s&box News

Hired Crew — NPC Workers

The Shop now offers a Hired Crew upgrade that spawns actual NPC miners into your facility. These workers autonomously pathfind to ore nodes, swing their pickaxes, and deposit what they find. Each upgrade level adds another worker to your crew, and they'll keep mining even while you're busy elsewhere.

Workers are surprisingly capable:

Open doors automatically when navigating between rooms
Collect dropped ingots and deposit them into the nearest output crate
Pick the best smelter dynamically - preferring idle ones over busy ones
Recover from getting stuck - if a worker gets wedged, it resets and finds a new path

Worker Management

Walk up to any NPC worker and press E to open their management panel:

Promote - spend ore to increase their mining tier, letting them handle tougher nodes
Praise - free temporary speed boost
Fire - dismiss the worker with a dissolve effect

Workers now have individual tiers that determine mining efficiency against higher-tier ores.

Base Expansion System

A new expansion system gates facility growth. Invest resources to unlock new rooms, and each unlock directly expands:

Worker capacity (+2 workers per room or more as they randomly walk to other rooms)
Extraction bay slots (+4 bays per room, laid out in a grid)
Mining throughput as workers spread across rooms and use the nearest smelter

This creates a loop where unlocking rooms directly increases production and automation depth.

Mining Drone

The old Auto-Miner has been split into two distinct upgrades:

Hired Crew: Physical NPC workers (described above)
Mining Drone: A flying drone that orbits nodes and chips away at them passively - pure DPS scaling for late game

This gives you meaningful choices in how you automate your operation.

Trading Post — Black Market

Need brass but drowning in coal? The Black Market lets you exchange materials at rotating daily rates. Walk up, interact, and swap surplus for what you actually need. Now with 11 trade offers covering ore-to-ingot, ingot-to-ingot, and ingot-to-ore exchanges.

Card-Based Shop UI

The shop has been redesigned with a compact card grid layout for both Hardware and Augments tabs. Each item is a self-contained card showing name, stats, and action button. The grid tiles naturally so future content fills the space without scrolling through endless rows.

Smelter Output Crates

Finished ingots no longer teleport into your inventory. They drop into a physical output crate next to the smelter - walk up and collect when you're ready. A floating panel above each crate shows exactly what's waiting inside.

Save System Hardening

The save system got significantly more robust this update:

Auto-save interval tightened from 30s to 15 seconds
Shutdown saves detect if the game is closing and safely fall back to the latest auto-save instead of writing empty data
Smelter state is fully persistent - active progress, the recipe queue, and uncollected crate ingots are all saved. Quit mid-smelt and come back to find everything exactly where you left it
Multi-smelter and multi-crate support - each smelter saves independently, so expansion rooms work properly
V5→V6 migration - converts legacy individual upgrade fields to the new dictionary format automatically

Ore Node Tier HUD

Looking at an ore node now shows its name, rarity tier, and color. If your tool is under-leveled, a warning tells you exactly which tool to upgrade to.

Tool & Ore Rebalance

Every tool now has a unique tier (0–6), spread across the full progression. No more duplicate tiers. Ore nodes scale to match, giving each weapon purchase a meaningful unlock.

The mine runs itself now. See you in 0.4.

Per-Ore Stat Tracking

Every ore type now automatically tracks ore_{name}_destroyed and ore_{name}_collected on the backend. No manual stat registration - just create a .cube file with a StatId and it starts tracking.

Modular Asset Registries

Every content system now follows the same modular pattern. Adding new content is a matter of creating an asset file:

Central registries (OreRegistry, RecipeRegistry, TradeRegistry, UpgradeManager) cache everything at startup and provide fast generic lookups.

Data-Driven Upgrade Library

The entire upgrade system has been rebuilt from scratch. Upgrades are now fully data-driven - adding a new upgrade means creating a single .upgrade asset file. No code changes required.

Dictionary-based levels replace individual properties - supports unlimited upgrades
Generic effect API - gameplay systems query UpgradeManager.GetEffect("tag") instead of knowing about specific upgrades
Automatic shop population - new upgrades appear in the shop instantly
Automatic save/load - no SaveData edits needed
Automatic stat tracking - each upgrade fires per-upgrade stats to the backend
Unlock conditions - upgrades can require prestige level, expansion, other upgrades, or specific weapons
Categories - Mining, Automation, Smelting, Economy, Combat, Utility, Prestige

Material Icons Overhaul

Emoji are out, icons are in. Every UI panel across the game - from the main menu and HUD to the shop, inventory, smelter, trading post, worker management, and leaderboards - now uses Google Material Icons. Buttons have recognizable symbols (play_arrow, settings, close), section headers use relevant icons (leaderboard, inventory_2, hexagon), and the ⛏ emoji has been replaced with a consistent paid icon throughout. The result is a cleaner, more professional interface that's easier to read at a glance.