s&box

Ore Works

Changes

Version 0.4 - The Automation Overhaul

0.4.0

17 July 2026

Work Rooms: New `WorkRoom` component defines named zones (Main Mine, Refinery...). Workers and drones get a permanent room assignment on spawn - they mine, collect and deliver only inside their room, ending the constant room-hopping that broke jobs and pathing. Reassign via the worker panel's new ROOM button; assignments persist in the save. Scenes without rooms behave exactly as before.
Black Market Redesign: The ore-for-ore trading post is gone. The Black Market is now a rotating buff shop - a daily seeded selection of temporary boosts (Quad Ore Production, Quad Mining Speed, Worker Frenzy, Smelter Overdrive, Overcharged Tools, Lucky Expeditions) bought with artifact credits. Data-driven via new `.buff` assets.
Expedition Artifacts: New `.artifact` assets (Ancient Relic, Strange Geode, Alien Alloy, Mystery Crate, Void Shard) are the Black Market's currency. Rarity-weighted drops, each with a credit value.
Dedicated Expedition Team: Expeditions no longer pull workers off the mining floor. Hire off-map specialists at the Black Market, send them out on wall-clock timers (they keep travelling while the game is closed), and they return with ore hauls and artifact finds. Members tier up every 3 completed expeditions. Legacy in-flight worker expeditions from old saves still complete normally.
Preferred Auto-Refine Ore: Star a baseline ore recipe in the smelter panel and workers prioritise refining that ore first. Note: The star only appears on single-input recipes; complex recipes like alloys cannot be starred to prevent automation from accidentally burning your rare resources. Persists in the save.
Hold-to-Mine: Hold Mouse1 to keep swinging - no more click-per-swing. Cooldown, attack speed and animation timing are all still respected.
Mining Augments: New 5-tier upgrade adding up to +90% swing speed. (The tier-5 automatic swinging was removed shortly after - it fired unprompted whenever ore was near and felt bad. All 5 tiers now boost swing speed only.)
Trapped-Ore Escape: Ore that workers repeatedly fail to reach gets a physics nudge (pops up and sideways out of props/machines) and a 30s targeting cooldown - workers abandon it, retry later, and never stand beside unreachable ore forever.
Weekly Contracts: The contract system has been completely rewritten into a data-driven model with over 100 new unique contracts. In addition to 3 daily contracts, you now receive 2 massive Weekly Contracts per week that require 7x the effort for 7x the reward!
Live Events: Server-scheduled events (Double Ores Weekend, seasonal specials...) override game tuning values live - drop rates, upgrade costs, sell prices - with no game update. Events can recur automatically (e.g. every weekend), and an in-world display shows the active event with a live "Started / Ends in" countdown. Overrides revert cleanly the moment an event ends.
Outdoor Courtyard Expansion: A second, much larger expansion zone - an open-air courtyard - joins the cramped indoor sectors, with far more physical room for extraction bays and its own grown-in grass and lighting.

Inventory Panel Overhaul: The ASSET MANIFEST panel (ores, ingots, contracts, crew) got a full visual rework - top tab bar replaced with a vertical rail showing live counts per tab, wider layout so crew list and detail view sit side-by-side instead of stacking, ore/ingot cards got color-coded stripes, contracts got a cleaner progress readout, and the credits total now formats with commas like the HUD. Same industrial orange/steel theme throughout, no behavior changes.
Pause Menu Settings Overhaul: The SETTINGS screen's top tab bar was replaced with the same vertical icon rail used in the inventory panel, widened the panel so labels aren't cramped, and gave the header an accent stripe + subtitle to match. Audio/Controls/Graphics/Bindings tabs, sliders, toggles and key bindings all work exactly as before - visual only.
Full UI Theming Pass: Extended the inventory/pause-menu look (accent header stripe + subtitle, vertical icon rail for tabbed screens, comma-formatted credit totals) across the rest of the game's UI - the Shop (Hardware/Augments/Facility tabs), the main menu's own Settings screen, the Smelter, and the Black Market. All behavior, purchasing, and data logic is unchanged; this is visual consistency only.
Ore Highlight Toggle: Colored outlines on dropped ore and ingots can now be toggled on or off in Settings (Graphics tab). New drops respect the setting immediately, and toggling it live updates every pickup already on the ground.
Visual & Performance Polish: Made game props static for better performance, optimized ore pickup physics, and capped crack visualizer wobble intensity to prevent explosive physics glitches on node impacts.
Drones Are Miners Now: Drones only mine. All collection/ferrying states were removed - they never pick up ore or ingots, never fly deliveries, never fight workers over pickups, and can't be confused by moved ore. They also avoid nodes a worker is already targeting when alternatives exist. Workers own the full logistics loop.
Tool Tier Power: New shared tier rule (player, workers - one implementation in `MiningBalance`): a tool above an ore's tier instantly destroys the node (the Tier 6 Gold Pickaxe one-shots every Tier 0–5 ore), an at-tier tool always breaks a node within 3 swings (the Gold Pickaxe vs diamond went from 42 swings to 3), and under-tier tools still barely scratch. Tunable via `tier_adv_oneshot_min` and `equal_tier_max_swings`.
Coal Economy: Coal availability roughly quadrupled - nodes drop 5–10 coal (was 2–4) and spawn weight raised 1.6 → 2.4. Smelter fuel is no longer a progression bottleneck.
Smarter Auto-Smelting: Automation now picks recipes preferred-ore-first, then cheapest-ore-first, so idle workers can never quietly burn diamond or mythril stockpiles.
Living Market: The market simulation got a full rework - fresh price movement every poll (was effectively once per hour), momentum so trends persist into rallies and crashes, rare spike/crash events, and 2-decimal prices so cheap ingots aren't frozen by rounding.

Worker Index Collisions: Firing a worker in the middle of the crew re-issued its index to the next hire, corrupting tier and expedition save entries. Indexes are now always unique.
Ore Claim Stealing: A worker grabbing a "second ore for the trip" ignored other workers' claims, leaving the robbed worker chasing a pickup that no longer existed. Claims are now respected and properly taken.
Worker Promotion Persistence: Room assignments and tiers are saved index-aligned and restored via the same deferred-apply path, so promotions survive firings, expeditions and reloads.
Smelter Recipes: Fixed an oreType key mismatch that was breaking smelter recipes, and updated the system so local .recipe files are the true source of truth for ingredients.