I suggest the game should show the price increment for each upgrade. This allows for better planning of prestige upgrades and gem upgrades.
For the gem mechanism, I think it should be immediately useful when unlocked. The game can give player some gems on unlocking it, and also give gems as achievement rewards. These should only give red and purple (and maybe green) but never blue gems.
I think 150 red gems at start should be enough, it allows the player to choose one of the upgrades.
I finally figured out how mining autoprogress works. Once you click the next arrow, it will continue to advance automatically until it hits the limit you specify. Then it will stop and will not autoprogess again until you click the arrow again, no matter how much you upgrade your damage.
Works quite well on mobile, only thing that's a little tedious is the school. I understand swapping to portrait mode for that may be too much work, but it'd really help out if literature wasn't case sensitive. It's already much harder than on a keyboard, having to disable shift every line really slows it down.
Also can't figure out what heirlooms are/do and where to view them. Got a few pop-ups stating I got one, but couldn't find them.
Definitely not trying to go for any high ranks in it. Math isn't too bad, but landscape typing is a bit of a nightmare. I'll accept some inconvenience for being able to play it on mobile though.
If I really needed the ranks I'd just grind a few on desktop.
"Forming bars" card might not be functional. It doesn't show up in the tooltip for the gold coin capacity, and doesn't seem to affect it, as well.
I do find myself curious as to when a prestige feature will finally show up. Being at global level 80 and having not seen any sign that one exists, when there's supposed to be one for each feature, has me questioning the gameplay. Can there at least be hints as to when/where these will show up?
Most of my cards work, already (and they show up in the tooltips as "Cards" for the effect). Just not the one I mentioned. Now, if cards are ONLY supposed to work when activated during a prestige (which basically means you're going to wait WEEKS before you can use a single one since you can only prestige duplicates) then their values are WAY too low. Pointless to get something like 1.25x capacity for a single prestige with that huge of a delay between getting to use them.
I'm afraid so. Most of the sub features are not useful when unlocked, and takes a huge amount of time investment to actually start having any benefit, and even when they start having benefits the bonus are low. This really isn't good game design.
Any chance there could be an option to adjust the UI for number of upgrades per page? At the moment I have 5 pages of things to build in the village, and I'd much rather be able to scroll through all of them, rather than having to scroll, click, scroll, click, to check all tabs for what I can afford.
the gem prices seem way too high for any amount of gameplay. An average of 250 red gems for a x1.75 upgrade? that's more than 10 days of waiting with default gem speeds, and with +1% for each achievement it really doesn't speed up.
there's some cheaper ones at around 120, but that's still 5 whole days with no active way to speed up or strategize around it for an "alright" upgrade
sidenote, I love the School mechanic but grinding it feels very stressful. I feel like a way to extend the time limit would benefit it a lot - unless it already exists and I'm just way too early in the game to have found it. Got maths in D+ and literature in B-- through the art of "doing the bare minimum and scraping by" (meaning getting at least 7 points and climbing up with 15%~ grade increases). I feel like I can't do maths fast and accurately enough in just 30 seconds, and literature is kind of a coin toss with what kind of "words" you need to type (ironically, the worst things are the uppercase letters. Numbers and symbols are a blessing)
it might seem like I'm being very negative about this game, but these are just two things that kind of annoyed me out of like 6 different mechanics. This game is a gem, and I just hope this feedback can make it more enjoyable
Hi, like I stated in another response, the school feature is already on the to-do-list to receive big changes in the next update. Reducing grind aspects and time pressure is a big focus there, as well as some changes to literature.
About gems, they were always intended to be a slow side feature, since the game is intended to be played over a long time. I get that it can be frustrating for new players to see all these upgrades locked behind a big timegate, especially when you don't have a +250% achievement boost. But I'd like to wait a bit more until players are able to afford a few big upgrades and start planning around which upgrade to buy next
I've found literature to be a lot easier too, and I don't think reducing the dust reward last patch was a good decision. If anything, that change makes it even more grindy since you need to do it 3x - 4x more for the same reward earlygame, and by the time it's at 100% efficiency you probably won't really need it.
Edit: The rework made it better, though I suck at math even more lol
It actually used to do that, but I decided to change it because the well already raised water capacity. Turns out aquariums are useful for holding other things as well!
