MoteMancer News

[h3]MoteMancer's second Major update is now Live![/h3]

Elemental Mastery brings a massive amount of additional content to your alchemical garden. The Research Tree has been infused with dozens of new researches, complete with new spells, new structures, and new synergies. Every node in the research tree that was shattered is now available, and the tree itself has grown with the help of our community. There's a ton to cover, but I'll go into the highlights first, with complete patch notes below.



[h3]Research Complete[/h3]
MoteMancer's tree now has over 200 research nodes available, with a focus on meaningful upgrades and filling out a few of the later elements. Let's do a quick highlight for each element:

• Life: Overgrowth Pillar provides a way to extend your Mote Fields by growing Flora on them - with the new addition of Mystical Agriculture allowing your Collectors to harvest Flora in addition to raw motes. Sovereign Manaheart carries this theme and has been changed to convert abundant solar power back into the ground and replenish Mote Fields directly, and even grow them beyond their initial footprint.
  
• Earth: Excavator has moved to earlier in the tree to assist in early itches for base refactoring, and later Titanic Command allows you to increase the radius of both Nudge and Excavator to exert your will upon the world. Chests also now have slot locking and synergy with Earth Grippers, allowing double pickups from an Earth Chest with an Earth Gripper.
  
• Fire: Luminarium is finally available, with the ability to kit out your base with elemental lighting. Thermal Towers have an upgrade to double their connection distance, and placement of Fire Wires now places successive structures at their correct distances. Void Tower allows for wireless power transmission, and the Foundry creates the opportunity for a significant Elemental Production boost and feedback loop.
  
• Shadow: Umbral Waygates and Slipways are in and provide both intraplanar and interplanar teleportation respectively. Mark / Return is a new spell on the block that will allow you to bind a unique location that you can return to at will. Blackhole Monolith will drag Rifts towards them, and Radiantshrooms increase the range of your Runeshroom Rituals.
  
• Air: Enchanted Grippers and Deltas are in - allowing you to filter your factory lines, and Omni Grippers give you even more freedom - allowing you to set any input and output slot you like. Vortex is a new spell that will passively snag items from nearby chests to top off your inventory stacks, and Cloudspring Fountain is a new super-distributor of items, combining the best of Streamways and Air Grippers.
  
• Water: By popular request, Streamways Deltas can now reverse their direction, changing from a Delta to a Tributary. Mana Pools have gained synergy with Downpour Bastions in two ways: Overflow will increase the storage capacity of Mana Pools near Bastions, and Whirlpool will cleanse Entropy that drains 1000 Power from the Pool, creating a powered safety wall. Riptide will also pickup items from Pedestals to allow you to wipe the slate clean when you need it.
  

A reminder that spells have always had the ability to toggle their additional functionality on and off, but there is now a Spell Tooltip window that reminds you of the state you are in.

Full patch notes below for all the gritty details :)

New Sovereign Manaheart and Overgrowth Pillar

[h3]Aesthetic Alchemy[/h3]
The underlying tech for our art pipeline has received a significant overhaul. In the short term this means that each structure is now much more performant, and unifies their artistic reach. Every structure has received a night-lighting pass, and elemental dissolves. Structures now are uniformly affected by wind, and are set up for future animation polish.

The planes themselves have also been better balanced for day and night lighting, as well as terrain texture improvements. Terrace of Trails - a new Air structure - also has a new suite of elemental paths to extend the simple Swiftstone that Salt provides.


[h3]Extra Highlights[/h3]
In preparation for the next update, the ability to start a playthrough from any Plane has been added! You can find this by going into the options menu from the main menu before you begin a new game - this will be massively fleshed out in the future, but this early access will help make sure that alternate plane starts are tuned appropriately. Note that tutorials are not available for custom plane starts.


[h3]State of the Game and the Future[/h3]
With the Research Tree complete, the next phase of development will focus on expanding replay-ability through affixes. This update was able to hit lighting and new structure art very well, so the next phase is going to be much more animation, FX, and UI focused. I will be off for the holidays spending time with family, but will be back at it in full force in January. The Affix update is tentatively planned for February 2026. HUGE shoutout to the alpha testers for helping land this patch! The game will continue to improve with all of your feedback.

