Moose Miners News

I'll be streaming the demo and talking a bit about the game.
The footage is pre-recorded, but I will hang out in the chat to answer any questions you might have

I just want to start by giving my thanks to everyone that tried the demo. I have gotten some really good feedback and insights so far that will help make the game the best it can be.

This update is mostly about what is going on under the hood as I have worked on implementing multi-threading for the simulation the last weeks. It will not make that much difference for the most of you in the demo, but it will have greater effect in the full version when the max number of miners are greatly increased and the world is much larger and allows for a really large operation. I also managed to squeeze in some improvements to the rendering performance so it should be bit less demanding on the GPU now as well.

If anyone is experiences bad performance now after these changes please send me the specs of your computer and what fps you are getting together with your save file as described in https://steamcommunity.com/app/2591410/discussions/0/4038104984936396794/, this will help me set the final system requirements for the game and also find if there are any setups that are getting worse performance than expected that I could fix. The same goes if you experience any crashes or freezes in the game.

I'll leave the full patch notes below.

• Improved rendering performance
  
• Improved simulation performance
  
• Improved auto save performance
  

• Fixed a bug causing miners to sometimes end up in more than one group
  
• Fixed a bug causing the cost of rail and the rail upgrades to show wrong numbers in some cases
  
• Fixed some potential crash issues
  
• Fixed a bug causing more than one moose to mine the same gem sometimes
  
• Fixed tooltips for adding left and right grinders being the wrong way around
  
• Fixed tooltips showing wrong numbers for storage minecart for x10 and Max upgrades
  
• Fixed control group area of selected control group disappearing when the flag was outside view
  

A hotfix for two bugs making it impossible to reach a full clear

• Fixed miners not being able to mine the columns at the very edges
  
• Fixed demo width being 2 columns wider than it should be
  

Hi, time for a little bit larger update to the demo. I have recently finished the control group feature of the game and thought there was no good reason to not include that in the demo as it could give you a few more ways of playing the game while you wait for the full version. In addition I thought I might as well add leaderboards for speed running since I wanted to have some sort of leaderboard for the full game as well. So this update also include two leaderboards for those who want to maximize efficiency and compete.

There are also a few bug fixes and some tweaks to a few of the upgrades costs in the game that you can read about in the full patch notes below. But first I'll explain the control groups and new leaderboards in more detail.

Starting with the control groups. The control groups allows you to group moose together by selecting them and pressing the create control group button. Then you get a button at the bottom left of the screen that when pressed selects all the moose in that group. This can be useful if you have certain moose you want to upgrade separately from the rest of them. In addition each control group have a flag that you can place in the world. When placed the flag will show an area that any moose in the control group will mine inside. The area can be resized as well. So if there are some rare gems you really want to get to quickly you can set a control group flag for that area and the moose will work their way deeper into that specific area.

Then we have leaderboards. I have added two leaderboards that will be exclusive for the demo due to their nature. The first one is for mining to the north demo wall in the shortest time. So as soon as you mine the last gem before the wall in a column the time will be recorded and uploaded to the leaderboard. If you have one of the top 100 best times then you will appear in the leaderboard that can be reached from the main menu. The second leaderboard is for clearing the full demo area in the shortest time. So get your strategies ready and optimize your starting build orders to claim the top spots in the leaderboard. To keep track of your current time there is a clock button at the top right of the screen that you can press to see the current time of your save.

An extra tip for the ones reading all the text in this update post: Each save of the game has a different seed, so you can reset the game from the main menu until you get a seed that looks good, for example that has a good amount of gold ores close enough for early mining.

The rest of the patch notes follows below:

• Added control groups. See description earlier in the post
  
• Added speed running leaderboards. More details earlier in the post
  
• Added timer showing time played this save
  
• Added tooltips to upgrade buttons showing how many things will be upgraded
  
• Added expected sell value to the storage minecart info card
  
• Navigation buttons now unlock if moving the camera away from the base
  
• Added option to go to main menu in pause screen
  

• Increased cost scaling of saw speed upgrade
  
• Reduced cost scaling of miner capacity upgrade
  
• Reduced cost scaling of minecart speed upgrade
  
• Reduced cost scaling of rail length upgrade
  
• Made storage minecart upgrades unlock earlier
  

• Fixed rare gems being more common than intended
  
• Fixed a bug causing the minecarts to not animate in when buying the first rails in a column
  
• Fixed a bug causing the moose to not go to a collection point if mining too far away from the base
  
• Fixed a bug casing moose to sometimes get stuck in the air
  

The mining area in Moose Miners is very large. It is about 32 000 gems wide and 4800 gems deep. Technically there are gems to mine about 2 billion deep, but new gem types stop after 4800 as of right now. I have not decided how to handle the depth yet, I might figure out something to make it interesting to keep mining beyond the 4800 depth.

But for now let’s assume 4800 is the limit and make some calculations about the value of those gems.
To start with let’s have a look at how much each gem is worth. You can see it in the picture below.



The gems are divided in layers 25 gems deep with the 16 first gems each having their own layer. The last 3 are more valuable and are spread around in all the layers with higher spawn rates as you go deeper or wider on the map.

After the 16 layers the gem types start repeating in the same order, but now they are magically enchanted. The magic comes in 11 different colours increasing the amount that can be mined from each gem. The following formula is used to calculate the total amount that can be mined from an enchanted gem: 10^(1 + 0.25 * magicColorIndex), where magicColorIndex starts at 1 for the white magic up to 11 for the black magic.



Let’s calculate the value of a single column 4800 gems deep, ignoring the 3 most valuable gems that do not have their own layers for now. The first 400 gems are the non magic gems and are worth (2+10+20+30+40+50+60+70+80+90+100+110+120+130+140+150) * 25 * 10, which is $305000. 25 is the number of gems per type. And if we take the value of one picked up gem from each gem in the column it is $30050, since each gem gives 10 for the non magic gems.

Then for each magic tier there are the following amounts per gem: 17, 31, 56, 100, 177, 316, 562, 1000, 1778, 3162, 5623. In total when including the non magic gems there are 12 832 mined gems per gem type. So the total value for a column results in 12 832 * $30050, which is $385 601 600.

The total value excluding the rare gems for the whole minable area up until 4800 deep is then $385 601 600 * 32 768 which is $12 635 393 228 800.

But the rare gems are worth a lot of money, so we can’t exclude them. The rare gems each have their own spawn chance that gets higher deeper into the map or further to the sides of the map. So calculating their values would be too much even for this quite technical and nerdy post. Instead I just wrote a function in my game that can calculate the total value of all the gems in an area of the map if they were to be mined and sold, and run it for our 32768 * 4800 area. The total value will vary quite a bit depending on which seed you get. From running the function for a few seeds the total value was in the range of $28 682 876 084 806 to $28 834 352 916 632.

That is quite a bit more than the $12 635 393 228 800 for only the regular gems. And I guess that answers the question in the title of the post. 157 million gems are worth over 28 trillion dollars. At least with the values and other numbers I have set right now. I might end up changing some of them when I work more on the balancing of upgrade costs and when I decide what to do with the gems after depth 4800.