Dwarves Mining Idle News

Hello everyone! It has been awhile for sure. I wanted to finish up the concepts and polish up the rewrite before I made another News announcement.

I do want to inform the community of somethings before we get started. We're 7 months in front of our Roadmap schedule. Our plan was to release The Surface Q4 of 2024. We didn't plan on working on it this early, but we're really ahead of ourselves. The rewrite was never planned until the community gave their feedback and suggestions, and of course the rewrite technically never set us back since we're still in front of schedule as per what the Roadmap shows. Most people have said that our 1.0 update is "a continuously delayed release", but that's beyond false. The Surface was put on a bit of hold until the rewrite, polish and the new mechanics/features were implemented and it's being worked on! As I mentioned, the rewrite was never planned until we received feedback and it's basically an entirely new game because of it.

I do want to show some examples of what to expect with the new mechanics. Today, I'll be showing you how Mining, Combat, Dwarven Book, Floors and Placeables will work. Whilst there's still more to do, I want to show some teasers to keep everybody informed. Please bear with us!

These examples are in testing mode to show you the newly made mechanics so expect the final result to be different.

[h2]Areas come to the Dwarf[/h2]
This will remove any wasted time between Dwarves running around going to the next material/tile. The original idea was to make it seem like you're digging further, but it ended up not being executed well since it was all a huge time waster for the Dwarves and Player.

Dwarves don't walk to materials and they come to the Dwarf.



[h2]Areas cost materials, but are Infinite[/h2]
Yes, areas will cost materials. Originally, I thought the concept of how the areas act now was okay, but it ended up removing a lot of the "idler" aspect to the game reducing that nice grind factor.

Areas will cost materials to unlock and if you do not have enough materials to unlock an area, it will restart back to the beginning and go from there until you have enough materials to unlock the next area.


[h2]Floors now cost materials[/h2]
Current Build, Floors have a chance to unlock by resetting floors.

Floors will cost materials and you can choose which Floor type to spawn. Floor Type determines Dwarf Behavior since Dwarf Behaviors were completely removed.





[h2]Floor Combat/Loot and Enemies[/h2]
Currently, enemies spawn near Dwarves with Combat Behavior assigned. Dwarves will have to move to enemies to be able to eliminate them. Like the mineable tiles, it could take awhile to walk to an enemy and end up wasting precious time before finally eliminating them.

Enemies will spawn in front of the Dwarf on a Combat floor type. Combat Floor type will have two behaviors: Attack and Loot. It's slower, but a Loot Floor Type will take loot from a Combat Floor overtime and you can set Dwarves to loot faster on a Loot Floor than on a Combat Floor.

New enemy drops have been set as well and as you see, all the loot information is all displayed under the Dwarf.



[h2]Dwarven Book[/h2]
As you know the Dwarven Book was completely redone. It's all fully implemented and when you unlock new floors and other features you will unlock more upgrades in your Dwarven Book.

Now, how this works is when you purchase any of these Stat items, the timer will start to count down and when it reaches 0 it will increase the multiplier. This multiplier is global for all Dwarves and Floors, but it takes a good awhile for it to start actually helping, but you will notice changes as it does upgrade.








[h2]Transferring Dwarves[/h2]
Dwarves Window, I removed the drop down for Floors and added buttons instead. It's easier to see your Floors and which one you have selected. The buttons for Dwarves are now based on Floor Type and Floor count.

Transferring Dwarves is different in the upcoming update. Currently, you had to spawn a Door after 1 floor reset. I changed it so now there's a Transfer Button in the Dwarves Window and the only requirement is to have more than 1 floor.







I don't have an ETA when this will be out. I'm still working on all the new features, mechanics and changing some things. It's a lot of grunt work. Once I'm finally comfortable with everything I'll start back on The Surface and get that going. Thank you for your patience, support, feedback and suggestions! I do hope you all enjoy the new teasers!


For interaction with Litty Game developers and our community please join our Discord. We're open to constructive criticism, feedback and suggestions for our games and we find it very important to hear our community out!

If you don't have Discord, you can post your suggestions in the Suggestions Forum.


https://store.steampowered.com/app/2220570/Dwarves_Mining_Idle/

Hello everybody! I wanted to update you on what's been going on since it has been awhile. Trust me, it's been... awhile! Now, last time I updated the community on what we were in the process of doing -- today will be the same but with a good relief of results.

