Mined

Service drones in inactive orbit after I built a coolant in the center of their triangular route. 

That's them circling. Haunting? All the drones energy-drained, too.
Up top is the new one I made, which is stationary because it's not servicing them, either. Only the other drones. By shape of corridor hope you can see what I mean by triangular routes.
p.s. I really love the zoom focus function with the pointer and the mouse wheel. I haven't tested it on other interfaces like trackpad but it was very pleasing and intuitive to me. Others may find it dizzying, it was kind of Iron Man on-focus control, simple and elegant.

p.p.s. Aw, spoke too soon. Multiple un-connected elevators turned all the drones into Blair Witch Project. Staring at wall, no power. Adding drones temporary fix...  and then zoom stopped working completely.

@developer: Are you still working on development of this game? 

[note: my keyboard is acting up, especially the 'T' key. If something makes no sense, mentally add a T to see if i makes sense.]

Nice concept, great potential. There are some major and minor issues...

1) Path finding will sometimes skip nearby items and go to a farther one, sometimes even going up/down levels. Likewise, I can tag a block to be mined that is next to an idle miner, and yet it gets assigned to a miner that is ... in a galaxy far, far away.

2) The "job" system is still ineffective. For example, I just had a game where service bot A was trying to service bot B... Which was trying to service bot C... which was trying o service bot D... which was trying to service bot A! They'd just keep going in circles chasing each other around the system of corridors and "rooms" I had (I was mining out in a grid-like fashion).

3) The particles are "glitchey", they would sometimes show up while viewing higher or lower levels. Likewise, I've seen bots suddenly appear in the middle of solid ground. However, they happily moved to the nearest corridor/machine and then went on their way.

4) Once here's a few material reactors, the material count sometimes goes negative. this does not seem to affect operations, so it may only be a display bug (or possibly an integer under-/over-flow).

Suggestions:

1) Don't show all territory; Give bots a "sensor range" to uncover what's where. This gives players an incentive to go mine out areas and explore them, rather than simply dig straight to the high value ores.

2) Make maintenance cost money as well--Keep the player moving and mining! After having a sizable workforce, machinery base, and all research is done, the game just becomes an infinite money tree. Give players an incentive to go make more money to pay for maintenance, and keep bots moving and working.

3) Give jobs/tasks a time limit. If a bot cannot complete it's assigned job before the time limit expires, abort the job (and most likely put i back in he job queue for another bot to attempt). Also, if a bot "calls" for maintenance, have it STOP and WAIT for maintenance to be complete. Don't make maint bots keep trying to hit a moving target.

4) Add "elevator up", not just down. As the game grows, this could allow things like harder materials that require special miner bots, but in the meantime, players could route corridors under/over the area towards easier to mine areas.

5) Add the ability to sell bots and machines which are in the way or no longer needed (or even simply misplaced). You could even add a "operational lifetime" counter to reduce the sell cost--Immediately selling a misplaced item would recover full cost, while selling a generator after an hour (real-time) of use might only get back 10% of it's cost (scrap metal).

6) It seems idle bots still consume power, but make sure all bots continuously consume power (and possibly water), and have regular maint cost material and/or money as well. Working/moving bots drain it all faster, of course. This is another way to prevent maint bots from running endlessly chasing others--the maint bot will eventually break down and need maint on itself.

7) Let maint bots try to self-maintain; As long as they can get to he right machines to do so, they can replenish themselves--again, this helps avoid circular chasing and if main costs money, gives players incentive to keep moving and mining.

8) Add doors/gates. Give some control over sections of the mine and prevent bots from entering them until I want them to.

Other ideas (long term goals?):

1) Planning mode; Pause the game and let the player "plan" where to mine, and what machines to place where (including possibly mining out space needed for the machine). This can include adding notes/markers ("Found high value ores here! Check around for veins of more!"), or possibly "idle bot storage" and/or "maint areas".

2) Ability to move machines; Constructors can disassemble a machine one place and reassemble it another.

3) Specialized miners; Normal miners can dig out dirt, but other ores (and stone) not only take longer to mine, but give a decreased yield when mined. Specialized ore miners are the opposite--they can mine out high value ores more efficiently, but decreased efficiency for others.

4) Runs/veins of high value ore; I already do this mentally--When I mine out a high value ore, I pretend I cannot see the other ores around it, so I have to mine out he surrounding blocks to "expose" the valuable ores for mining. (In effect, veins are not always continuous, but may "skip" one block, thus the need to mine out the surrounding blocks in order to expose possible veins for "chasing", much as I'd do it in "real life".)

