MoteMancer News

[h3]MoteMancer's third Major Content Update is Live![/h3]

Foundations are modifiers that change the rules of the world and open the door to endlessly varied playthroughs. With the new Enduring Research system, your most optimized factories can now fuel infinite upgrades that carry forward into future worlds. Whether you want to sculpt a unique new challenge or push your alchemy further than ever before, the tools are now in your hands. Welcome to Foundations.



[h3]Foundations Make the World[/h3]

This update comes with 23 unique Foundations that all change the rules of your automation garden significantly. Each Foundation is handcrafted to provide a unique challenge for a playthrough, and allows you to cater your world through deliberate choices rather than sliders.

Fling will double the reach of all Grippers whether you want it to or not - changing the geometry of your base dramatically. Chromatic Fields will create a rainbow of Motes on every patch, giving you access to every element early, but requires careful management. Miasma blankets the world in Entropy when the game begins, forcing you to carve into the cloud to stake your claim. Elementalist lets you begin with Elemental research, but prevents you from using any Salt-based logistics.



Not all Foundations make the game more difficult either. Twinseed makes Mote Patches spawn in pairs to aid early base development. Ancient Spindles prevent Entropy spawning outright, and can be broken to unleash massive Rifts exactly when you so choose.

There is also a randomizer that generates curated sets of Foundations in case you are looking for inspiration, using the same logic as a continued run. Each random set was designed to teach something new and provide a unique challenge.

Full patch notes below for all the gritty details :)

Chromatic Fields, Miasma, Fling, Elementalist

[h3]Eternal Research[/h3]
Elemental Synergy Research has been overhauled in a variety of ways. The new early research recipes are now unique, and the max-tier structures are available as soon as you start farming entropic shards (usually plane 2, unless Foundations affect that). Each Synergy also has an Enduring Research capper node that can be researched indefinitely, providing benefits to your current world, but also a subsequent world if you choose to continue your quest of balance.

Echotracer (the blueprint filling spell) has been removed and Echoflare (that allows filling blueprints from Mana Flares) has moved to very early in the Entropy Research Tree. This guarantees that you can start filling blueprints early instead of having to wait until you get to Shadow. Shadow has received two new Rituals: Seep and Scrying as well.

Wavedash has been replaced with Oracle, allowing you to remotely view any plane from anywhere, and Wavedash now treats all streamways as Paths passively. A new sister research has also been implemented: Wind Surfing that also passively increases movement speed while in a wind corridor, so enjoy levitating through your gusty grid of wind power.

[h3]Extra Highlights[/h3]
There is a brand new option to play the tutorial from the plane of Fire in addition to Life, allowing you to immediately choose your challenges and benefits. The world of logistics puzzles in MoteMancer is massive, and as always, the path is yours to decide. The Free Demo for MoteMancer has also been updated, and while you cannot choose Fire from there, Twinseed and Apprentice Cache are automatically enabled to give players a taste of the system.

[h3]State of the Game and the Future[/h3]
Now that MoteMancer has an incredibly rich and replayable endgame, the focus turns to art, polish, and quality of life additions. There are still improvements to be made for onboarding, controller support, and modding as well. The current plan is to continue Monday Musings and drop a small update every other week with improvements, since all the changes will be either cosmetic or surface level as opposed to structural changes.

Which Foundations are you planning to try first? Which Foundations would you like to see added in the future? The system was made to be easily extended as your ideas come in.

Time to respec back to an FX artist and bring the world alive 🌿
~CyanAvatar




With the addition of Foundations, MoteMancer now offers hundreds of hours of unique logistics puzzle content. If you’ve been waiting to jump in, now’s a great time!

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 - v0.4.001[/h2]
New games will now always begin through the Foundations Menu, you can simply choose a starting plane and go, or cater your world rules as you see fit. Note that the challenge for combining Foundations increases significantly!

[h3]New Foundations Available[/h3]
Starting Plane - You can now choose to start your journey on any Elemental Plane.
Shattered Elements - Permanently removes an Element from the world.

