental structure of the world itself takes time to unfold. There are many places I can help teach that, and the tutorial selection screen is one of them. When you choose either path, the element and its adjacent sisters will highlight, seeding their relationship with each other and the world. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/45567834/44e78e0d1b59945ec0ff28bd9e19c4524573defe.png It's not important that you fully understand the implications in the moment, but highlighting adjacent elements reinforces the shape of the world early. Even if players can’t select all six planes for the tutorial, it foreshadows that broader freedom once tutorials are disabled. Which leads us to another benefit of this selection. I've curated a handful of useful early Foundations (with a dedicated devlog here) that not only give you tools to cater your playthrough, but also seeds the larger system you will graduate into. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/45567834/54037ec78f081302d9ae52ac2fe3bb25ea6bc0d7.png

Tipping the Scales

Maintaining two tutorials is quite challenging as a developer. Splitting attention for the player that doesn't know anything about the game yet is a risk. Overwhelming the player with information is generally not a good idea. That said, this design provides an abundance of agency, emotional anchoring, mechanical framing, and a window into the systemic depth on offer. It’s not a conventional choice, but neither is MoteMancer. One of the challenges (that I love) about design is that there isn't really a playbook to follow. Each game is unique and carries with it unique obstacles and opportunities. Always learn as much as you can, but make sure to leave enough room to chart your own path. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/45567834/54037ec78f081302d9ae52ac2fe3bb25ea6bc0d7.png

And the Demo?

I plan on leaving MoteMancer's demo up for the foreseeable future, but maintaining both paths in the demo is probably a bridge too far. Just this morning I received feedback from someone that spent 30 hours playing the demo. I'm happy to provide that experience to them, as they'll likely find hundreds more hours in the full game, but allowing travel to planes beyond life will remain part of the full-featured experience. I also plan on enabling Twinseed for the demo as soon as the Foundations update rolls out. I always hesitate to list any Foundation as the default, but Twinseed greases the wheels just enough for a demo that I'll let it slide. And with that, I've got work to go getting Foundations out the door :) Huge shoutout to all the players actively giving feedback and helping find bugs in the experimental build. The fruits of your labor shall be ripe soon. Back to the Lab 🌿 ~CyanAvatar

Systems Design is probably my main discipline. It’s the thing I can’t shut off when my brain wanders. Today I thought I’d share a bit of the process and headspace behind it through an example that will be landing alongside Foundations. Time for some philosophy. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/45567834/54037ec78f081302d9ae52ac2fe3bb25ea6bc0d7.png

Stake the Perimeter

When manipulating an image you lock the corners so you can nudge the inside freely. When pitching a tent you stake the perimeter first so the rest of the structure can take shape. Large buildings need corner stones to build around. I think of systems design the same way. You start by laying out the high-level pillars of the game. For MoteMancer that means: Spells, Elements, Planes, Research, Foundations, Entropy. The goal isn’t to fill them yet. It’s to understand the shape of the space. Once the buckets exist, you can start feeling which one should own a given idea. Naming those buckets has power. It creates boundaries. It creates responsibility. You don’t have to literally venn-diagram it, but conceptually that’s what’s happening. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/45567834/7caf123fb4588d053e72f30d3cfefa12103794dd.png {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/45567834/54037ec78f081302d9ae52ac2fe3bb25ea6bc0d7.png

Start Sorting

Now think of a variety of details that you know need to exist. Power systems, resource gathering, combat etc. At bottom, the goal is to marry the details with the high level concepts in a way that has the most number of benefits, or choosing where there can be overlap. Now take something small but fundamental: movement speed. Where does it live? It could be:

• A spell aura like Haste.
• A conditional spell like Wave Dash.
• A passive research node.
• A Foundation modifier.
• A plane-specific trait.
• A ritual bonus.
• A reward for defeating enemies.

Any of the buckets could own it, but design is about balancing where it belongs and where it doesn't. Think of what makes the most intuitive sense to a player, where can it create a delightful surprise, and to not overuse it so there's space to breathe. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/45567834/54037ec78f081302d9ae52ac2fe3bb25ea6bc0d7.png

Inevitable Iteration

You are smarter today than yesterday. Make the best decision you can, but don’t be precious about it. Future you (or indeed your players) will probably have a better idea. You are curating the best ideas whether or not you are the creator of them. Implementing something even if you suspect it won’t survive still has value. It gives you something real to react to and design against. even if you ultimately replace it. Wave Dash is a good example. Right now it competes awkwardly with Haste. They both solve similar problems, one conditional, one not. The better solution is likely to turn Wave Dash into a passive benefit and let Haste breathe on its own. We can also mirror that and say that Wind Corridors from air power confer a similar passive benefit. But that means something else has to fill the now-empty spell slot. And that’s where design begins to reveals itself. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/45567834/54037ec78f081302d9ae52ac2fe3bb25ea6bc0d7.png

New Useful Toys

All of that thinking led to two new spells: Oracle and Shear. Oracle is straightforward. A Water spell that lets you view any revealed part of the map remotely. It has some fun implications around the Dark Reach ritual as well, but more importantly it nicely fills a niche use case in the factory genre of remote viewing, while staying in kit. Shear is the more interesting one. Shear will be replacing Echotracer, and here’s the chain of friction that led there:

• Blueprint filling is highly sought after. Gating it deep in Shadow is probably too late.
• Pacing the unlock differently depending on starting plane feels messy.
• Recycling has flirted with both Entropy and Shadow trees but never fully landed.
• Mass clearing areas that clog up your inventory can feel tedious.
• Ichor Slicks and Void Chests can get contaminated or want to be reset wholesale.
• What happens if you Shatter Earth and still want access to a deconstruction tool like Excavator?