Happy Holidays everyone, thank you for making this year automagical 🌿
~CyanAvatar



If you’ve been waiting to jump in, now’s a great time! MoteMancer is 20% off during the Elemental Mastery Update and Winter Sale!
https://store.steampowered.com/app/3320980/


[h2]Steam Reviews[/h2]
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.


[h2]MoteMancer has a Wiki![/h2]
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.



[h2]Full Patch Notes - v0.3.014[/h2]
Crafting Window and Research tree have been reorganized. Your save game progress is associated with research node position rather than specific tech, so some researches may have to be reacquired. Others you may now have for free.

You can start a playthrough from any plane by going to the Gameplay Menu from the Main Menu. MoteMancer is a complex game - starting from a Plane besides Life will be very challenging especially if you are unfamiliar with the game's mechanics. This will evolve into a formal world and affix selection for the next patch, but have fun in the meantime :)

[h3]New/Updated Research and Structures[/h3]
Life:

• Mystical Agriculture - now additionally enables Collectors to harvest nearby Flora before Motes.
  
• Overgrowth Pillar - Place near Mote Fields to grow Flora on top of Motes.
  
• Fertile Ground - Upgrades Overgrowth Pillar and Biorhythm to grow Flora on any element.
  

Life\Earth:

• Sovereign Manaheart - Has changed to replenishing Mote Fields with Power. Current tuning is 1000 Power per Mote, pulses every 8 seconds, up to 500,000 power per pulse. Like Spindle, one of its tiles must overlap the center of a Mote Field in order to be placed.
  

Earth:

• Excavator has moved into Tier 1 Research
  
• Nudge has moved out to Tier 2 Research
  
• Seismic Flare has moved to the Entropic Research Tree on the North side.
  
• Stonebound - Allows Earth chests to lock a slot to a specific item. Use the top corner of the slot to set it.
  
• Titanic Command - Excavate can now toggle a +2 range when the player has this upgrade. It will harvest everything in that radius. Nudge now also works with the extra radius if toggled on.
  
• Ancient Strength - Allows Titan Grippers to double their reach.
  
• Delve - Earth Grippers grasp twice as many items from Earth Chests.
  

Earth\Fire:

• Raze - Meteor Swarm destroys Flora and Excavate allows building on top of Flora.
  
• Charged Lodestone - Affectionately known as Chest Trains. Allows you to send Earth Chests sailing across the map with stored up power.
  
• Foundry - Uses Brimstone to generate an abundance of Elements.
  
• Basalt Chest has been removed.
  

Fire:

• Luminarium - New elemental Lights for each element are available to spruce up your base aesthetically.
  
• Thermal Filament - Doubles Thermal Towers Connection range.
  

Fire\Shadow:

• Radiantshroom - Place 6 of these, one at each corner of a Runeshroom Ritual to double its area of effect.
  
• Radiant Glow - Upgrades Radiantshrooms to increase the area even further.
  
• Void Tower - Connects to other Void Towers on the same plane, transferring power between them, effectively creating a long-range wireless connection.
  

Shadow:

• Blackhole Monolith - Slowly drags Rifts towards its core.
  
• Echoflare - Upgrades Manaflare to act as an additional Echotracer source.
  
• Umbral Waygate - Player made teleporter that will allow you to travel to another Waygate on the same plane. Walk over the Waygate and select a star to teleport to.
  
• Sinkhole - Ichor slicks can now be upgraded to have double storage.
  
• Mark / Return - Allows you to place a Mark in the world that you can return to at will. Swap modes to set a new Mark.
  

Shadow\Air

• Omni Gripper Allows setting source and destination in any configuration around its 6 directions.
  
• Tunneling Grip - Upgrades Omni Gripper to be able to extend reach.
  
• Slipway - A player-made planar portal that will travel between Shadow, Air, Water, and Fire planes.
  