World

• Twinseed - Each Mote Field spawns with a second kindred field.
  
• World Veins - Mote Fields are smaller, but last forever.
  
• Jeweled Fields - Mote Fields spawn with 3 intermingled Elements.
  
• Chromatic Fields - Mote Fields spawn with 5 intermingled Elements.
  
• Naturalist - Flora cannot be destroyed.
  
• Prism Portals - Planar Portals are repaired with Prisms instead of Keystones.
  

Progression

• Apprentice Cache - A small cache of basic logistics tools awaits you.
  
• Clean Hands - Hand crafting is disabled.
  
• Theoretical Insight - Research no longer grants free Structures.
  
• Phased Pockets - Player inventory is unique per plane.
  
• Elusive Knowledge - Research requires double ingredients per cycle.
  
• Deep Research - Research requires {0} times as many cycles.
  
• Marathon - All recipe costs are doubled.
  

Entropy

• Ancient Spindles - Mote Fields spawn with an Ancient Spindle that prevents Rift incursions.
  
• Nascent Entropy - Rifts spawn from Mote Fields on the starting plane.
  
• Drifting Rifts - Rifts slowly drift after spawning.
  
• Miasma - Entropy surrounds the Great Portal at world generation.
  

Structures

• Elementalist - Begin with all basic Research unlocked. Salt Logistics cannot be placed.
  
• Fling - All Grippers have double reach.
  
• Gripper Claustraphobia - Grippers cannot be placed next to other Grippers.
  
• Isolation - Structures cannot be placed next to opposing Elements.
  
• Weakened Tether - Structures cannot be placed on any opposing plane.
  
• Islands of Power - Power costs increase with each structure in the same network.
  

[h3]New Spells & Rituals:[/h3]

• Shear - Destroys a Structure and its contents, reclaiming 50% of their Raw ingredients to your inventory. Multiple researchable upgrades.
  
• Oracle - Remotely view any revealed location on your Map.
  
• Windbound - Allows Player Inventory to reserve item slots for Vortex.
  
• Wavedash - changed to a passive that increases movement speed by 30% while on any Streamway, does not stack with Paths.
  
• Wind Surfing - new passive that increases movement speed by 30% while in a Wind Corridor, does stack with Paths/Wavedash.
  
• Levitating over chasms has a passive 50% movespeed boost for you Levihaste fanatics.
  
• Excavator now starts at double harvest speed (and still gets faster), Shear does too (without getting faster).
  
  
• Seep - Affected Structures grow Ichor Slick under them.
  
• Scrying - Affected Infusion Altars research every 3 seconds instead of 5.
  

[h3]Research & Recipe Updates:[/h3]

• Echoflare - moved to the Entropy Research Tree
  
• Shadow has received significant changes following the migration of Echotracer/Echoflare, the addition of Shear, and new Rituals.
  
• Enduring Research - Infinite research is fully implemented and will carry over subsequent playthroughs for the same save file.
  
• Elemental Synergy branches have been restructured, with new research requirements.
  

[h3]Behavior Tuning and Bug fixes[/h3]

• MoteMancer's Free Demo has been updated with the two Foundations enabled: Twinseed and Apprentice Cache.
  
• There is a brand new Tutorial path to start on the Plane of Fire in addition to Life (Retail only).
  
• Mote patches will start spawning a little further from the Great Portal to avoid early Entropy overlap.
  
• Planar Portals no longer require a Reaching or Whipping Grippers to repair them.
  
• Nudging a chest will no longer lose stonebound locks.
  
• Rift spread now has a little bit of noise to the edges so we get fewer straight lines.
  
• You can now harvest while you have a blueprint selection.
  
• Excavate + Raze now works when placing blueprints.
  
• Production Structures now have a contextual image for when a recipe is not yet researched; clicking will teleport you to the target research.
  
• Tutorial Corner now supports click to go to research tree for specific helper ?'s
  

Shifting Slab has been renamed to Saltway to make it more intuitively aligned with Streamways.

