MoteMancer News

We're about a week out from the Elemental Mastery Update!

There’s still plenty of work to do and bugs to fix, but an alpha build is available if you'd like to jump in early. There are tons of new toys available, but today I wanted to highlight some of the new Spells and spell upgrades that will help facilitate your creative crafting and cultivating.


For today I want to highlight 4 of the additions:

[h3]Vortex[/h3]
I always thought Air would have some sort of Tornado or Hurricane spell, but making it a cast just didn't make sense. Vortex has a wonderful niche of filling your inventory as you run around you mall or production setups, you don't even need to use buffer chests. Vortex will pull from any output or chest inventory and top off any stack of items you have in your inventory. There's no interface, just a smart 'fill my stacks please' contract with the spell. Anything that you want more of is better suited to Planar Reliquaries or other means of automation.

[h3]Titanic Command[/h3]
Excavator has moved earlier in the tree so allow for people to have earlier access to refactoring their base, and Nudge has always had niche uses. The best case for nudge is moving a chest full of items without having to pick them all up into your inventory, but it was still on the niche side. Now Nudge can be toggled to work as an area effect, and move an entire set of structures at once. Excavator also benefits from the new area effect, allowing you to harvest en masse.

[h3]Mark/Return[/h3]
The Elemental Master update has many new ways to traverse the world - Slipways and Umbral Waygates allow interplanar and intraplanar teleportation respectively, but Mark/Return gives you a completely freeform ability to teleport back to a unique destination whenever you wish. Want to go exploring but return home safely? Or just want to teleport back to your mall to replenish? Enjoy :)

[h3]Raze[/h3]
Players always need to clear space in automation games, but I still want things to feel thematic and kit appropriate while being functional. Enter Raze. Raze comes with two methods of clearing doodads - the Fire side will simply melt them with your Meteor Swarm spell, while the Earth side lets you build directly on top of doodads while Excavator is active.



[h3]Alpha Testing is Open![/h3]
Each of these are available in the current Alpha build of the game, which you can opt into on steam at your leisure. There are plenty of bugs to stomp out and polish to be done, but all are welcome to help test. Feel free to join our Discord server as well and share your thoughts!

Lots more work to do, I'll see you next week with a shiny new update :)
Back to the Lab! 🌿
~CyanAvatar

It's time to get back to being super nerdy and technical today! There are many problems that don’t reveal themselves until you’re deep into development, and MoteMancer’s art pipeline is absolutely one of them. I have many years experience in tech art and FX art, as well as crazy mad scientist solutions we've already covered in previous musings. All of that has come together to create MoteMancer's Mega Shader.

[h3]But Why Tho?[/h3]
There are so many subtle things that contribute to immersion - trees swaying, clouds drifting, shadows transitioning. Not all are required, but you notice their absence far more than their presence, if only subconsciously. We've covered a variety of voodoo to achieve immersion and 2D motion in Smoke and Mirrors 1 and Smoke and Mirrors 2, and that gives way to today's problem - if we want to animate everything in the game, what is the best way to do it?

We can certainly do custom materials, custom techniques, custom layering setups for each and every unique structure in the game, but when we have literally hundreds of flora alone, much less multiple rotations of dozens of structures, we need to find a way to not only be efficient on performance, but also on iteration and creation time to prevent us from drowning in pixels. So now our quest becomes: how many birds we can feed with one scone.



[h3]This is the Mountain I've Built[/h3]
In order to achieve all of our goals - iteration ease, good frame-rate, artistic freedom - one tool used moreso in the past than today is a single shader that does Everything. This can get scary because the shader itself is super complex, and you are invoking many things that might be wasted if not used, but it does allow you to do one crucial thing - batching.

Batching is basically telling the graphics card - keep doing what you are doing, and do as much of it as you can at once. Since MoteMancer draws top to bottom, layer over layer, most structures simply load their texture, draw the sprite, repeat. The problem is that even if you only have a bunch of trees on screen, each tree becomes its own draw call, since every one references its own little suite of textures. Usually you can solve this with a sprite atlas, but rarely do atlases use multiple technical textures. But that isn't going to stop us :)



It's crazy to collapse most of the art work you've done in the last 2 years to a single image. These are just two images of the 6 used in the mega shader. This style of material wrangling lets us do hue shifting, night glows, wind sways, custom scrolling, and much more all in a single pass. During testing, I was able to drop the draw calls of a test scene from 960 to 230, which is absolutely massive for performance. It also crucially means that every sprite gets the benefit of all of our crazy texture manipulations we've been building over time. Want wind sway and night lighting but also custom UV's? We are covered in all cases.



[h3]Practical Mad Science [/h3]
If I went on about all of the extra bips and bobs this shader could do, I'd be here all day, but I do want to share this absolutely crazy technique realized I could do - all of our smear textures can work on the same shader too.