Lovely :) So overall I like the game you really did a great thing here. What I would love to see (was a bit astonished) that the Village gives a boost to the mine and the hord to the village in any way. Right now it seems to me there is no connection at all. I think that would be something I would appriciate as a functionality.
This is fantastic. Good unlock pacing, nice AFK / Active loops, good spread of ~idle sub-games (that are surprisingly well developed given the number of them), excellent attributions in the Info section, lots of thought clearly given to ease of use. If there were a Support button, I'd throw some money at this free game. The designer deserves it for achieving so much more than the average Itch entry. Top 2% for sure, possibly a contender to steal Trimps's mantle.
Fantastic work, the game looks very smooth. There are of course things to work on, you have mentioned that the school is changing, which is probably good. But to find a game that looks this good and also has meaningful game progression is very rare. Great job, hope to see more in the future!
You can get more by playing the school minigame. If you are looking for a way to increase the capacity of the hourglass, that won't be accessible until much later in the game
I suddenly can't type on the math minigame. I was typing before, but now I can only enter the number by hitting the up arrow. Did something change in the last few hours?
Hi, there was a recent update to allow the text box to stay focused when using the answer button, maybe that caused some other problems. Can you still type when manually clicking on the text box? If not, what browser / OS are you using?
Hi, it means you spent too much time and need to do a prestige for that feature. If you don't have access to the depth dweller in mining yet, try to reach 40m and look for the upgrade with the same name.
I fully agree with the guy who suggested having students to automate the school aspect. Just reached the Literature part and it's double bad because first off it's complete nonsense you're copying (rather than words) and secondly I keep switching up the reading of letters so I have to redo like 30% of the "words". I dread whatever gets unlocked next.
The fact that you CAN gain more resources than your capacity would indicate but that you CAN'T build something that costs more than your capacity threw me for a loop initially, especially because I didn't notice the Farm/Plantation/Mine got "we now increase your capacity" after the first purchase. Why not show that for the first build?
For the mine I wish there were moments where going back a couple of levels would be worthwhile (I'm at 27 right now), but it pretty much never works out to increasing your income despite the "x5 on break" modifier. I sure hope there's an upgrade for that modifier at some point because it feels so negligible it may as well be absent. Or a speed increasing upgrade.
Hi, like I stated in another response, the school feature is already on the to-do-list to receive big changes in the next update, and I will be addressing the literature subject as well.
Farms, plantations and mines do not show "Increase capacity" because the first building does not increase it
The mining x5 modifier will stay, even later in the game, but there are other reasons to visit earlier depths (this starts being a thing at around 50m)
The two things (that I've reached) that aren't quite being self-explanatory are:
Food. At one point I was accumulating tons of it, for no clear reason. Now I have none, to no clear effect. What is it for? What does it mean to run out?
Cards. I just unlocked cards, I bought a set of cards, and...now what? Can I do anything with them? Do they have any effect?
Food is sold to workers in exchange for gold coins. Prior to unlocking tax rate it doesn’t get consumed so it just stockpiles until then. All of this information is visible in tooltips. As far as I can tell the only effect of running out of food is slower gold income.
Food (like already pointed out in another answer) is just used by the villagers to be converted to gold coins and running out has no negative effects (other than less gold)
For each unique card you collect you get a bonus based on the feature it belongs to (+5% damage for mining, +3% resource gain for village, ...)
You can also equip and activate duplicate cards in features when you unlock their prestige to get the effects listed (different for each card) until you prestige again
The school thing is cool and all, but seriously even if they are simple math questions at begin its a feature that makes it not good imo, maybe if it was a automated feature something like this, a student answer the questions where it has a % of answering correctly and as we use books it would get a higher %, in a way it would make things easier and less rewarding to good math players, but it would make the game more acessible since not everyone is good at math even through like i said they are all simple questions till D+ (the rank ive achieved)
Hi, I absolutely agree about the state of the school feature! I already changed a few things in v1.0.1 and (like I stated in another response), school will receive big changes in the next update to be less grindy
Questions: How does "mining autoprogress limit" work? It doesn't seem to do anything. I'm also not sure how to progress in the "deeprun" achievement. Says I have 12/15, no idea how.