Additionally, MoteMancer's Unity version has been updated which has fixed a few users that were crashing on startup.

--

Enduring thanks to all of MoteMancer's Alpha Testers, you make the game better every day :) Thank you!

Happy Monday!

I wrote an extensive post about Runeshroom Rituals in the past, and recent design developments got me thinking about extending the ritual suite. With the Foundations update arriving shortly, I want to talk through 2 new rituals that will be part of the update and a few thoughts on future opportunities.



[h3]Seep and Scrying[/h3]
On the heels of the Echotracer and Echoflare suite (blueprint filling) moving to the Entropy tree, many Shadow research nodes were left open. The new Shadow spell, Shear, was able to flavorfully fill many of them, but it left a wonderful opportunity to add to the ritual repertoire. Shadow still favors prime numbers in its design (because I'm a nerd), so Shadow is growing from 3 rituals to 5.



The two new Rituals on the block fill two niches that have always been loosely discussed in the community, and finally have found a kit-appropriate home.

• Seep - Affected Structures grow Ichor Slick under them.
  The community has long discussed whether Ichor Slick should have underground options, but omitting the simple bridge made for better puzzle solving. Combining ideas from the Entanglement upgrade (placing ichor under waygates) and Rampant Bloom (growing roots under structures) hits a sweet spot. Seep has a lot of unique implications and allows for very dense and surgical logistical solves.
  
  
• Scrying - Affected Infusion Altars research every 3 seconds.
  Altars default to 5 seconds per cycle, which encourages clean 2-altar setups early on. Once grippers upgrade, though, there wasn’t a clean way to scale research speed further. As a ritual, it fits perfectly - both mechanically and geometrically.
  

[h3]Divining the Future[/h3]
One design that didn't make it into this patch but I want to explore in the future is rituals from additional elements. There's a foundation named Arcanum that has a few extra structures to build - notably Void Chest: Abyss and Grotto for water and earth coded options. That space feels like a natural home for Wavecaps and Cragcaps, opening a new ritual suite for Water and Earth. I haven't nailed down what the new rituals do yet, so if you have fun ideas, by all means share them!

That same flexibility is why Rituals feel like the perfect modding surface. Modding has been on my mind throughout the development process, and especially where to leave an open invitation for modding. Players will of course mod whatever they like, but I think Rituals specifically are ripe for it, so making sure that they are easy to extend is one of my goals.



[h3]Wrapping Up[/h3]
The Foundations update is nearly complete, so I should get back to completing it. I’ll touch on this more soon, but modding is likely to follow quickly once Foundations is stable. Foundations may even become the backbone of the mod-loader, if it proves as extensible as it seems.

Thank you everyone who has been playtesting experimental and giving feedback!
Back to the lab 🌿
~CyanAvatar

Happy Monday!

Today I want to talk through a unique opportunity that presented itself when it came to tutorializing MoteMancer. MoteMancer is going to get two tutorial paths. It is not something I would typically do, much less advise, but there are some very MoteMancer-specific reasons for it. The question is always how to make a game the best version of itself that it can be, and sometimes that means doing something you normally wouldn’t.


[h3]Why Fire?[/h3]

I had always imagined Life being the starting plane because of its access to conveyor-like Streamways from Water, familiar chests from Earth, and an intuitive fuel to solar power path via Life. There's a lot of intuition building you get for free, especially in a game that has little real-world language to latch onto. Mana Roots as the power distribution method were a large hurdle for some to overcome though.

A significant strength of MoteMancer is the unique identity of each element and how they play, so removing roots as part of Life didn't feel like the right solution. Growing your own tree of power is a wonderful fantasy when you embrace it.



Fire, on the other hand, gives the ultimate freedom of power distribution with crackling wires that tower above your base, leaving you much freer to build beneath. The cost here comes from the power generation itself, which needs to be carefully managed - fire power consistently needs fuel and will never throttle itself for demand. Modular Lava Generators are extremely flexible and have plenty of vectors for creativity, but are much more attention intensive than Life's solar engine.