There are more, but all of that leads elegantly to Shear and its upgrades: Shear - Destroys a Structure and its contents, reclaiming 50% of their Raw ingredients to your inventory. Collapse - Allows Shear to toggle between reclaiming 100% or 0% of Raw ingredients. Unravel - When Shearing an Ichor Slick or Void Chest, also Shear all linked Ichor Slicks or Void Chests. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/45567834/fe1b25788b4a10721a33899540d5cbda07cf9c47.png Shear falls squarely within Shadow's kit of dealing with linked structures, breaking things down with mycelium, and a nod to quantum mechanics. It solves recycling and clearing in a single stroke - two niche sides of a coin that feels more cohesive. It acts as a clean alternative to Excavator with its own use case and flavor. The important part is this: Shear could not have existed at the beginning of MoteMancer. It only revealed itself once the rest of the systems solidified. The hole had to exist before the piece could be shaped. Many details only reveal themselves after the broad strokes are complete. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/45567834/54037ec78f081302d9ae52ac2fe3bb25ea6bc0d7.png

What About Echotracer?

Blueprint filling still matters. I loved the kit for Echotracer as a blueprint filler aura, but another happy accident along the way was Echo Flare - turning Mana Flare into your blueprint filler as an upgrade in the shadow tree. Since blueprints come from the Entropy Research tree, it only makes sense for Echo Flare to live there as well. Best of all, that means you will have access to it in your second plane - no matter the plane - as soon as you start fighting Entropy. Pacing wise this is just about perfect. Just as you are setting up your second plane you get the tool to alleviate that burden. Plus, if Mana Flares are still serving as short term power, you can literally power the structures as they create themselves. Tools deserve full lifecycles. It’s satisfying when something you loved early never truly becomes obsolete, it just evolves. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/45567834/54037ec78f081302d9ae52ac2fe3bb25ea6bc0d7.png

The Pattern

If I had to distill this down:

• Set your stakes in the ground.
• Fill obvious matches first.
• Implement imperfect solutions.
• Watch for the gaps that form.
• Let the missing pieces reveal themselves.

There is no such thing as perfect design. Good design is building enough structure that the right idea becomes obvious. Back to the lab 🌿 ~CyanAvatar

MoteMancer's sandbox has a very high skill ceiling. There are multiple ways to solve logistics problems by design, and players will naturally gravitate towards solutions that are intuitive to them. Another part of the fun though is exploring the full landscape of possibilities, and slowly evolving how you even approach a problem in the first place. There was a specific joy in playing an expert modded Minecraft pack, because it really stretched your ability to understand game mechanics. Don't have a flint and steel? You can light a nether portal by getting a standing flame to light an adjacent leaf block on fire with lava. That level of mastery is something that can only be earned through extensive experience, and it's something I hope to live up to in MoteMancer. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/45567834/54037ec78f081302d9ae52ac2fe3bb25ea6bc0d7.png

Think Outside the Hex

The incoming Foundations system that changes the rules of the world presents challenges in its own right, but through curation of a few specific sets of them, I can present a problem to the player that forces a sideways solution. For example when Chromatic Fields is active, every Mote Patch has a randomized element per tile. You can of course live with a sushi belt in the early game and store some motes in chests that you can hand feed to bootstrap yourself, and beeline for filtering grippers. But what happens if filtering grippers are removed entirely? One solution is that elemental collectors will only target matching motes, and you can arrange a new suite of varied collectors in a space that will pre-filter for you. I love this example because many players find joy in creating their own collector shapes and patterns, and this keeps that puzzle going, even after a hundred hours of mastery. Most of the Foundations were made with this in mind, but we can also institutionalize it. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/45567834/54037ec78f081302d9ae52ac2fe3bb25ea6bc0d7.png

Catered Worlds

Upon restoring your first Great Portal in MoteMancer, you will return to the Library and be welcomed home. But from here, there are more worlds to bring balance to. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/45567834/ee41a5e69595c10268f169d67612dda8067482cf.png You will be presented with a choice of three worlds to re-enter, carrying over the enduring knowledge from the previous run, but starting fresh with a new set of challenges. The current design for this is:

• A guaranteed Shattered set, where a given element is removed completely.
• A guaranteed Clean set, where a you start on a plane with 3 Foundations.
• A completely Random set. (almost)

One key design decision though is, while the first two cards pull from a curated set, the population of them also follows specific rules designed to avoid repeating the shape of your previous run. Did your last run start on the Water Plane? Did you use Ancient Spindles in your last run? None of the new options will give you that choice. The goal of this system is to continue as MoteMancer always has - give you multiple paths to travel, but ensure that each one provides a meaningful and interesting challenge to rise to. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/45567834/54037ec78f081302d9ae52ac2fe3bb25ea6bc0d7.png

A Cornucopia of Challenges

Of course you can always make your own homebrew challenge, such is the nature of a sandbox game. But I'm happy that MoteMancer will provide both the ultimate freedom to choose the table you set for yourself, but also curated ones that can't help but raise your mastery. I'm also planning on having a dedicated Foundations area that links directly to the Steam Workshop, so fellow MoteMancers can eternally challenge one another. Foundations is coming together into something that consistently challenges both how you think and what you build. I want to make sure those flows are smooth before opening the floodgates, so with that, back to the lab. 🌿 ~CyanAvatar