Mining: Ore clumping to increase your odds of a good pickaxe craft is useless. Better off doing more tries with lower odds, since you get the same odds of getting an upgrade at all overall, plus a chance to get an upgrade for a lower cost.
Village: It could use some adjusting. It's cluttered with all its resources and upgrades that do similar, unsatisfying things (mostly larger capacity). It's giving me around the same amount of global levels as mining, but it feels like it's taking a lot longer than the other because you have to put so much more effort and brainpower into it. I think i'd start by making farms/plantations/mines cheaper since they can't produce extra income without already investing into more workers.
School: I'd like it if the rewards were improved at the cost of making the minigames more limited, like with an energy meter or simply making it so you can only do each game x times a day. That way people don't need to grind it as much.
Gems: Seems really, really slow for upgrades that aren't too huge or interesting.
Despite all that, i'm enjoying the game and i'm looking forward to future updates.
Mining autoprogress is a way to automatically dig down when you are on the deepest rock. The limit is the maximum amount of seconds the next rock can take to break for this to work. So if you put in 90 seconds it would keep digging down until it would take more than 90 seconds to break the next rock.
Ore clumping may be inefficient now, but that will change later in the game!
In the village, resource caps are a lot more important than in other features, which is why about every second building increases it. Buildings like farms, plantations and mines have the benefit of being persistent, which means that they stay even after prestige. So yeah, the village is intentionally slower than other features.
School is something I'm already working on, I simply did not expect players to grind that much for the time skips, so there will be some sort of limit on the amount of times you can play for these rewards.
Gems are (like the village) supposed to be one of the slower features, as they are meant to be a resource you really think about how to spend
I've found that clumping gets quite a bit more useful once you get a second metal to alloy with in crafting. You can use a large amount of the less scarce resource to improve the chances of getting something good out of the more scarce resource.
Has a rather nice UI design, and all of the QoL missing from so many other games, absolutely something that people should check out if they enjoy the genre!
The only bug I've run into is that the Community Center seems to have vanished when I started construction, which seems to be causing it to construct forever (There's nothing in the console though, which is odd) (It took forever to build and with the entry gone I could not get an estimate, but it finished eventually)
I'm very much looking forward to seeing how things develop with this project!
I was just coming down to report on that crossed-out thing as a QoL issue! It also struck me that once you've started building a unique building, you can't see its progress. It'd be nice if the build queue could be expanded to show you more information (that; what the things in the queue are; how long they'll take...especially since you can reorder them, as I just learned, it'd be nice to know what effect that would have).
This is a really cool game! I love incremental games, but this one is quite unique. I love the mix of story elements with survival/town building and resource management. The depth of the game seems great from what little i've played so far too. (I also love that you can get more than max resources, just slowing down production that'ss a great feature.). All in all I can't wait to see more of what this can become ^^
Hi, I'm sorry that happened to you! I don't know what exactly happened there. Restricting cookies / website data in your browser can prevent the game from saving correctly, maybe that's the issue. Did you play the game in browser or use the desktop (downloadable) version?
That seems a little strange. Maybe the autosave got disabled somehow? The game usually saves every 30 seconds and notifies you about it. Could you please open your in-game settings (top right) and check if there is a number in the autosave option (generic, third option)?
Attending school does not immediately give books, they are gained passively (you get more with better grades). If you want to buy upgrades with these books, you need to reach the maximum level of certain main feature upgrades
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I suggest you floor the whole numbers instead of rounding. It will avoid the issue of a number saying you can buy something while you can't.
I suggest the game should show the price increment for each upgrade. This allows for better planning of prestige upgrades and gem upgrades.
For the gem mechanism, I think it should be immediately useful when unlocked. The game can give player some gems on unlocking it, and also give gems as achievement rewards. These should only give red and purple (and maybe green) but never blue gems.
I think 150 red gems at start should be enough, it allows the player to choose one of the upgrades.
I finally figured out how mining autoprogress works. Once you click the next arrow, it will continue to advance automatically until it hits the limit you specify. Then it will stop and will not autoprogess again until you click the arrow again, no matter how much you upgrade your damage.
