Hey sweepers!
BOOMSWEEPER 1.3.4 is live now. Surveyed Ground works on every board, paying tiles throw coins, and your crew calls you when they get stuck.
Surveyed Ground fixed
- Before this update, Surveyed Ground only really worked on small boards. On bigger or denser boards it couldn't find a fair layout in time, so it quietly gave up and dealt a normal random board, often with a forced guess ("found no fair layout"). Most players with Surveyed Ground were actually playing random boards.
- That's fixed. Every surveyed board can now be finished by logic alone, with no forced guesses, on any board size and with any number of mines, Hazard Pay included.
- On the biggest boards, finding a fair layout can take a moment. The loading screen now stays up and says "Surveying the ground..." until the board is ready, instead of showing a board that ignores your taps.
- Owning Surveyed Ground adds a Surveyed switch beside Countdown, so you can pick fair boards or random ones before each board.
- Because surveyed boards are now truly fair, boards pay 10% less while Surveyed is on. You never lose a board to a forced guess anymore, so you clear more boards and earn more Thorough Survey points, and the 10% keeps that in line with playing random boards. Turn Surveyed off and boards play and pay exactly like before.
- With Steady Hands' empty start, the game makes your first move for you on a surveyed board. Under Glass Cannon or Blind Start you make the first move yourself, and the board is still fair.
- Pockets aren't surveyed, so Oracles and Gambler's Protocol still help inside pockets. With Surveyed on and pockets off, the suggested crew leaves Oracles at home, so you don't pay their wages for nothing.
- Owning Pockets adds a Pockets switch beside Countdown, so you can play without them.
- Fixed: Gambler's Protocol could guess while other workers still had proven-safe tiles waiting.
Mine limit raised to 40%
- Normal boards can now hold up to 40% mines (was 35%), the same as reversed boards. Danger Pay, Mineral Rights and Saturation ranks you've bought now add real mines for longer, instead of only adding pay once your boards hit the old limit.
- Their talent descriptions now say 40%.
Hazard Pay
- The contract card now shows exactly what you're signing up for, for example "7 more mines: 20 instead of 13. Pay: x3."
- Hazard Pay adds up to 50% more mines. Late in the game, when your talents already had boards at the mine limit, it used to add no mines at all and was a free x2.5. Now it can go past the limit, up to 45% mines with Surveyed off, so it always means real extra mines.
- Pay is x2.5, or x3 on boards with 15% mines or fewer, sliding down to x2.5 at 25%.
- With Surveyed on, Hazard Pay stops at the usual 40% limit to keep the board fair. When that holds back some of the extra mines, the pay shrinks to match, and a board already at the limit isn't offered Hazard Pay.
Skeleton Crew reworked
- Skeleton Crew used to send your whole crew home for double pay, which made a late-game board take most of an hour by hand.
- Now up to 3 of your hired crew still come, unpaid: an Oracle, a Sweeper and a Prospector when you have them, even if you planned no crew for the board. The rest of the crew the board needs stay home.
- It pays x2, plus x0.5 for each worker who stays home, up to x6. The contract offer names exactly who comes, how many stay home and the pay for your next board.
- Small boards that don't call for a crew are still played by hand for x2, as before.
Reverse Polarity: reading flags
- On a reversed board, flagging a tile next to a mine you've found now shows that tile's number, with no charge and no pay. It gives you something to read, so reversed boards need less guessing.
- Flagging a mine defuses it. It counts as found but pays no bounty.
- The crew's flags, Metal Detector flags and Wide Sweep flags always show their number. Your own flags read once they're next to a mine you've found.
- The Reverse Polarity talent now has a much shorter description, which also says your first tap is free.
- The crew reads those numbers too. It won't get stuck or guess while a read is still open, and Engineers skip flagged tiles.
Coin pops
- Coins now pop out of every tile that pays and fly up into your points, and the score counts up as they land. Bigger pays throw more coins.
- On reversed boards, a number's charge pulls coins out of your points into the tile.
- When your crew works a pocket, coins fly out of that pocket's tile on the board above, so you can see where they're digging.
- Settings has a new Coin pops option: Full, Fewer or Off. With Reduce motion and flashes on, coins fade in place instead of flying.
Crew call and Go to crew
- When the crew gets stuck while you're inside a pocket, a soft red glow comes in from the screen edges and a crew member walks up to ask for help.
- A new Go to crew button takes you straight to the board the crew is on: out of a pocket, down into another one, or both. Your armed tool comes with you.
- Settings has a new Follow the crew option. Turn it off to stop the camera zooming into a pocket after the crew.
- Settings has a new Crew chatter speed option, so crew speech bubbles can stay up longer (Slow, Very slow) or go by faster.
- Fixed: with no workers hired, a pocket could show the crew badge and the camera could follow nobody down.
Talents
- A new Filter button on the Talents screen opens tick boxes for Hide maxed, Hide locked and Hide unpurchasable. Tick any mix of them.
- The Finds button is now a treasure chest.
- A new Settings button on the Talents screen, top right, so you can reach Settings without leaving.
- Start next board now says in small text what your next board is set to, for example "Contracts, Surveyed, Pockets, Steady Hands".
- The +1 button turns grey when you can't buy, and the outline on the talent you're looking at is green when you can buy it and red when you can't. Gold rings still mark every talent you can buy.
- A long talent description now scrolls instead of being cut off.
- The Filter button no longer glows when there's nothing left to buy.
- Foreman's Orders on the Talents screen count up live while you watch the crew work.
- When buying a talent finishes a Foreman's Order, that order lights up in its row and its coins fly out from it.
- The Reinforced Boots and Dud Mines descriptions now say they cover the crew too, and that they don't work in vaults.
Other fixes
- Ending cards (like All the Way Out and Scorched Earth) now show as soon as you earn them, instead of minutes later or not at all. A card you haven't seen yet comes back the next time you load.
- The board recap shows what Pension Plan paid into your bank, on its own line and as its own slice of "Where the points came from".
- BOARD LOST has a new View board button, so you can look over the board that got you. If the mine was in a pocket, it opens on that pocket, with a button to swap to the main board. Return to recap takes you back.
- Labels that said "points" now show the coin icon instead, on the board recap, the save slots and How to Play.
- The corner badges on Lucky, Gilded, Royal, Wet, Splash and Lava tiles now have a thin black outline, so they stand out on any tile.
- BOARD CLEARED now shows your clear time in gold at the top, for example "Cleared in 0:17".
- Steam no longer shows achievement progress pop-ups, which looked like unlocks. The "Close to an achievement" card after a board still shows how close you are.
- THE END? card now has a Leave a review button. If you've enjoyed the game, a review helps a ton!
Coming next: 2.0
BOOMSWEEPER 2.0 is in the works, with a brand new prestige system. We'd love to hear what you think and what you'd like to see from it, so come share your ideas on our Discord or in the Steam discussions.
Thanks for playing, and for all the reports on Discord!