The rewrite has been completed. Now, with the rewrite completed a lot has changed with the save file and I do hope you guys understand as we're in the process of leaping out of Early Access. YOU will still keep your materials and "Entity Points" (Renamed to Dwarf Points in the 1.0 update), but lose your world due to the new gameplay and mechanic changes. The world loss was already announced prior, but I'm reiterating through this bit of information so you will know everything.

Since the completion of the rewrite I can now focus on The Surface update, along with the new gameplay mechanics. Originally, what the rewrite did was remove ALL of the Perks, changed Perk Book, completely reworked the world generation, how the floors work, how Dwarves work and a lot more! Overall, I'm really hoping the new gameplay makes you all happier. The game will be less "PERK" based, cluttered with unnecessary point currency, less UI navigating and more in-tune with allowing you to idle without the need to figure out what's going on most of the time.

For returning or consistent players, you will need to learn the new mechanics but you will be able to purchase almost everything depending how many materials you have.

For interaction with Litty Game developers and our community please join our Discord. We're open to constructive criticism, feedback and suggestions for our games and we find it very important to hear our community out!

If you don't have Discord, you can post your suggestions in the Suggestions Forum.

Thank you for your time and I'll be seeing you soon!

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2220570/Dwarves_Mining_Idle/

I want to update everybody on our progress. We're still working hard on the major gameplay changes and upcoming 1.0 release of The Surface. While there are a large amount of changes to the code and within the process of that we're working on some artwork for The Surface in the meantime.

I have changed some of the major world generation code to work more performantly through its iterations. What this means is all the tiles you see in the game will no longer be global, but Floor specific. This will help with the code cycling through arrays more quickly. However, with this change all placeables will not have their materials returned back. There has been a lot of clean up to the save file. HOWEVER, you still get to keep your Materials, points, etc. of course.

I've also been working on multiplier formulas for the new Dwarven Book changes for Dwarf stats and such. Before, I felt like it was really bad and forced in the wrong ways.

I don't have anything major to share today other than a brief, honest update! There's still a lot more to get done.

For interaction with Litty Game developers and our community please join our Discord. We're open to constructive criticism, feedback and suggestions for our games and we find it very important to hear our community out!

If you don't have Discord, you can post your suggestions in the Suggestions Forum.

Thank you for your time and I'll be seeing you soon!

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2220570/Dwarves_Mining_Idle/

Hello wild adventurers! Today I'll be showing you what was changed and what's being worked on. I don't want to spoil it all so I'll go over the need-to-know stuff so your brain can become excited. Everything is being worked on HARD and that being said, it has set us back another month or so -- BUT, that's a good thing! Allows us to work everything out and get it ready.


I have listened to feedback and suggestions with negative reviews, Discord community and other messages people have written. I cannot cater to everybody's needs; otherwise, the game would end up in a displeasing mess. HOWEVER, I do agree with some points people made and I've tried my best to balance the two.

I'll be going over what my thoughts are on the feedback below on the CURRENT game's gameplay status.

[h3]"Game is too slow", "Tiles have too much Health", "Barebones, too early in development"[/h3]

• Tile Health was high pretty high and there was no real defining concept with how Tile Health was overall. It was just a value and Dwarves had to mine until the Tile was mined and that's what made it slow.
  
• As for the game being "too Barebones", I have to disagree if you only played for 30 minutes, you're not going to unlock much. There's plenty of things to work toward and unlock. But, with the Tile Health being high at the start, most were discouraged due to how slow progression was.
  
• The game's concept before was to start with a couple Dwarves, they gain Entity Points, you spend those in the Dwarven Book and they'll earn more Experience Gain, Hit Damage, Hit Speed, etc. depending where you put your points into.
  
• I also feel as if a lot of people don't understand the Dwarven Book and perks very well either. There is a lot to understand and a lot has changed to make it easier, fun and more involved. That is where I think a lot of people were discouraged to continue on, especially the Tile Health situation. The guide wasn't completely finished until now, so most of my fault for not explaining more, but I didn't want to finish the guide when adding more content since I redid the whole entire guide system on 1.0.
  

For interaction with Litty Game developers and our community please join our Discord. We're open to constructive criticism, feedback and suggestions for our games and we find it very important to hear our community out!