This one is especially cool because we can use a simple float value to tell the UVs to read from a specific area, like read from 0 - .25 (the bottom quarter) and then change to +.25 to read the next texture up and so on. Usually you’d control this through a material, but the magic here is that we can drive it through a mask channel instead. I can say for example, read a value of #111111 to mean offset .25, #222222 means offset .5 etc.

This also gives us two awesome side benefits - this technique can be used to branch a shader to a bunch of other future paths, without actually introducing a true/false boolean inside the shader (generally bad). It's all just adds and multiplies, which makes your graphics card very happy. And, we can mix and match inside the same object, since it's all just controlled with a pixel mask color.



Ok I probably lost some of you with that last bit, just know that swaying trees, grinding wheels, flowing water, and bioluminescent geodes all draw with a single (complicated) technique, and that means better performance, more artistic consistency, and faster art iteration across all structures simultaneously. Honestly this is the stuff I nerd out on the most, because it's like my own alchemical workshop where i get to blow up and reassemble everything into a new, delightfully chaotic concoction. And it's beautiful.

Back to the lab :) 🌿
~CyanAvatar

One of the last things I added into MoteMancer before EA Launch was a way to do in-game feedback (shoutout to Easy Feedback Form on the Unity store!) and it was one of the best decisions I ever made. Not only have I gotten hundreds of submissions for suggestions and bugs, but I also use it to track game completions to see how robust the content actually is. You can always try to guess based on your own play patterns, but it's always important to validate your assumptions. So today I want to say thank you not only to everyone who posts actively, but also to the people who just play and are enjoying themselves while the game continues to grow.

[h3]Problem Solving Time[/h3]
I've easily spent thousands of hours playing automation games and modded Minecraft, whose systems and complexity allow for personal expression while problem solving all the while - creating your own concoction of problem-solving spaghetti bit by bit. When making a game like MoteMancer, you hope to live up to the depth and breadth of your sources of inspiration. I remember multiple restarts and just enjoying the logistical gardens, where completion wasn't really the most important goal, but still something reserved for 'eventually'.



I'm happy to say that so far MoteMancer seems to be filling that trajectory. i did a quick survey of the last two months of completion times, and MoteMancer is landing at ~101 hours mean completion time, and ~83 hours median completion time, which feels great personally. To me it means that there is enough to get lost in but it also has a reachable goal, so the balance is pretty spot-on to what I'd hoped for.

So far the fastest clear for restoring the Great Portal belongs to veriszg at just under 32 hours. And the longest clear time to date is held by rqtballer at just over 335 hours. Both of these numbers are awesome to me. Also the highest player structure count is 127,853 - proving that I have my work cut out for me on the perf side :)



[h3]A Thousand-Hour Game?[/h3]
Games that reach the worthiness of a thousand+ hours are more than an experience, they are comfort. They are games that help you think deeper and become their own unique flow state. They provide a space to let you stretch out. At this stage of MoteMancer's development, I don't think we're there yet, but I do think the current foundation shows that it is capable of becoming that. MoteMancer is uniquely set up in the automation space to actively change its ruleset per playthrough, and I think that will be a fantastic finishing move if I can pull it off.

There are still plenty of things on the docket to build and polish in the mean-time, but mostly I wanted to take a moment to stop and thank everyone who decided to step into MoteMancer's garden while it's still growing. I could not have done it without you.

Keep using that in-game feedback form. Happy Thanksgiving! 🌿
~CyanAvatar

MoteMancer's community continues to blow me away. The best proof of that? Our freshly minted MoteMancer Wiki. Entirely community-driven, already full of depth, and growing by the day.

While I was preparing for the seismic restructuring of the codebase to support new art, research, and foundational improvements, a few of our members commented on how a wiki would be a fun project during the down-time. While I have certainly used countless wikis in my gaming time, I was super green when it came to making them. Thankfully we have some pros in our midst.

[h3] All-Stars[/h3]
Many people helped out, but a Super special shoutout to Syuushi and Tenebrais, who ran with the most basic of scaffolding and dove headfirst into templates, structure, and styling to make it shine - everything needed to turn the site into a robust resource for present and future players.



Community collaboration has been a core pillar of MoteMancer for a long while now, and I couldn't be happier and more humbled with how passionate our players are at sharing their thoughts, skills, and time to continue to improve the game together. A good wiki becomes the shared memory of a game, and seeing ours take shape this early fills me with determination.

[h3]All Are Welcome[/h3]
The wiki is currently hosted on Miraheze while we finish preparing its permanent home, but the content is fully browsable and already growing fast. If you’d like to lend a hand, all contributions are welcome, from small edits to full articles. We have a dedicated channel in our Discord as well if anyone has suggestions or thoughts for how to improve it, or wants to have a conversation first.



There are still plenty of areas to improve information, presentation, and visualization. Power and Logistics nuances for each element, a more robust archive and grouping for all of our Monday Musings, and full visualizations of the Research Trees are all on deck. Also when the Elemental Mastery Update arrives in a few short weeks, there will be plenty of opportunities for the new additional structures, spells, and upgrades.