One other feature of Fire is you do not have access to the logistics power of a double-lane belt from Water's Streamways (opposite elements are strictly forbidden from placement, even if you could find a Mote of Water in the scorching lands of the Fire Plane). You do get access to the enigmatic Ichor Slick though, which has been described as a 'paintable chest'. Ichor Slick is among the more unique contributions to the automation space - it can only hold one entity type at a time, but its throughput is effectively infinite.

Fire reduces spatial friction at the cost of resource friction, and that trade is easier to teach. The learning curve is not harder than Life, but is orthogonal in a very healthy way. Fire as a tutorial path also mirrors the spirit of Foundations - not easier or harder, but a differently shaped challenge.


[h3]The Contract of Choice[/h3]

I've designed many systems where players choose their path - class selection is an obvious example. Class selection is a contract with the player. You are giving them an imaginary fantasy that appeals to their emotional core, and once they select it, you need to make good on that promise to further earn their trust.

MoteMancer's Elements are all designed to synergize and weave with each other, but stand alone in their identity. Choosing the Trail of Fire or Tree of Life is as much emotional as mechanical. You’ll master every element eventually, but choosing your home gives you a meaningful foothold.

There's an important bit about emotional design as well - players will invest more in a character that feels like it is their own. It's one of the reasons so many games have character customization (and MoteMancer likely will have a little bit too in the future). But unlike an rpg, in an automation game, your base is your character. Your base and the elemental tools you use to build it are just as much a reflection of you as the armor you wear or hairstyle you choose.


[h3]Elemental Structure[/h3]

MoteMancer is a very deep game with a lot to learn, and the elemental structure of the world itself takes time to unfold. There are many places I can help teach that, and the tutorial selection screen is one of them. When you choose either path, the element and its adjacent sisters will highlight, seeding their relationship with each other and the world.



It's not important that you fully understand the implications in the moment, but highlighting adjacent elements reinforces the shape of the world early. Even if players can’t select all six planes for the tutorial, it foreshadows that broader freedom once tutorials are disabled.

Which leads us to another benefit of this selection. I've curated a handful of useful early Foundations (with a dedicated devlog here) that not only give you tools to cater your playthrough, but also seeds the larger system you will graduate into.


[h3]Tipping the Scales[/h3]

Maintaining two tutorials is quite challenging as a developer. Splitting attention for the player that doesn't know anything about the game yet is a risk. Overwhelming the player with information is generally not a good idea.

That said, this design provides an abundance of agency, emotional anchoring, mechanical framing, and a window into the systemic depth on offer.

It’s not a conventional choice, but neither is MoteMancer. One of the challenges (that I love) about design is that there isn't really a playbook to follow. Each game is unique and carries with it unique obstacles and opportunities. Always learn as much as you can, but make sure to leave enough room to chart your own path.


[h3]And the Demo?[/h3]

I plan on leaving MoteMancer's demo up for the foreseeable future, but maintaining both paths in the demo is probably a bridge too far. Just this morning I received feedback from someone that spent 30 hours playing the demo. I'm happy to provide that experience to them, as they'll likely find hundreds more hours in the full game, but allowing travel to planes beyond life will remain part of the full-featured experience.

I also plan on enabling Twinseed for the demo as soon as the Foundations update rolls out. I always hesitate to list any Foundation as the default, but Twinseed greases the wheels just enough for a demo that I'll let it slide.

And with that, I've got work to go getting Foundations out the door :) Huge shoutout to all the players actively giving feedback and helping find bugs in the experimental build. The fruits of your labor shall be ripe soon.

Back to the Lab 🌿
~CyanAvatar

Systems Design is probably my main discipline. It’s the thing I can’t shut off when my brain wanders. Today I thought I’d share a bit of the process and headspace behind it through an example that will be landing alongside Foundations.

Time for some philosophy.


