Greetings MoteMancers!
If the last update shook the foundations of the elemental planes, this update is poised to hone and refine your alchemical journey. The Attunement Update brings character customization, major performance improvements, achievements, power system refinements, and a host of quality-of-life upgrades. Full patch notes are available below, but for now let's talk shop!
Personalizing your Apprentice
I didn't know when character customization was going to sneak its way into MoteMancer, but sneak in it has. Figuring out the level of customization was definitely a challenge, I started with 12 swatch options, but it quickly became too fiddly, so we've landed on 6.
At the top you'll find 6 presets to start a character from, and there is a 7th that will hold whatever custom kit you like. There is also an optional cloak decal available. Character Customization can be entered from the Gameplay options menu, or at the start of a run. Enjoy!
Performance Improvements
Special shoutout to all of the playtesters that provided bases with tens of thousands of structures. You provided quite a challenge!
One of the largest changes in this update is a new internal tick system for factory simulation. Until now, world generation, factory processing, and supporting systems all ran continuously in parallel. By moving the simulation onto a managed tick system, MoteMancer can better regulate heavy workloads and recover from performance spikes when large factories begin to push the limits.
That combined with a slew of MoteMancer-specific optimizations landed us in a place that felt almost impossible at the outset. There's an affectionate save file dubbed Final Boss Base, courtesy of @nerever, that was running at 12 fps on my rig. It is now running at 60. The good news too is that this patch was predominantly focused on simulation speed, and there's still more gains to be gotten on the graphics side. Those improvements will trickle in while the rest of the art gets its polish pass.
Also one fun surprise. We are finally at a stage where optimizing save file size makes sense. Said Final Boss Base's save file clocked in around 45 mb, that same save is now 7 mb. If you still want human-readable save files, you can start the game with -saveJson and you'll get the old behavior. Everything is backwards and forwards compatible.
A Plethora of Achievements
I wrote an entire Musing about my achievements philosophy, so I won't repeat that here. I'm super happy to have achievements live and ready for players to explore.
If you have any saves from before completing a run that had Foundations enabled, that should be all you need to trigger those achievements. Loading an end-game save will also likely trigger a slew of already completed ones, so enjoy your pinata of steam notifications.
Power Plants or Powered Plants?
The Power systems in MoteMancer have needed some love for a while. They serve their purpose well, but some of the pacing and incentives felt a little off, so they've gotten some much needed attention.
- Air has had the most change. Wind Turbines now operate over a larger area, but with less power per tile, they are about even baseline, but require more open space. The master-tier upgrade however increases their range 3 extra rings instead of 1. Both Updraft and Howl From Beyond now add significant gains to Turbines, and the Circulation Ritual triples the power generation of all affected Turbines. Gale Generators are no longer network-wide but affect a huge area, quadrupling the baseline power per open air tile. The main goal of all of these changes is to give air networks a better shape and incentives to build strategically and synergistically.
- Life mostly has pacing changes. It was always a little silly that your very first canopy doubled your solar output, but the exponential nature of solar still feels right for life. Also Canopies never really had any sort of spatial component to them. Both edges have been addressed. When Canopies unlock, they generate 55 power per Adjacent Mana Leaf, and the Master-tier unlock retains their old behavior of additionally generating power per leaf in the entire network. This should provide a smoother power curve in the mid and end game while retaining its identity.
- Fire was actually already in a pretty good spot but there were some weird incentives around pedestal and pyroclastic chamber placement that should be resolved (both will increase your burn rate more than they used to). Heat will also now accumulate And drain depending on whether the generator is active or dormant. Also Fire has a couple of aesthetic improvements - Heat is now represented by the lava color so you can see it at a glance, and Lava Generator pools are now meshes instead of sprites, which both makes them more performant, and removes the occasional weird hole that could happen from an acute angle.
Plus Some Extra Goodies
There are a bunch of extras as well, two of the most notable:
- Revamped Tutorial - The Library portion of the tutorial has been significantly extended to help players find their footing a little better. Feedback always welcome.
- Sandbox Mode - You can now play MoteMancer in creative mode at the start of a new game if you want to test out some shapes or builds for your blueprint machinations.
Check out the patch notes below for a full list of additional Quality of Life improvements.
State of the Game and the Future
Well last time I said I was going to focus on art and look what happened. Proof that priorities can constantly evolve. The new tutorial and achievements serve new and old players very well, and with the new advent of Foundations, players were pushing bases much harder and so performance became a significant priority.
Working on art also revealed how much performance groundwork needed to be laid to make room for FX. The Character Customizer and the UI did get some significant art attention, but there is still more to be done.
While working on perf, we found a great solve for the Alchemists Journal, and laid the groundwork for controller support. Those two features along with continuing to polish animations, sound, and overall presentation will be what consumes the next leg of the journey.
Thanks to all the players who already have spent hundreds of hours with MoteMancer, Here's to hundreds more 🌿
~CyanAvatar
PS - This patch represents the largest architectural shift MoteMancer has ever had, please use F1 to post bug reports, localization issues, or other suggestions. And thank you so much for your patience and support. I will be around as always actively working on the game and hanging out in MoteMancer's Discord if you need anything.
With the addition of Achievements, MoteMancer now offers hundreds of hours of content to chase. Additionally, MoteMancer will be 20% off through Steam's Summer Sale - If you’ve been waiting to jump in, now’s a great time!
https://store.steampowered.com/app/3320980/
Steam Reviews
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.