Works quite well on mobile, only thing that's a little tedious is the school. I understand swapping to portrait mode for that may be too much work, but it'd really help out if literature wasn't case sensitive. It's already much harder than on a keyboard, having to disable shift every line really slows it down.
Also can't figure out what heirlooms are/do and where to view them. Got a few pop-ups stating I got one, but couldn't find them.
Both literature and math are difficult enough even on a keyboard, just to get average score. I can't even imagine doing these on mobile No way
Definitely not trying to go for any high ranks in it. Math isn't too bad, but landscape typing is a bit of a nightmare. I'll accept some inconvenience for being able to play it on mobile though.
If I really needed the ranks I'd just grind a few on desktop.
Cool concept but I can't seem to export my save to a file? The button doesn't seem to do anything
which browser are you on? im on edge and it immediately downloaded a save.json
It won't load in. Probably because I have third party cookies disabled.
"Forming bars" card might not be functional. It doesn't show up in the tooltip for the gold coin capacity, and doesn't seem to affect it, as well.
I do find myself curious as to when a prestige feature will finally show up. Being at global level 80 and having not seen any sign that one exists, when there's supposed to be one for each feature, has me questioning the gameplay. Can there at least be hints as to when/where these will show up?
Outside camping (+12 workers) also does nothing
cards do stuff.. you just need to unlock prestige.
Most of my cards work, already (and they show up in the tooltips as "Cards" for the effect). Just not the one I mentioned. Now, if cards are ONLY supposed to work when activated during a prestige (which basically means you're going to wait WEEKS before you can use a single one since you can only prestige duplicates) then their values are WAY too low. Pointless to get something like 1.25x capacity for a single prestige with that huge of a delay between getting to use them.
I'm afraid so. Most of the sub features are not useful when unlocked, and takes a huge amount of time investment to actually start having any benefit, and even when they start having benefits the bonus are low. This really isn't good game design.
Ye i was pretty happy when i read i get +12 workers.. but none appreared =(
Any chance there could be an option to adjust the UI for number of upgrades per page? At the moment I have 5 pages of things to build in the village, and I'd much rather be able to scroll through all of them, rather than having to scroll, click, scroll, click, to check all tabs for what I can afford.
This is already a thing. Check the performance tab in the settings page.
Oh neat, thanks, missed it.
need a sound and music for better gaming
the gem prices seem way too high for any amount of gameplay. An average of 250 red gems for a x1.75 upgrade? that's more than 10 days of waiting with default gem speeds, and with +1% for each achievement it really doesn't speed up.
there's some cheaper ones at around 120, but that's still 5 whole days with no active way to speed up or strategize around it for an "alright" upgrade
sidenote, I love the School mechanic but grinding it feels very stressful. I feel like a way to extend the time limit would benefit it a lot - unless it already exists and I'm just way too early in the game to have found it. Got maths in D+ and literature in B-- through the art of "doing the bare minimum and scraping by" (meaning getting at least 7 points and climbing up with 15%~ grade increases). I feel like I can't do maths fast and accurately enough in just 30 seconds, and literature is kind of a coin toss with what kind of "words" you need to type (ironically, the worst things are the uppercase letters. Numbers and symbols are a blessing)
it might seem like I'm being very negative about this game, but these are just two things that kind of annoyed me out of like 6 different mechanics. This game is a gem, and I just hope this feedback can make it more enjoyable
Hi, like I stated in another response, the school feature is already on the to-do-list to receive big changes in the next update. Reducing grind aspects and time pressure is a big focus there, as well as some changes to literature.
About gems, they were always intended to be a slow side feature, since the game is intended to be played over a long time. I get that it can be frustrating for new players to see all these upgrades locked behind a big timegate, especially when you don't have a +250% achievement boost. But I'd like to wait a bit more until players are able to afford a few big upgrades and start planning around which upgrade to buy next
I've found literature to be a lot easier too, and I don't think reducing the dust reward last patch was a good decision. If anything, that change makes it even more grindy since you need to do it 3x - 4x more for the same reward earlygame, and by the time it's at 100% efficiency you probably won't really need it.
Edit: The rework made it better, though I suck at math even more lol
Last question really: Lovely game.....why does my aquarium not hold water?
It actually used to do that, but I decided to change it because the well already raised water capacity. Turns out aquariums are useful for holding other things as well!
