Welcome to Moose News where you’ll get more in depth information about the game as I am getting it ready for release.
Today I will describe the merge mechanic in Moose Builders. Everything (with a few exceptions) in the game can be merged by putting 4 of the same item into a Crafter. They will then be merged into 1 of a higher merge tier. There will be 16 merge tiers in the game which means the last merge tiers will be very expensive to craft. The different tiers are displayed with Roman numerals in the game.
So what do you get for upgrading by merging? Let’s start with the tools. There are currently three different tools in the game. A shovel for digging different sand blocks, a hammer for gathering different stone blocks and a smashovel which is a combined shovel and hammer that can be used on either sand or stone. When upgrading a tool through merging it will get a larger digging area. Tier II increases it from 1 to 3x1, Tier III to 3x3, Tier IV to 5x5, Tier V to 7x7 and so on. So merging your tools will greatly increase the amount of raw resources you can get from digging.
You can also merge chests, processing machines, solar panels, power storage, pipes and in-between items such as iron gears. Chests get higher item stack sizes with higher merge tiers. For example a tier I cactus chest has 8 item slots that each can hold a stack size of 16. Upgrading it to merge tier II gives it a stack size of 32, tier III a stack size of 48 and so on. Solar panels increase in power outputs with higher merge tiers and power storage increase in capacity. Pipes of higher merge tiers increase the stack size of transferred items. It starts at 1 for tier I and increases by 1 for each merge tier.
In-between items such as iron gears do not have any use other than being used in recipes to craft other things. So when merged there is no functionality to enhance. However they can still be useful to merge since you can use Iron gear tier IV to craft a crafter tier IV. This means that you can set up your factory in different ways. You can either craft all your end products in tier I using materials and in-between items in tier I only and then merge the finished products to higher merge tiers. The other alternative is to merge at an earlier stage to the merge tiers you want to craft and then use higher merge tier items to craft your end products.
Merging is not the only way to improve machines and tools, there will also be different tech tiers for tools, pipes, and machines as well as upgrade modules that improve different aspects of machines. But more on that in a future Moose News.