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:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

The save system got significantly more robust this update:

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.

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 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.

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

System | Asset | What happens
Upgrades | .upgrade | Auto-appears in shop, saves, tracks stats
Ores | .cube | Auto-spawns in nodes, tracks per-ore stats
Recipes | .recipe | Auto-appears in smelter UI
Trades | .trade | Auto-appears in Black Market rotation

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

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.

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.