Lovely :) So overall I like the game you really did a great thing here.
What I would love to see (was a bit astonished) that the Village gives a boost to the mine and the hord to the village in any way. Right now it seems to me there is no connection at all. I think that would be something I would appriciate as a functionality.
This is fantastic. Good unlock pacing, nice AFK / Active loops, good spread of ~idle sub-games (that are surprisingly well developed given the number of them), excellent attributions in the Info section, lots of thought clearly given to ease of use.
If there were a Support button, I'd throw some money at this free game. The designer deserves it for achieving so much more than the average Itch entry. Top 2% for sure, possibly a contender to steal Trimps's mantle.
Fantastic work, the game looks very smooth. There are of course things to work on, you have mentioned that the school is changing, which is probably good. But to find a game that looks this good and also has meaningful game progression is very rare. Great job, hope to see more in the future!
How to do I get more Ancient Hour Glass time?
You can get more by playing the school minigame. If you are looking for a way to increase the capacity of the hourglass, that won't be accessible until much later in the game
Can the game go beyond 1.79 x 10 ^ 308? I am looking for large numbers.
No, the numbers in this game stay rather small (10 ^ 30 to 10 ^ 60 for late game currencies
I suddenly can't type on the math minigame. I was typing before, but now I can only enter the number by hitting the up arrow. Did something change in the last few hours?
Hi, there was a recent update to allow the text box to stay focused when using the answer button, maybe that caused some other problems. Can you still type when manually clicking on the text box? If not, what browser / OS are you using?
I don't get the General Quest:
Time spent at most 30m 00s : 1d 11h? what? if I already spend one day how can I get to 0 Secs?
Never mind...just wait and I will answer my questions myself
Hi, it means you spent too much time and need to do a prestige for that feature. If you don't have access to the depth dweller in mining yet, try to reach 40m and look for the upgrade with the same name.
I fully agree with the guy who suggested having students to automate the school aspect. Just reached the Literature part and it's double bad because first off it's complete nonsense you're copying (rather than words) and secondly I keep switching up the reading of letters so I have to redo like 30% of the "words". I dread whatever gets unlocked next.
The fact that you CAN gain more resources than your capacity would indicate but that you CAN'T build something that costs more than your capacity threw me for a loop initially, especially because I didn't notice the Farm/Plantation/Mine got "we now increase your capacity" after the first purchase. Why not show that for the first build?
For the mine I wish there were moments where going back a couple of levels would be worthwhile (I'm at 27 right now), but it pretty much never works out to increasing your income despite the "x5 on break" modifier. I sure hope there's an upgrade for that modifier at some point because it feels so negligible it may as well be absent. Or a speed increasing upgrade.
Hi, like I stated in another response, the school feature is already on the to-do-list to receive big changes in the next update, and I will be addressing the literature subject as well.
Farms, plantations and mines do not show "Increase capacity" because the first building does not increase it
The mining x5 modifier will stay, even later in the game, but there are other reasons to visit earlier depths (this starts being a thing at around 50m)
Yeah, but why doesn't it increase the capacity? That just seems needlessly arbitrary.
The two things (that I've reached) that aren't quite being self-explanatory are:
Food is sold to workers in exchange for gold coins. Prior to unlocking tax rate it doesn’t get consumed so it just stockpiles until then. All of this information is visible in tooltips. As far as I can tell the only effect of running out of food is slower gold income.
Food (like already pointed out in another answer) is just used by the villagers to be converted to gold coins and running out has no negative effects (other than less gold)
For each unique card you collect you get a bonus based on the feature it belongs to (+5% damage for mining, +3% resource gain for village, ...)
You can also equip and activate duplicate cards in features when you unlock their prestige to get the effects listed (different for each card) until you prestige again
The school thing is cool and all, but seriously even if they are simple math questions at begin its a feature that makes it not good imo, maybe if it was a automated feature something like this, a student answer the questions where it has a % of answering correctly and as we use books it would get a higher %, in a way it would make things easier and less rewarding to good math players, but it would make the game more acessible since not everyone is good at math even through like i said they are all simple questions till D+ (the rank ive achieved)
Hi, I absolutely agree about the state of the school feature! I already changed a few things in v1.0.1 and (like I stated in another response), school will receive big changes in the next update to be less grindy
Questions: How does "mining autoprogress limit" work? It doesn't seem to do anything. I'm also not sure how to progress in the "deeprun" achievement. Says I have 12/15, no idea how.
