Thanks for being patient I know it's been a while since the last update, this new patch was a doozy. Plenty of Quality of life for both Demo and Beta builds, and Entropy is now available for testing.

• Entropy is now an active and regenerating threat. Rifts are the source of where Entropy will spread from. Rifts will spawn once you've entered another Plane near any Mote Field you've been collecting from.

• Entropy can be cleansed with spells (currently Riptide only) and Downpour Bastion, which will create a field of cleansing, but Rifts themselves can only be sealed with an Incineration Spire. The more planes you visit, the more aggressive the Rifts will become.

• Remember that Entropy pierces the planes, so a Mote Field on one plane can interfere with your base on other Planes.

• Entropy now persist through saves

• Intro sequence uses the new entropy system but appears close to what it was before

• Structures with power consumption will now be at 0 power if any part of their footprint is in entropy.

• The Great Portal is now capable of having the Elemental Orbs be replenished with Keystones and Catalysts. Please give feedback on the UI, there's still work to do but the main request is to make sure it feels intuitive enough.

• Collision should be fixed for the Anchor Stones near the Great Portal

• Mouseover tooltips have been significantly reworked to show more information that is contextual to whatever you are hovering over. Please give feedback on this. Mote Fields and Entropy/Rift tips coming shortly.

• Add preview arrows to all belts

• Collector specialization now shows colored text to help draw attention

• Infusion Altars will now show mismatching ingredients with a red slot if there is no research for that ingredient available

• Slight right offset to item counts while holding to prevent cursor getting in the way of held count

• Hitting escape during an interactive rebind will now unbind that key.

• Recipe updates for diamonds, charged lodestone, quintessence

• Mana Bloom initial power area +1 radius

• Fire Wire and Thermal Tower initial power area +1 radius

• Tree of Life Research 1 and 2 tuned back to 30 and 50

• Infusion Altar now takes 100 power to operate

• Mana Flare now generates 500 Power

• Coral Pool power cost now 1000

• Air power now generates 5 per open-air tile, from 2

• Fire power buffed significantly and is now more in line with Air and Life

• Second Shadow music track added!

• Added a thin line to the outside range of Biorhythm and Downpour Bastion

• Art polish passes for:

• Mana Pool

• Primordial Manawell

• Downpour Bastion

• Coral Pool

• Ritual Shrooms

• Reef Crafter

• All Grippers

• Vortex Miner

• Zephyrmill

• Incineration Spire

• Void Chest

• Coral Pools now save and load properly

• Fixed a variety of ways buildings could not be harvested or interacted with, mostly from interference from other Planes.

• Fixed a bad verdant stream collider

• Fixed a bug that would allow you to dupe Fire Wire

• Fixed a bug that could cause your player to get stuck if pressing Q while casting a spell

• Attempting to force game to run while in background to fix the few folks who have reported it. This is inconsistent, please give feedback.

• Fixed a bug where info text could block mouse input randomly

• Walking near a Tidal Collector should sort with the player properly now

• Fixed a variety of ways fire power could load improperly

• More defense against overlapping aspect states

• Fixed a variety of Collector Crystal FX that weren't sorting properly

• Roots under buildings should no longer break Nudge

Thanks again for all the feedback, suggestions, and bug reports, keep them coming!

~CyanAvatar

Making randomness feel good is one of the trickiest things in games. If you go with true randomness — pure chaos with a side of regret — it often feels terrible to players. It’s clumpy, swingy, and frustrating. Drawing a 1-in-100 result three times in a row isn’t just unlikely — it’s inevitable given enough time, and that kind of streak tends to wreck pacing and fun.

credit: https://forums.lindale.io/t/grid-and-uniform/1154

What players tend to want isn’t “random” — it’s more about “unpredictability.” Something they can’t quite script, but can still react to and reason about. And that’s where my favorite randomization tool comes in: the humble deck of cards.

There are all kinds of clever techniques for smoothing out randomness: escalating chances, rerolls, weighted sampling, averaging multiple rolls — and they all work in different contexts. But none of them quite do what a deck of cards does: ensure coverage. You’ll see every card eventually, but in a shuffled order. Repeats are rare, patterns are broken, and you always get a fresh mix.

In board games this is standard, but digital games often forget how powerful it can be. In MoteMancer, we use this technique somewhere you might not expect: the music selection system.

Each Element (Life, Earth, Water, etc.) has its own shuffled “deck” of music tracks. When a track plays, it gets set aside until it is ready to be shuffled, and we are guaranteed to not hear it again until we’ve cycled through the rest. Already, this means few repeats, smoother transitions, and way more variety.

But, we also have a deck of elements layered on top — like a meta-deck that controls which plane's deck we draw from. It includes cards like “Current Plane”, “Clockwise Plane”, and “Counterclockwise Plane.” Shuffle it, draw one, and use that to pick which elemental deck to pull a track from — using the player's current plane as the key. This technique is affectionately known as a "Deck of Decks".

The result? You always get music that’s relevant to your surroundings, but never in a fixed or looping order. As you move from Life to Water to Air, the soundscape shifts with you — organically and unpredictably, but always feels correct.

There are so many more ways to play with this kind of layered randomness. Enemy spawns, game modifiers, even procedural terrain (looking forward to that one!). But for now, I just wanted to highlight a quiet corner of MoteMancer where a bit of clever math makes the world feel alive.

Thanks for reading, and if you’re curious: yes, I have spreadsheets for all of it. 😇

~CyanAvatar