If you don't have Discord, you can post your suggestions in the Suggestions Forum.


I don't want to spoil everything, but I do want to show you that things have changed.. a lot!

[h2]General Changes[/h2]

• Removed Informational Button and added Tooltips. The guide also takes care of helping too now!
  
• Placeables (Furnace, Crusher, Fusion, Pump, Bottler, etc.) are no longer perks and they are always unlocked, but now they cost materials to place down. You can view them all in the Placeable Build Panel by clicking a ground tile.
  
• Workbench has been removed. With the new additions and changes, Workbench is redundant.
  
• There's now more tooltips in places that needed it. E.g. Archaeology and when adding fuel to placeables or trying to view a recipe.
  

[h2]Perks and Points[/h2]

• Entity Points are now global, merged with all your floors and they were renamed to Dwarf Points. I felt like Entity Points wasn't obvious enough so I decided to rename it to something that makes more sense.
  
• Area Points were removed.
  
• Floor Points were removed.
  
• Floor Resets Counter were removed.
  
• Perks no longer exist.
  

I wanted to reduce the amount of UI navigation. With removing a lot of Dwarven Book's navigating -- points are global, removed certain points, Materials will show all the time and Perks have been removed.

I removed specific points to reduce the amount of non-material currencies so there's no more confusion what does what. There might've been too many "point" additions that could have been removed early on.

[h2]Major Dwarven Book Changes[/h2]

• Dwarven Book was completely reworked and it's used for spending Dwarf Points.
  
• Materials are no longer in the Dwarven Book and are now shown on the main Canvas.
  
  
  
  
• Added basic Purchaseables you can upgrade with Dwarf Points.
  
  

[h2]Major Dwarf Changes[/h2]

• Dwarves are no longer free on floor reset. Instead, you buy Dwarves at the Cloning Orb (Big yellow Orb at Floor 1, Area 1).
  
• Dwarves can no longer be clicked to regenerate Stamina faster.
  
• Dwarves will no longer walk to chase enemies or the next area, or to catch up to the next area. Check World Generation Changes below for more info.
  

[h2]Major World Generation Changes[/h2]

• Floors have a type Mining, Combat and Liquid.
  
• Floors are no longer free and they no longer have a chance to spawn on a floor reset.
  
• Areas are no longer free. You have to buy areas with materials and/or Dwarf points. You will see an Unlock Area # panel if you don't have that area unlocked.
  
• Areas are now infinite. Dwarves will stand in one spot to mine, attack and more. Areas will come to THEM! And one area spawns at a time. This removed a lot of trying to find things and less UI usage.
  
• Areas will automatically be placed down and no longer spawn by Dwarves mining the last mineable material.
  
• Tile Health will dynamically change on each floor reset. This will be floor specific, not global.
  

Thank you everyone for the feedback! No matter harsh or constructive it is, we'll find ways to listen and work around what every player is running in to and/or feeling. This is going to be a huge update, so bear with us and I hope all of you understand!

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2220570/Dwarves_Mining_Idle/

Hello everybody! Today, I'll be updating you all on what's going on, but first, I'd love to hear some suggestions or your thoughts on Dwarves Mining Idle.


We've been getting some vague responses that say there's not much to do or it's "too barebones". Now this is below the 2 hour mark, so I'm assuming they want more to do at the beginning? I did an update not too long ago that made mining at the start faster, but I think some players don't want to idle literally at the beginning, even though it's an idler.

As I said, very vague and all I can do is guess what they mean or what they want at the beginning of the game. What's too barebones? What makes it boring? What's simple and basic about the game? I don't want to add holy grail of micro-managing since it's an Idler, something at the start that's meant to be ran in the background (when 1.0 comes out there will be offline progression, however) and as you progress you'll start to see more things to do.

A little backstory for Dwarves Mining Idle: We're two developers and we wanted to create something simplistic art-wise that would be cheap, but include a fair amount of content for players to enjoy Dwarves Mining Idle despite it's pixelated art-style. We released in Early Access to get the experience we both needed for working with Steam and how everything worked in that regard. We're trying our best to give everybody a great experience. However, with players giving us very vague responses that don't include much feedback or suggestions, it's hard to tell what we should do -- as I said all we can do is guess.