5) Job/task management; Be able to look at the tasks/job, both global and per-bot/machine, in order to cancel/reorder/reassign them.

6) Percentage based improvement research; Instead of just a dozen or so static researches, have something where each percentage improvement costs increasingly more (like how a typical "incremental" game does it). Thus, research is only limited by the computer's numerical limits.

7) Path finding; Use graph theory and nodes/edges to pre-calculate many paths. For example, if I mine out a "room" area connected to the start area by a corridor, there is no need to constantly path find between them; the path exiting the room area to the start area will always be the same so you can pre-calculate and save it for re-use.  Thus a bot only needs to the nearest edge to connect to the desired area, then use the saved path, and on arrival, find the path to the specific target location. You still have to calculate two paths--the start and end paths--but since these are usually very short and quick, they don't use as much CPU as trying to calculate a full path every time. You can determine the edges and nodes using traffic and destination tracking: if 14 bots route along points (10, 17) to (8, 4) every "tick", those are high traffic points and the route between them is a candidate for pre-calculation. You can even track other metadata--"Where is the nearest collector from point (10,17)? Ah-ha! Near point (8,4)!" and so on.

8) Add overlays to show distributor range, and possibly collection zones for collectors. Maybe even service ranges of generators and pumps, and so on.

9) The game suggests you need to pay off your initial debt... Maybe keep track of that debt (plus accumulating interest), so players can pay it off... Or else! ;-)

After playing another game, here's some more notes and observations:

1) The z-order stacking seems to confuse the path finder even more, especially when the same machine is built at the same (x,y), but a different z.

2) It seems that as long as I tag a block to be mined on each level that *cannot* be reached at all, miner bots have less (but not entirely eliminated!) problems when it comes to finding jobs to do at different levels.

3) Possibly related, logistics bots in  one game had a problem with elevators and collectors; In the game, I had collectors on each level in the same place, but the logistics bots would not use them--they tried to go up the elevators to the "home machine" to use. Once up top, however, they seemed to change their mind and go back down to one of the lower level collectors. But they'd just change their mind again and go back up top. They'd just bounce back and forth like that in an infinite loop.

4) I encountered the bug someone else mentioned where I'd place one machine, but it would build a different machine. In my case, it would sometimes build collectors in places I placed to build distributors.

how can I select more tiles to mine at once

You need to give the player info in order to make decisions. E.g. " 50% Dig Speed" instead of "Mining Drone Dig Speed I". Show the all the specifications of all research, equipment and drones. Also tooltips showing the dig difficulty, material yield and coolant cost of a block when you mouse over them. Number of each type of drone, and how many of each type are idle.

Without this kind of info, the player can't make informed strategic decisions, which makes the decisions uninteresting.

Also in addition to peacemakers list could you possibly throw in the total number of drone that are currently built along with how many of each individual drone we have. Can you through that into the top of his little pop up menu that he was describing. That is, of course, if you get to it. Thank you!!!

What is the status on the campaign. Is that, like, premium or are you still working on completing it. Thanks.

Bugs:

- If you got mining drones on other layers, they doesn't go to the other layers. Once you click a tile      beside those drones they left the layer and start to work.

- Text in menu for pump and generator is weird. ->power from coolant / coolant from power (in what ratio?)

- I didn't found any end of game or exit

- In browser mode there is no save game

- It started lagging in browser with 100 drones. That's not much for a drone game. (AMD FX-8350/16GB RAM-1866MHZ / NVIDIA-GTX1660 GamingX

Suggestions and Improvements:

- Add a workload info for service drones to know when you need to add more drones

- Add overview for drone counts and their consumptions

- Add some info for power distributor cause its behavior is actually unknown. Same counts for collector effectivity in research

- Add more research and show its improvements in precent or something

- Add color on menu and research items to show if you can afford them

- Maybe add a effective range for the collector

- Add option to disable path and mining particle effects for better performance

- Add icons for drones and buildings in menu

- It shouldn't be possible to research more than 1 item at the same time

Suggestion: Add grid/slots where you can place buildings(others would not allow it)
My OCD is going crazy when I misplace a building 1 tile in a wrong direction...
Make it so you can only place every 2 tiles in all directions starting from main base.
OR make it so each building can have various sizes(coolant being 2x2, pump 3x2 or 3x3 etc...With images that take as much space too)

OR maybe Pump requires Water tile and is 1x1 only(so you avoid situation where you get 1 tile of water and cant place a pump there.
OR you can add "roads" that will increase speed(you can place it on water too), so your path finding would use roads if it's faster to get to the location.

