s&box

0.3.1

6 July 2026

Tier-Based Expedition Rarity: The rarity of items a worker can find during an expedition is now strictly governed by their current Mining Tier (higher tier = access to deeper loot table indices).
Smart Smelter Routing: NPC Workers carrying specific ores will now actively seek out a smelter that is currently processing or queued for that exact ore type.
Skill-Based Prioritization: High-tier NPC Workers now prioritize mining the highest-tier nodes available to them, rather than wasting time on low-tier materials.
Active Stuck Detection: NPC Workers now monitor their own velocity and will "fast-fail" within 2 seconds if they get stuck against physics geometry, instead of hopelessly pushing against walls for 20 seconds.
Extended Progression: Added 4 new extraction tier thresholds (Tiers 6-9) allowing access to all remaining high-tier ores like Diamond, Mythril, and Obsidian.

NPC Worker Spawning: Spawning logic was rewritten to use a deterministic circular distribution, completely eliminating physics clipping and overlapping when deploying a large crew.
NPC Worker Responsiveness: Removed random 2-5 second idle delays between actions. Workers now also prime their animations so they swing their pickaxes the exact moment they reach a node.
Ore Node Visuals: Removed the aggressive pulsing/flashing highlight effect from ore nodes for a cleaner visual experience.
Tier Level Up UI: The tier notification has been repositioned to cleanly slide in at the top of the screen without blinding the player with overpowering visual effects.

Pathfinding Performance: Fixed a massive CPU performance drain where NPC Workers were recalculating their NavMesh paths every single frame (60 times a second) while retrieving stray ore and ingots.