Hi everyone, sorry for a slightly delayed update this month. In fact that’s the main theme of this month’s update unfortunately – the necessity of returning to full-time work has hit me much, much harder than I thought it would, probably also due to the fact I now have a fairly long commute after working from home for 3.5 years. So progress has been much slower than I was hoping for, but now I’m settled in my new day job I should be able to fit in development time for Mountaincore here and there.

June was spent pretty much entirely still responding to crashes, bugs and feedback suggestions, primarily via the Discord server. The good news though is I think it’s about time to switch gears from focusing fully on improvements to what is already in the game, and change over to focusing on adding new content.

I was hoping that the first point of the roadmap would be done to release alongside this update, but sadly it isn’t ready quite yet. The first proper update will see metal alloys added, a use for all the different kinds of metal ores currently in the game (as there’s a few that were added by backer reward that don’t have an in-game use yet), and finally something to distinguish the different metals and other materials from each other. We’ll have some stats on materials such as hardness which will be used to determine how effective that material is when used to make an item, specifically weapons. For example, though they might look pretty, weapons made out of gold are not particularly effective as gold is a relatively soft metal that does not hold an edge very well. This is actually why alloys were invented in the first place – mixing some tin with copper produces bronze which is a much more effective material for weapons than copper alone, and this is why we have the historic period known as the Bronze Age.

So look out for that update coming hopefully in the next couple of weeks. Apologies again for the lack of updates more recently compared to when we were able to still focus on development full-time (and still had a team!) in the run-up to and after the Early Access launch. I don’t think the game is ever going to be successful enough to switch back to that (though I’ll keep hoping for a miracle), but regardless I’m as determined as ever to see this thing through and keep working on it whenever I can. See you next month then!