[h3]Stake the Perimeter[/h3]

When manipulating an image you lock the corners so you can nudge the inside freely. When pitching a tent you stake the perimeter first so the rest of the structure can take shape. Large buildings need corner stones to build around. I think of systems design the same way.

You start by laying out the high-level pillars of the game. For MoteMancer that means: Spells, Elements, Planes, Research, Foundations, Entropy.

The goal isn’t to fill them yet. It’s to understand the shape of the space. Once the buckets exist, you can start feeling which one should own a given idea. Naming those buckets has power. It creates boundaries. It creates responsibility.

You don’t have to literally venn-diagram it, but conceptually that’s what’s happening.




[h3]Start Sorting[/h3]

Now think of a variety of details that you know need to exist. Power systems, resource gathering, combat etc. At bottom, the goal is to marry the details with the high level concepts in a way that has the most number of benefits, or choosing where there can be overlap.

Now take something small but fundamental: movement speed. Where does it live?
It could be:

• A spell aura like Haste.
  
• A conditional spell like Wave Dash.
  
• A passive research node.
  
• A Foundation modifier.
  
• A plane-specific trait.
  
• A ritual bonus.
  
• A reward for defeating enemies.
  

Any of the buckets could own it, but design is about balancing where it belongs and where it doesn't. Think of what makes the most intuitive sense to a player, where can it create a delightful surprise, and to not overuse it so there's space to breathe.


[h3]Inevitable Iteration[/h3]

You are smarter today than yesterday.

Make the best decision you can, but don’t be precious about it. Future you (or indeed your players) will probably have a better idea. You are curating the best ideas whether or not you are the creator of them. Implementing something even if you suspect it won’t survive still has value. It gives you something real to react to and design against. even if you ultimately replace it.

Wave Dash is a good example. Right now it competes awkwardly with Haste. They both solve similar problems, one conditional, one not. The better solution is likely to turn Wave Dash into a passive benefit and let Haste breathe on its own. We can also mirror that and say that Wind Corridors from air power confer a similar passive benefit.

But that means something else has to fill the now-empty spell slot. And that’s where design begins to reveals itself.


[h3]New Useful Toys[/h3]

All of that thinking led to two new spells: Oracle and Shear.

Oracle is straightforward. A Water spell that lets you view any revealed part of the map remotely. It has some fun implications around the Dark Reach ritual as well, but more importantly it nicely fills a niche use case in the factory genre of remote viewing, while staying in kit.

Shear is the more interesting one. Shear will be replacing Echotracer, and here’s the chain of friction that led there:

• Blueprint filling is highly sought after. Gating it deep in Shadow is probably too late.
  
• Pacing the unlock differently depending on starting plane feels messy.
  
• Recycling has flirted with both Entropy and Shadow trees but never fully landed.
  
• Mass clearing areas that clog up your inventory can feel tedious.
  
• Ichor Slicks and Void Chests can get contaminated or want to be reset wholesale.
  
• What happens if you Shatter Earth and still want access to a deconstruction tool like Excavator?
  

There are more, but all of that leads elegantly to Shear and its upgrades:

Shear - Destroys a Structure and its contents, reclaiming 50% of their Raw ingredients to your inventory.
Collapse - Allows Shear to toggle between reclaiming 100% or 0% of Raw ingredients.
Unravel - When Shearing an Ichor Slick or Void Chest, also Shear all linked Ichor Slicks or Void Chests.



Shear falls squarely within Shadow's kit of dealing with linked structures, breaking things down with mycelium, and a nod to quantum mechanics. It solves recycling and clearing in a single stroke - two niche sides of a coin that feels more cohesive. It acts as a clean alternative to Excavator with its own use case and flavor.

The important part is this: Shear could not have existed at the beginning of MoteMancer. It only revealed itself once the rest of the systems solidified. The hole had to exist before the piece could be shaped. Many details only reveal themselves after the broad strokes are complete.