Air:

• New Spell - Vortex (Aura) - Gathers ingredients from nearby Structures to replenish your inventory. Will only grab from output and unrestricted (chest) slots, and will fill to stack cap for everything in the player inventory.
  
• Terrace of Trails - New elemental Paths for each element are available to spruce up your base aesthetically - still grants the same 30% move speed buff that Swiftstone does.
  

Air/Water:

• Streamline - Streamways and Air Grippers do not block air flow tiles.
  
• Enchanted Gripper - Air-style gripper with filtering. Modes for Allow and Deny, and setting a single entity per source or destination
  
• Enchanted Delta - Streamway Delta with the same filtering options.
  
• Cloudspring Fountain - Feed items directly in with Streamways and the fountain will distribute them to any structure under its influence.
  
• Torrential Slipstream removed.
  

Water:

• Tributary - Allows you to flip the direction of Streamway Deltas
  
• Shoal Sweep - now also includes gathering from pedestals.
  
• Whirlpool - Entropy over Mana Pools will be cleansed after 1000 Power is drained. Allows you to use Mana Pools as a wall against entropy
  
• Overflow - Downpour Bastions grant nearby Mana Pools 20% more Power storage.
  

[h3]Quality of Life:[/h3]

• All grippers have a new corner UI to facilitate functional mode swaps
  
• Inventories can now be set to freeform instead of auto sorted - enabled in the options menu.
  
• Chest slots can now be truncated with a red lock button in the bottom right corner of their UI.
  
• Added a Spell Hover tooltip to show the name of the spell and the function status of the spell. You can toggle the function while the spell is hovered.
  
• All collectors have an in-game indicator for primary output direction
  
• Changed rift reaper Mote Patch generation so that it doesn't always merge with the original mote patch.
  
• Recipes in structures now show hovers per ingredient rather than just the final product
  
• Simple hovers show more information
  
• Fire Wires now have a special placement style that will place them at max distance while click and holding.
  
• Recipe times have increased for more advanced structures
  
• Deprecated Structures like Torrential Slipstream and Basalt Chest will still load but they are unable to be crafted any more.
  
• Earth Chest art has updated and now always sorts under the player - Collision on Earth Chests has been removed.
  
• Buildings which require 100% saturation will now show their no power indicator on their structure and in their respective windows when saturation is less than 100%.
  
• Shift + Mouse Wheel will now rotate Structures while in build mode.
  

[h3]Aesthetics:[/h3]

• All structures have new player sorting layers
  
• Powered UI corner now uses the mana flare shader
  
• New lighting pipeline should improve lighting at all times of day throughout the game, and allows for structural lighting at night.
  
• Air Power corridors now have FX art showing their area of effect.
  
• Entropy tree now has colors for elemental nodes
  
• Refactor Fire Wire connections now create fewer overlapping wires.
  
• Life, Shadow, and Air planes have had terrain and lighting passes.
  
  
• Updated art for: Sovereign Manaheart, Void Collector, Darkgrove, Ember Collector, Tar Cauldron, Crystal Loft, Lava Barrier
  

[h3]Performance:[/h3]

• Power grid optimization
  
• Planar Clouds are now much cheaper to render
  
• Fixed performance around upgrading Life Power Networks
  
• All structures have been atlassed, reducing draw calls by ~60%
  

[h3]Bug Fixes[/h3]

• Shockwave (distortion that happens when you cast manaflare) should not use a shared material in case the last one hasn't fully cleaned up before a new one starts.
  
• Saves will no longer show up in the loading screen if the required files are not present.
  
• If autosave on quit throws an exception it wont stop the process from quitting.
  
• Echo tracer will validate it can build the structure before both sending the missile and building it. This fixes an issue where you could get invalid lava barriers from echo tracer missiles.
  
• Gripper now detects if the target inventory is full and will only pick up up entities to fill any partially filled slots on the target.
  
• Doodads now nudge like everything else and dont change colors.
  
• You can no longer activate 2 spells at the same time. So long Levi-haste.
  

For the curious alchemists among you: a link to the full Elemental Mastery Research Tree lies below. Those who prefer discovery may wish to avert their gaze.

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