To counter the "slow-ness" of the game at the beginning to further cater to people that might think it's very slow, I'm going to remove 50 areas and create a dynamic tile health system that increases by +0.1 on floor reset. That way, players feel like they're progressing and it's not going to seem very slow, but also later on when X floor resets it will take a bit longer if you don't upgrade your Dwarves to compensate for the tile health. And, I'll remove Tile Health increasing based on Dwarves mining on that floor.

What do you think? Any other suggestions, feedback or constructive criticism? Would love to hear! 1.0 update is going to be VERY big with a lot of content and I want to get it all ready for its full release, but first I want to address this issue.

For interaction with Litty Game developers and our community please join our Discord. We're open to constructive criticism, feedback and suggestions for our games and we find it very important to hear our community out!

If you don't have Discord, you can post your suggestions in the Suggestions Forum.


I've been teasing things in our Discord for a couple weeks now. Here's what we have finished so far, and what we have left. I won't include it all since some is a surprise; however, there's so much to go through!

[h2]Performance[/h2]

• Increased performance. I had enemies and tiles hiding when the camera wasn't near them and showing when it was, but after a few internal testing I found out it was causing more performance issues than doing good. Removed and everything is going even more smoothly now!
  
• Added a Load Manager. The world can become pretty big and so can the save file. Instead of everything loading all at once it'll take time its time to performantly load the world and everything in it.
  

[h2]Material and Area Changes[/h2]

• Diamond will now have its rarity increased when you unlock more floors. Lower the floor, the higher spawn chance of Diamond. If you already have floors unlocked it'll calculate when you launch your game.
  
• Ore is no longer limited to specific areas. This was intended originally as a progression concept, but it ends up causing issues with ores like Diamond and Uranium to be mined less since they're already rare.
  
• Dirt will only spawn in the first area, and after that it'll be random based on rarity excluding area limitation.
  

[h2]Quality of Life[/h2]
Working on some QoL to make life easier with the game.

Added a Dwarves Near window. There's quite a lot of Dwarves to manage. You can hover any Dwarf and it will show all Dwarves near with a quick button go-to instead of going to the Dwarves Window, selecting floor and finally getting to a dwarf you want to edit or look at. You can change Name, Behavior and View Skills within the Dwarves Near Window.



[h2]Placeables[/h2]

• Completely reworked placeables to make them better and for myself because the code haunted me until I reworked everything.
  
• This rework of Placeables is basically a huge QoL visually and internally to perform better and had a lot of redundancies removed. Not only that, it made a dynamic room open for The Surface Placeables implementation.
  

So far I've only finished Workbench and Furnace. Lots more to take care of!

[h3]Workbench[/h3]

• Alert saying "You must select a Dwarf to upgrade" even though you selected a Dwarf will no longer show after selecting a Dwarf.
  
• The item and Dwarf you're upgrading will no longer have its selection removed until you select a different item or dwarf. It did get pretty confusing if you still had an item or Dwarf selected after or
  before upgrading.

[h3]Furnace[/h3]

• Added Text at the top showing you what the Furnace is smelting.
  
• Updated Fuel and Output texts and increased the font size.
  
• Replaced Output Timer and Fuel Timer texts with a progress bar.
  

[h2]Offline Calculation[/h2]
Offline calculation is pretty much finished. Just needs some polishing to make sure everything is okay! But, you will receive Dwarf Levels, Area, Floor and Entity points while offline. Depend on Dwarves behavior when you close the game, you'll receive materials from Mining and Combat. AND if you have any placeables (Furnace, Crusher, etc) running it will smelt, crush and run offline.





[h2]Camera[/h2]
Added some camera move and zoom limitations. I felt like the camera was a bit too free.

[h2]Dwarf[/h2]

• Added NEW skills for Dwarves! We had new artwork for the Dwarves made months ago and they're finally being used! I had to come up with a concept on how to utilize these new dwarf look and animation. Decided to place them in the Skill Tree and they're valuable. Choose your Skill Trees how you want to build your Dwarves material grind!
  

That's is just the stepping stone on what to expect. There's more where that came from! Please consider giving us suggestions or feedback on Dwarves Mining Idle. We dislike having people quit too early when the grind and game does become better as you progress, you just have to keep mining and progressing! We want your experience to be the BEST. See you soon!

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2220570/Dwarves_Mining_Idle/

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2731830/Real_Coin_Pusher/