MoteMancer has a Wiki!
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.
Full Patch Notes - v0.5.001
66 Achievements fully implemented
Sandbox Mode
- All spells unlocked
- Mana disabled
- Building from pointer is infinite
- Speed is unique to sandbox mode and scales based on zoom level
- Fixed the craftable items that had 0 ingredients
- Crafting window filters are available by default
- Option to instantly unlock any single or all research
Quality of Life
- Better color language previews for out of reach, polish on tilemap preview colors and states
- Research tree fog collider is now the outer rim only
- Tilemap area of effect previews will show even if the structure build is blocked
- Mouse wheel scroll now will push and pull single items between inventories
- Grippers now have a cheap pseudo round robin implementation
- Ichor slick now allows F pickup even when not full
- The Master can now be re-clicked at any time with custom lines for reminders of beats
- Structure configuration can now be exported as part of blueprints Lodestone, chests, omni, filtered deltas.
- Mana Flares can now be freely built over
- Character Customizer supports undo
- Umbral Waygate no longer affected by entropy
- Mouseover spells on action bar buttons shows spell tip window
- Save games now use compression and are about 15% of their original size.
- Prisms sorted in craft menu
Tuning
- Everything in the Production tab is now affected by Tailwind.
- Rampant Bloom now works on Sovereign Manaheart.
- Free grants from research completed are now disabled unless Clean Hands is enabled
- Theoretical Insight removed.
- Keystones can no longer be hand crafted
- Player movement speed adjustments ease in to new speed rather than abruptly changing per tile
- Phased Pockets free initial grant is now per plane
- Air grippers will alternate if input throughput is lower than internal cooldown time.
- Great Portal orb tuning down to 600 from 1000
- Research tiles visible on the Research Tree increased from 12 to 18
- Excavator research is now a direct tutorial objective
- Other production category structures are affected by echo catcher.
- Howl from beyond and wind surfing positions swapped in the research tree
Power
Fire
- Lava pedestals count for 2 lava tiles for burn time.
- Pyroclastic Chambers count for 15 lava tiles for burn time.
- Heat rises and falls depending on fuel.
- Heat is shown visually on the lava pool inside the Lava Generator.
Life
- Mana Canopies now generate 55 power per Adjacent Mana Leaf by default
- Mana Leaf power per leaf is now 21 from 20
- Mana Canopy Synergy now generates 8 power per Mana Leaf in the entire network.
Air
- Wind Turbine range increased to 7 baseline, +3 on upgrade.
- Wind Turbine Open Air value reduced from 3 to 1 baseline.
- Gale Generators now grant +3 bonus power to each open air tile within a range of 18.
- Circulation ritual is no longer tile based and now affects Wind Turbine structures, each affected Turbine triples its power output.
- Howl From Beyond grants 7 bonus power per Open Air tile
- Updraft grants 3 bonus power per Open Air tile
Aesthetics
- New recipes now show a chaser on the crafting menu's header
- New logic for revealing crafting menu headers
- Dimmer tabs that are not yet available to open
- Icons added to all tutorial objectives
- Character now a single Material and Customizable
- Hover tip snapping tech
- Water doodads have been colored a bit more blue to separate them from Life Flora a little more.
- Mana flare disabled during library cut scene
- Mana flares no longer run out while in the library, but drain when the rifts show up
- Lava generator now uses a mesh instead of a tilemap.
Optional Launch flags
- -forceLocalBlueprints to always load the local blueprint file even if the cloud save version is newer.
- -clearAchievements will clear Steam Achievements. It also stop achievements from accruing, so you must restart without the flag in order to start getting them again
- -saveJson to save a human-readable file. Saves are forwards and backwards compatible from the new format.
Performance
- Default to DirectX12 (This caused a crash once in testing, but resolved itself on restart, please make a thread on the forum if you need help).
- Significant cleanup around Structure Mana performance
- Bastions can now search for targets over multiple frames. They will also not search again for a few seconds after not finding any entropy.
- Chunk Manager is now smarter about requesting calculations based on the rest of the factory's performance.
- Allow hex mesh generation to break up over multiple frames to keep us within our allotted time for chunk gen.
- Better sound performance especially while moving.
- Significant Gripper performance improvements.
- Significantly reduced the cost of character hybrid rendering
- Aggressive culling on all off screen or off plane objects
- Non-visible planes' ticks are offset from the currently active plane
- Garbage Collection optimization
- Structure in Entropy detection significantly cheaper
- Structures now turn off their inputs if they are full
- Power Grid Optimizations
- Only draw one arm per side for air grippers.
- Visibility objects can now opt to turn off when above a zoom threshold.
- Gripper arms and gust funnel swirls disable above the threshold.
Bugs
- Fixed a bug with overgrowth pillar failing to search for new growth locations.
- Altar FX were not culling
- Fix for Lava barriers not clearing their map tiles.
- Fix for going to foundations menu and back clearing portal tiles.
- Fix production structures not starting if you change their inventory too quickly after powering them.
- Tutorial banner should no longer swap its title on fade out
- Fire path tutorial objective wasn't allowing for shadow of fire doodads to complete
- Loading an infinite research with 0 cycles remaining is now confirmable
- Elemental Orbs no longer keep taking items once the orb is capped out.
- Fix biorhythm bad interaction with blueprints.
- Portals are no longer triggered while in Oracle mode.
- Quit context now works when mouse is over ui
- Fix for being unable to build belts over belt blueprints.