Cabochon Shapes, Wrap Styles, Mounts for Every Cut, and Mini-Games Tweaks
Hello, rockhounds! This update is built from more of your requests: more cabochon shapes, choosing your own wire-wrap style, and mounts for more than round gems.
New: Cabochon Shapes
- Before grinding, pick a template shape: Round, Oval, Long Oval, Squavel, Cushion, Rectangle, Triangle or Teardrop. The template dots and your trace follow the shape you chose.
- Unusual shapes are worth a little more: long oval and teardrop +5%, squavel, cushion and rectangle +10%, triangle +15%.
- Every shape has its own wire-wrap settings, painted to fit.
- Your older cabochons stay as they were.
New: Choose Your Wire-Wrap Style
- After picking your wire, choose from 9 styles: Scroll, Braided, Spiral Ends, Woven Net, Leaf Vine, Coiled, Beaded, Basket Weave and Tree of Life. A preview shows the finished pendant before you start.
- Crystal points have 3 cages to choose from.
- Pendants you've already made keep their style.
New: Mounts for Every Cut
- Plain, Halo and Filigree pendants and Solitaire, Accent and Split Shank rings now come in all 9 cuts.
- The Rock Shop's Mounts page has Round, Oval, Cushion and Princess buttons, with every style in each cut.
- Casting offers any style in any cut, so you can make heart, pear, marquise and trillion settings yourself.
Fairer Mini-Games
- Results judge your work, not the stone. The done button and the message now come from how you did (your trace, kinks, facet angles, how straight the setting is, how round the sphere is), never from the stone's own grade. A perfect job on a plain stone now gets the praise it deserves.
- Fail messages name what really happened. No more "a kink or two" with zero kinks, or a puckered bezel blamed when something else went wrong.
- Cabochon tracing is fairer. Within a few pixels of the line counts as spot on. A lopsided cab says so, and its shape matches the message.
- Bezel pushing: after you push one side, the side you must push next (its opposite) now glows gold.
- Wire wrapping: a quick click while the pliers are still bending the last run now counts, instead of being ignored.
- Fossil prep: every outcome now has a message, including a little stray glue, rock left on the shell, light frosting, and a polish short of a mirror.
- Held tools (pliers, tweezers and the spray bottle) now work exactly at their painted tips.
Air Abrasion Powders Feel Different
- The rock matters: trilobites sit in soft shale, and crinoids in hard limestone. The screen tells you which.
- Baking soda never marks the shell, but it's slow and barely cuts limestone. Dolomite is the steady all-rounder. Aluminum oxide cuts anything fast, but frosts the shell as the rock gets thin.
- High pressure cuts faster but wears the shell faster still, and sprays wider.
Tool Upgrades Pull Their Weight
- Better digging tools now save stamina at the Salt Plains and the Shale Bank too, and the Rockhound Pick Set opens holes and splits slabs in one strike fewer.
- Better hammer sets now save stamina splitting trilobite slabs and chiseling vein pockets.
- Oxalic Acid Soak: the soak for iron-stained stones now needs the Cleaning upgrade you buy at the Rock Shop. Without it, a stained stone is no longer held back from your cutting benches; it simply keeps its stain.
Smaller Improvements
- Sphere Machine: the grit stages go up to 30% faster while the stone is kept fully wet. The sawing step is centered, and the stone moves beside the grinder when it arrives.
- Map: Coober Pedy and Amethyst Tunnels sit closer to their pins, with a dotted line to each. Site cards show the full description instead of cutting it short.
Bug Fixes
- Showroom: a piece of the tip-jar table (or a geode) could show up shifted inside a box while visitors walked by, mostly in a maximized window. Fixed.
- Oxalic acid bath: a quartz point held over the bath no longer turns into a stretched brown blob.
- The acid soak no longer says "Rust-free!" when stain is left, and the giant geode no longer says "Wonderful!" when it opened rough.
- New text is translated into German, Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese and Russian.
Thank you for all the ideas and bug reports. Keep them coming, and happy hunting!
More updates and fixes will be Rockin' and Rollin' soon!