So many possibilities, this game has lot's of potential, I hope to see it someday on Steam when it's "finished"

If you click fast, you can buy more drones but your money will become negative.
With good auto clicker I can get myself quite a lot of these.

Hello!

I`ve played it a bit and I like it so far! That is, until i have too many droness, cause then they don`t work anymore as they are supposed to.

Not sure if the threshold is a certain number of drones, or queued up jobs or something else. But at some point, the logistic drones stop working while at least one mining drone is working.

As soon as >no< mining drone is working anymore, the logistic drones start doing their job and bring all the metal to the storage containers.

Only very rarely are some drones working together at the same time. Monstly newly crafted ones I think.Also it seems as if fewer and fewer logistic drones are actually working. Some just stay stuck at the storage containers.

And a last one more thing. I´ve been wondering. What happens if I don`t have enough or even any repair drones? What are they actually doing? How do drones get damaged?

Thank you very much for sharing this game!

L

We are back with a new version of the game. Please try it out and provide some feedback!

Firstly I would like to say even tho this game is in alpha still I love it although like other people have said the miner bots get stuck but so far it's only happend once 

I love games in this style so keep it up man can't wait till you update it again 

10/10 from me

I played with it a few times, and I made more than 9 million, when get bored and quit the game. Gazillions of drones on the screen, and I get no lag at all, even if I zoomed out as far as I can.  I play it on a laptop with Intel 520 gpu.  (On Linux.)

Some kind of a tooltips or something that explains more, what exactly some of the equipments do, would be very nice.
I can't figure out what the water pumps are doing. If I don't build any, the game seems to run just fine.
What the scanners actually do?
What are those distributors do exactly, how and where they distribute power?

Matter reactor seems to do nothing. Once I build some and stop mining, to see how much money they generate from power,  I stared at the monitor for relative long time, but don't see anything.

What the pavings do? I see that the engineer drones build them automatically if they have nothing else to do, but why?

I have a suggestion, that if you select  something to build, keep it selected, until I choose something else or close the popup menu, or maybe until I right-click with the mouse to "unselect" it. It is very annoying that I always have to navigate back to the bottom with the mouse and click on what I like to build.  I don't build just one thing at a time, even in the very beginning of the game, I always build few generators. This one-by-one building is not good at all! I think there is even a bug, because sometimes it seems not selecting what I want to build; it build distributors, not what I clicked! It is do this randomly, like once when I tried to build several scanners to see what they doing, some of they somehow become distributors. There is no way that I missed the click, they are too far from each other!

And...well...the game seems to be a very-very pre-alpha something. Or at least, not much to do in it, and almost zero the challenge factor at this point. What I mean is that, when first started to play with the game, and figured out (or maybe doesn't even have to figure out anything, because it is so obvious) the coloured things are considered the ores or gems (you get the most money mining them) the light brown is the "dirt" (they mined fast, not much money in them) and the dark ones are the "rocks" (mined slower, not much money in them). So after I see this, I thought the best method is; if I try to mine in a way that I can reach the most of those coloured stuff, in the shortest path. Than I figured out, I just can literally select EVERYTHING and just sit back and watch how everything converted into money. All I need to do, sometimes build more power, more drones an collectors, maybe some drop-points so the collectors don't have to go that far. 

Another thing that it is impossible to build if there is some drone on the tile or even if it just sit on the next to that tile, where I like to build. Because you can't control the drones directly to move away, you lose lot of building space because of it. When you build something they are just "blueprints", not actual things until the engineers start building them. Even all the drones can walk through them, so I consider this as a bug, that you can't put something down, when drones are nearby.

Last thing is what I like to see in your game, is that, if i can delete those "blueprints" while the engineers don't start building them, or maybe even delete the buildings.

Well, I enjoyed the game. It is very good if you have too much free time to kill or just like to watch for hours how little pixels running around in your monitor...

I really hope, in the future, there will be more things in the game. So it will be not just an "interactive screensaver".

P.S.: I found another bug. Sometimes the minders "freeze". They do mining on tiles that are already mined, and even have pavings on them. The green outline prove this, because they are there around those tiles, and the miners just stay there, don't go to mine other tiles. They just stay there forever mining the nothing...

When is next update?

I think im the only one who gets positive figures. 

Hey Doom I was wondering, I'm going to do a YouTube series on this, is there anything you want me to talk about, or anything you want to say?

Could a quick guide to how to play be added? as well as the hotkeys ?

Hey heres the First Looks And Introductions. Episode 1