Mining: Ore clumping to increase your odds of a good pickaxe craft is useless. Better off doing more tries with lower odds, since you get the same odds of getting an upgrade at all overall, plus a chance to get an upgrade for a lower cost.
Village: It could use some adjusting. It's cluttered with all its resources and upgrades that do similar, unsatisfying things (mostly larger capacity). It's giving me around the same amount of global levels as mining, but it feels like it's taking a lot longer than the other because you have to put so much more effort and brainpower into it. I think i'd start by making farms/plantations/mines cheaper since they can't produce extra income without already investing into more workers.
School: I'd like it if the rewards were improved at the cost of making the minigames more limited, like with an energy meter or simply making it so you can only do each game x times a day. That way people don't need to grind it as much.
Gems: Seems really, really slow for upgrades that aren't too huge or interesting.
Despite all that, i'm enjoying the game and i'm looking forward to future updates.
Mining autoprogress is a way to automatically dig down when you are on the deepest rock. The limit is the maximum amount of seconds the next rock can take to break for this to work. So if you put in 90 seconds it would keep digging down until it would take more than 90 seconds to break the next rock.
Ore clumping may be inefficient now, but that will change later in the game!
In the village, resource caps are a lot more important than in other features, which is why about every second building increases it. Buildings like farms, plantations and mines have the benefit of being persistent, which means that they stay even after prestige. So yeah, the village is intentionally slower than other features.
School is something I'm already working on, I simply did not expect players to grind that much for the time skips, so there will be some sort of limit on the amount of times you can play for these rewards.
Gems are (like the village) supposed to be one of the slower features, as they are meant to be a resource you really think about how to spend
I've found that clumping gets quite a bit more useful once you get a second metal to alloy with in crafting. You can use a large amount of the less scarce resource to improve the chances of getting something good out of the more scarce resource.
Has a rather nice UI design, and all of the QoL missing from so many other games, absolutely something that people should check out if they enjoy the genre!
The only bug I've run into is that the Community Center seems to have vanished when I started construction, which seems to be causing it to construct forever (There's nothing in the console though, which is odd)(It took forever to build and with the entry gone I could not get an estimate, but it finished eventually)I'm very much looking forward to seeing how things develop with this project!
I was just coming down to report on that crossed-out thing as a QoL issue! It also struck me that once you've started building a unique building, you can't see its progress. It'd be nice if the build queue could be expanded to show you more information (that; what the things in the queue are; how long they'll take...especially since you can reorder them, as I just learned, it'd be nice to know what effect that would have).
Why is the web version of the game so small
The game was smaller than intended so I updated it to be the same size as the desktop version
Much better, thanks!
Just one error to report: The limits do not seem to work. I have 4000 stone but a limit of 2700.
This is actually an intended feature! You can still collect resources after reaching the limit, but at a reduced rate
now it all makes sense
This is a really cool game! I love incremental games, but this one is quite unique. I love the mix of story elements with survival/town building and resource management. The depth of the game seems great from what little i've played so far too. (I also love that you can get more than max resources, just slowing down production that'ss a great feature.). All in all I can't wait to see more of what this can become ^^
wtf i lost all my progress
Hi, I'm sorry that happened to you! I don't know what exactly happened there. Restricting cookies / website data in your browser can prevent the game from saving correctly, maybe that's the issue. Did you play the game in browser or use the desktop (downloadable) version?
i played in browser and i dont restrict cookies
the game even mentioend how long i was offline but did not store any of my progress
That seems a little strange. Maybe the autosave got disabled somehow? The game usually saves every 30 seconds and notifies you about it. Could you please open your in-game settings (top right) and check if there is a number in the autosave option (generic, third option)?
says 30s
no idea what happened
ive gotten schoolign to D-- and still no books are offered
Attending school does not immediately give books, they are gained passively (you get more with better grades). If you want to buy upgrades with these books, you need to reach the maximum level of certain main feature upgrades
how do i use the bombs
The bomb in mining just shows how much damage you deal per second, it cannot be used