s&box

1.5.0

18 August 2026

Three places, three buttons. The top bar now carries picture buttons for the Gemworks, the Mines and the Expeditions camp; a locked one wears a padlock and names the gem that opens it (Iron Ore for the mines, Omnigem for the camp). Under each button a one-line feed says what that room is earning right now.
The Deep Claim: stake up to 8 mines on the rock face, dig each one deeper tier by tier, hire up to 3 miners per mine, up to 12 cart haulers on the rail and 3 haul trucks with drivers. Ore goes mine -> cart -> crusher -> bay -> truck -> coins on delivery, and every link is a purchase with its own ladder.
A dispatcher sends each departing cart to the mine whose ore is worth the most to it - dear ore first, a bonus for a mine whose crew stands idle, and a growing bonus the longer a mine goes uncollected. Carts show the gem they carry; trucks drive off with the body heaped in it.
The crusher chews one ore type per lane, in the order the hopper received them, and LANES buys up to four lanes - fewer changeovers on a mixed feed, never more throughput. It comes with two hands of its own: an operator shovelling the hopper and a spout hand raking the pile.
Rail Depot: three camp-wide cart upgrades - Grease (speed), Buckets (capacity), Coupling (shorter stops). Carts tip at the crusher the moment they arrive.
Trucks nose out of the standby lane front-on, drive the road side-on, and back into their slot rear-on with the reverse lights lit. Three of them, each carrying more.
The Expeditions camp, one screen to the left: trailhead, signpost, tent, map table, campfire and the three explorers, who are gone while a trip is out. Provision the party with shards for the Shallows, the Old Workings or the Gnome Warrens; the first two run endless once launched.
Expedition finds: timed boons, permanent field gear, three lost tools - the Twinning Wand, the Dowsing Rod and the Blasting Charge - and Tay, the Foreman Gnome, who makes every crew dig 20% faster.
Tay rides a pump handcar round the cart circuit on errands of his own: he stops at crews to shout at them (they mutter back once he has rolled on), yells at the crusher, parks in the middle of nowhere to rant at nobody, asks a truck driver for a honk - and gets one - and has questions about passing a cart on the same rail without a crash.
Energy Rounds: the single dearest purchase in the game, three ranks. Tay lobs an energy drink to every miner at each stop and that crew digs +25% / +50% / +75% faster for 25 seconds.
Every room has its own sound - picks, the crusher chewing, cart clacks, a quiet diesel, the register on a sale; the campfire and the departure whistle in the camp - and every speech bubble comes with a cartoon voice blip.

Hover cards in the camp and the mines: an icon and a title on a coloured rule, then the details as chips. Every stock wears a fill bar under its number - mine stock, cart load, hopper, bay, truck bed - green while there is room, amber past three quarters, orange when full; the crusher's two bars carry the gem they are about.
A quiet three-line ticker at the bottom of the mines: what is being dug and how fast, what the crusher is chewing (and what is queued), and what the trucks have sold - the last sale lit for a moment. Deliveries pop a SOLD banner with the coins big and gold.
Missing hires are written where they are missing: DRIVER over a driverless truck, MINER over an empty mine.
The camp's ladders were re-priced upward across the board (about ten times the earlier numbers - the whole camp now runs out around Void Crystal), and the first cart carries 6 ore instead of 4.
The coin counter now has names all the way to a centillion.
The Gemworks' strikes drop to a murmur while you are looking at another room.

A cart bigger than the crusher's hopper could park at the dock forever; it now tips in instalments.
The Foreman's speech bubbles are drawn as real text over the world - they used to vanish behind their own paper.

The Foreman's lines, the crews' replies and the drivers' honks are in English in every language.