[h3]What About Echotracer?[/h3]

Blueprint filling still matters. I loved the kit for Echotracer as a blueprint filler aura, but another happy accident along the way was Echo Flare - turning Mana Flare into your blueprint filler as an upgrade in the shadow tree. Since blueprints come from the Entropy Research tree, it only makes sense for Echo Flare to live there as well.

Best of all, that means you will have access to it in your second plane - no matter the plane - as soon as you start fighting Entropy. Pacing wise this is just about perfect. Just as you are setting up your second plane you get the tool to alleviate that burden. Plus, if Mana Flares are still serving as short term power, you can literally power the structures as they create themselves.

Tools deserve full lifecycles. It’s satisfying when something you loved early never truly becomes obsolete, it just evolves.


[h3]The Pattern[/h3]

If I had to distill this down:

• Set your stakes in the ground.
  
• Fill obvious matches first.
  
• Implement imperfect solutions.
  
• Watch for the gaps that form.
  
• Let the missing pieces reveal themselves.
  

There is no such thing as perfect design. Good design is building enough structure that the right idea becomes obvious.

Back to the lab 🌿
~CyanAvatar

MoteMancer's sandbox has a very high skill ceiling. There are multiple ways to solve logistics problems by design, and players will naturally gravitate towards solutions that are intuitive to them. Another part of the fun though is exploring the full landscape of possibilities, and slowly evolving how you even approach a problem in the first place.

There was a specific joy in playing an expert modded Minecraft pack, because it really stretched your ability to understand game mechanics. Don't have a flint and steel? You can light a nether portal by getting a standing flame to light an adjacent leaf block on fire with lava. That level of mastery is something that can only be earned through extensive experience, and it's something I hope to live up to in MoteMancer.



[h3]Think Outside the Hex[/h3]

The incoming Foundations system that changes the rules of the world presents challenges in its own right, but through curation of a few specific sets of them, I can present a problem to the player that forces a sideways solution.

For example when Chromatic Fields is active, every Mote Patch has a randomized element per tile. You can of course live with a sushi belt in the early game and store some motes in chests that you can hand feed to bootstrap yourself, and beeline for filtering grippers. But what happens if filtering grippers are removed entirely?

One solution is that elemental collectors will only target matching motes, and you can arrange a new suite of varied collectors in a space that will pre-filter for you. I love this example because many players find joy in creating their own collector shapes and patterns, and this keeps that puzzle going, even after a hundred hours of mastery.

Most of the Foundations were made with this in mind, but we can also institutionalize it.



[h3]Catered Worlds[/h3]

Upon restoring your first Great Portal in MoteMancer, you will return to the Library and be welcomed home. But from here, there are more worlds to bring balance to.



You will be presented with a choice of three worlds to re-enter, carrying over the enduring knowledge from the previous run, but starting fresh with a new set of challenges. The current design for this is:

• A guaranteed Shattered set, where a given element is removed completely.
  
• A guaranteed Clean set, where a you start on a plane with 3 Foundations.
  
• A completely Random set. (almost)
  

One key design decision though is, while the first two cards pull from a curated set, the population of them also follows specific rules designed to avoid repeating the shape of your previous run. Did your last run start on the Water Plane? Did you use Ancient Spindles in your last run? None of the new options will give you that choice.

The goal of this system is to continue as MoteMancer always has - give you multiple paths to travel, but ensure that each one provides a meaningful and interesting challenge to rise to.



[h3]A Cornucopia of Challenges[/h3]

Of course you can always make your own homebrew challenge, such is the nature of a sandbox game. But I'm happy that MoteMancer will provide both the ultimate freedom to choose the table you set for yourself, but also curated ones that can't help but raise your mastery. I'm also planning on having a dedicated Foundations area that links directly to the Steam Workshop, so fellow MoteMancers can eternally challenge one another.

Foundations is coming together into something that consistently challenges both how you think and what you build. I want to make sure those flows are smooth before opening the floodgates, so with that, back to the lab. 🌿

~CyanAvatar