I'm still mostly heads-down, cramming as much as I can into this upcoming patch, but I'm also continually active on the server if anyone needs help with anything at all. Keep sending suggestions and bug reports you find so we can make this next patch awesome together. Thanks again to everyone who got the ball rolling on the wiki, it truly means the world.

Back to the lab! 🌿
~CyanAvatar

It’s been a busy few months in the lab, and MoteMancer’s world keeps growing more intricate with every patch. I’ve been doing a lot of technical logs lately, so let’s take a breath and look ahead together.

[h2]The Long View[/h2]
MoteMancer's Early Access phase has stayed on course so far with the addition of Blueprints, Entropy, and a wide variety of quality of life updates. While nothing is ever certain, 1.0 Launch is currently targeted for the one-year anniversary of Early Access - July 2026, with a few significant beats planned along the way, so let's get into that.



[h3]December [/h3]
Fast approaching will be the Elemental Mastery Update, where all of the remaining Structures from every element will be available. Currently in game there are a handful of Shattered researches and recipes, which represent placeholder slots of said remnants. Those will all be filled in and the research tree will be getting an overall polish and tuning pass. I don’t want to spoil every surprise, but here are three new toys I’m especially excited about:

• Entanglement - Umbral Waygates form a pool of Ichor Slick that is shared per Plane. Umbral Waygates were always planned as a way for the player to teleport around their base, but tying them into logistics on a local plane felt very thematic and useful especially when navigating several late-game Planar Bridges.
  
• Delve - Earth Grippers grasp twice as many items from Earth Chests. I always imagined Earth as the mining and throughput king of the elements, even though Air needs to be just as powerful. This tech pairs super nicely with the BoxMancer playstyle as the community unofficially calls it, and will also have fun implications with Charged Lodestone - the structure I showed off that sends Chests plowing across the planes from one far-flung area to another. 12 items per pickup is super strong, but relies on Earth synergy.
  
• Tributary - Streamway Deltas can be toggled to reverse their flow. This one was a popular request to give MoteMancer's unique splitters some of the functionality that players enjoy from other factory games. The unique shape implications from hex logistics means that even though you can easily channel multiple streams into one main corridor, maintaining lanes becomes more of a hassle than it's worth. Reversing the Delta direction as a toggle is an elegant solution because it doesn't take up a precious structure slot, and follows the conventions that Air Grippers use for flipping their functionality on the fly.
  

There are of course many other toys like Filtered Grippers and Deltas, extra Lights and Paths, and the ultimate Elemental Synergy structures from each pair of elements. But those you'll have to see for yourself.

The Elemental Mastery update will also come with a host of visual improvements like structure animations and UI, as well as a holistic performance pass on the art in the game. I almost wrote about the current concoction I'm cooking up - I think I can get thousands of structure draw calls down to a dozen - but that'll have to wait until I'm certain it'll work. Either way, lots of performance improvements will come as well.

I want to quickly shoutout all of the people posting bugs - there isn't anything game breaking but there are a few typos and language issues that have been identified. I have fixed them all locally, but the game is in a pretty significant transition phase, so posting the updates to live won't happen until the build is more stable. Thank you for your continued reports, I read them all.



[h3]February[/h3]
The Affix Update will take the game from dozens or hundreds of hours of content to hundreds or thousands of hours. I'm super excited for Affixes - they were planned from the start of the project but only really make sense once the first core playthrough is completely robust. If you are unfamiliar, Affixes are like modifiers or challenge modes that can significantly change the way you play the game. It's sort of like a combination of tuning sliders and built in modding, but MoteMancer is uniquely positioned in the automation space to take advantage of this because of how unique each element is.

Thanks to community brainstorming and feedback, I've already amassed dozens of affixes ranging from the obvious:

• Start on the Fire Plane
  
• Hand Crafting is disabled
  
• Water is Shattered
  

to things that can fundamentally alter the geometry puzzle of building:

• Mote Fields spawn random Elements per Tile
  
• All Grippers have double range
  
• Flora are Indestructible
  

and many many more. I have been asked whether achievements will be in the game, and the answer is yes - they are still on the roadmap, but they make much more sense to add after or with Affixes, since that will constitute the bulk of the challenge beyond the base game.



[h3]April and beyond[/h3]
There will likely be a larger update in April as well, but it's too early to tell. If nothing pressing arises from the community, there are still plenty of performance opportunities to pursue. I still plan on making controller fully supported. Many people have asked for something like an Alchemist's Journal, which I would love to make eventually. There are many other things that can fill that slot, but I'm also sure I'll know much more by the time I get there.

Honestly I feel very well prepared for the road ahead. There’s a lot still bubbling in the cauldron, but MoteMancer’s growth has been steady and spirited since Early Access began. I’m grateful for every player helping to refine it for all of our future alchemists.

Back to the Lab! 🌿
~CyanAvatar