Miners Mettle News

Early Access Patch 005: Snapped Bowstring Patch - 19th May 2020

The highlights today are the new alternative aiming method and the zoom to satellite view feature. In this new-fangled aiming system, once you have primed an ability, you no longer need to drag the mouse holding down LMB but can simply click where you want to shoot at. You’ll need to make a change in the settings for this to take effect!

Gameplay
New aiming control alternative – No longer need to have to drag the mouse while aiming. Combined with the previously added inverted options, you’ll now be able to find aiming controls you’re comfortable with. – Thanks to Mr. Wild, The Last Hope, KuseBlack, Breytac, and many others!

Points of Interest (mineral nodes and buildable spots) are no longer hidden by the fog of war, preventing players from wandering aimlessly – Thanks to Phoagne

Difficulty on all 1P Horde mode maps has been tuned down further. Easy has a much longer wait time before hostile units show up, and has 5 hostiles in total, for example. 2P and 3P difficulties will receive their own fine tuning soon.

Pause – The game will now pause when you are playing by yourself and hit escape.

The Horde mode timer was off and showed the wrong number of waves left. This has been fixed.

Attempting to shoot while making the transition from Satellite View to the World View would cause the FoW to not render in, now fixed.

Tutorial
A simple mining tutorial has been added, to show the basics of how to earn resources

Camera Controls
Zoom in and out further, and you can now zoom all the way up to satellite view and back down again using the mouse wheel only – Thanks to Mr. Wild, and others

UI
Resized the length of the items in the game log
Removed the facility tree UI until it gets a graphical overhaul – it was crowding that side of the screen
Tutorial
Another fix that prevents the movement tutorial flow from breaking

Multiplayer
2 and 3 player horde modes were crashing due to an error in the camera manager, now fixed – Thanks The Croc Dealer, ZubZeroHMG
Very often crash when a randomized faction choice was made, now fixed
Crash when icon widgets were initializing before they were supposed to, now fixed


You can expect a further patch tomorrow, with other highly requested items such as camera rotation by holding the middle mouse button, and more! Thank you.

Hello,

We've got a patch with a couple highly requested features today.

We had issues with units stuttering on camera very regularly, and that should not be a problem anymore. Your trains will glide across the surface of Pentum as intended!

You can also pan the camera with the arrow keys now, though of course you can rebind them to something else if needed.

Camera
Camera stuttering has been fixed, leading to a much smoother experience
Arrow keys can be used to pan the camera around
The middle mouse button can be used to pan the camera around

Tutorials
The first panel in the tutorials had a back button that would break the tutorial if pressed, it has been removed
Movement Tutorial - snapping to your unit before you were asked to snap to your unit would break tutorial flow
Movement Tutorial - Moving your unit before being asked to move your unit would break tutorial flow

Thanks and have a good weekend!

Ignatius

Early Access Patch 003: The Tutorial Patch - 16th May 2020

One of our biggest hurdles is players not being properly taught mechanics of the game or struggling with commands. We're implementing interactive tutorials so players can understand the mechanics better.

Tutorials
Movement Tutorial shows players how to move units with the current command system
Combat Tutorial shows players how combat works and the intricacies of aiming in Miner's Mettle
Old video tutorials have been removed
Economy, Units and Facilities and Camera Controls are other tutorials being worked on and are expected within the next few days

Camera Controls
Added the option to invert camera height in Settings
Added the option to invert aiming controls in the Settings (both X and Y axes separately)
Unified inverting camera rotations for all 3 views under one option
Changed the positioning of your units relative to the screen when the camera is locked onto a unit, it is now more central to the screen – Thank you Zpajro, and others
Note: Some settings may be inverted by default and you’ll need to go in and change your settings if you desire

Game play
Removed Brutal difficulty from Horde Mode, Hard is difficult enough and we’ll come back and further refine difficulty levels upon feedback
AMPs were getting damaged through shields, this has been fixed – Thank you McKaby and others
Removed some old code relating to right click movement, which is not ready from prime time but would occasionally fire, causing confusion – Thank you Square

Miscellaneous
Added this change log on startup so player can see what’s been added and what’s been fixed recently
Reset our Discord link in the main menu to never expire
V-Sync settings were not shown as being saved even though they were – Thank you KuseBlack
Maps show information such as size, biome, number of mineral nodes, when selecting a map during solo Horde

We're trying out this new patch note format, since this one is a larger one with multiple changes. You'll see a very similar screen when starting up the game too, so it's easier to find patch notes in the future. In terms of what's next for us, we're continuing work on the other tutorials, we've fixed the camera stuttering issue (turned out to be really simple and we were trying over complicated solutions), and other bug fixes and QoL stuff.

The patch is 1.2GB and you may need to restart Steam in order to start the download. Thank you!

Hello!

Thank you for being with us from the beginning! We hope this is the start of a great journey.

Players have been very understanding and patient regarding some features that should have made it in at launch but didn't.

We've been trying to be incredibly responsive, and answer as many questions as we can, both here on the Steam forums but also on our Discord channel (https://discord.gg/XNdE37p), while also listening to what features are highly requested and putting them in as soon as we can.

In the past 60 hours or so since launch, we've had 4 patches which have fixed numerous crashes and glitches, as well as features such as: inverted controls and camera options (coming in today's patch), graphical options, unlocking frame rates, improving cursor performance (it was too large, and also offset), drastically reducing difficulty levels, and others.

Something else that has been highly requested is a replacement of our current tutorial section to an interactive tutorial that teaches players how to play while they play. We've been working on this in the past couple of days and are creating a 4 part tutorial that focuses on showing players how to 1) move units and control the camera, 2) combat, 3) economy, and 4) units and facilities. We'll put in each part as soon as it's complete, so they may come in day by day. The first two will be in before Sunday, and the second two coming in first half next week.

Other items on the very near agenda include: fixing camera stuttering, tweaking a unit's location (to make it more central to the screen), a change log upon start-up to quickly see what's in the latest patch, further control options to customize playing style, panning with the arrow keys, rebindable keys, further tweaks to horde difficulty, revealing points of interest on the map through FoW at all times. We'll have further fixes and features as well, but the above are on our list of tasks for sure.

Thank you!

Patch Notes for 14-05-20:

1) Crash Fix: The game was crashing when attempting to play horde mode games back to back, this has been fixed - thank you to Phoagne
2) Crash Fix: Using abilities with a unit docked at HQ was crashing the game, this has been fixed - thanks to Cyberaapje
3) Players would sometimes get locked into a faction if they went back to map selection mode - McKaby found this bug for us
4) Settings are now available in the main menu - we've included some graphic settings such as resolution, anti-aliasing, and V-Sync - much requested
5) Reduced the cursor size by a bit, and the pointer is no longer offset but accurate - MrWild, thanks!
6) Horde difficulty has been severely toned down for 1 and 2 co-op: As an example, you would face a total of 20 hostile units in 1 player normal difficulty, now you will face 12. - requested by many players, thank you all!
7) Unlocked frame rates from a cap of 62fps which was causing issues and slow downs for some players

The patch should be approximately 18mb, and you may need to restart Steam to start the download. We're still working on the tutorial and should have parts of it available (1 or 2 of 4 parts) today. Thank you!