023 was a tumultuous year for Mountaincore - we were made to keep the community in the dark by a publisher which ultimately backed out, scrambled to release the game according to the plan that had been put in place, and ultimately it suffered as a commercial failure.

The Mountaincore launch was way below what was required to keep even a single dev employed working on the game, so eventually all staff were laid off and it was forced to revert to being a free-time hobby project. This hasn't really worked out and the game hasn't seen any updates since that launch period, and I deeply apologise for that.

In addition, the company (Rocket Jump Technology) has had to be declared insolvent as the small amount of revenue from Mountaincore was not enough to cover even the small debts the company owed (themselves just a tiny fraction of the publisher-funded development budget). This means that Rocket Jump Technology is no more, and with it, there's very little chance of Mountaincore continuing to receive focused development.

That said, it is not entirely bad news. While the legal ownership of Mountaincore itself is still unclear due to the significant investment by the publisher, Rocket Jump Technology still owned all the rights to its preceding form, King under the Mountain, and this has now been made freely available as an (MIT-licensed) open-source project at https://github.com/rossturner/king-under-the-mountain

The MIT license is extremely permissive, essentially allowing you to do whatever you like with the contents, including using it for commercial purposes. The hope is that perhaps people will choose to continue developing the game as a community project, or failing that perhaps it will be useful to other developers (aspiring or not) to build something out of into another game.

Again I can only apologise for ending up in this situation, I didn't want this to happen as much as any of you. I've been working on King under the Mountain and Mountaincore since 2015, making it the most significant project I'll probably ever get to work on. Generally the community and response has been absolutely fantastic and I couldn't have hoped for that. Hopefully this isn't the end of Mountaincore entirely, but I don't foresee any updates in the near future, so it was important to set this expectation. Maybe I'll see you in the king-under-the-moutain github repo!

Hi everyone, sorry for a slightly delayed update this month. In fact thats the main theme of this months update unfortunately the necessity of returning to full-time work has hit me much, much harder than I thought it would, probably also due to the fact I now have a fairly long commute after working from home for 3.5 years. So progress has been much slower than I was hoping for, but now Im settled in my new day job I should be able to fit in development time for Mountaincore here and there.

June was spent pretty much entirely still responding to crashes, bugs and feedback suggestions, primarily via the Discord server. The good news though is I think its about time to switch gears from focusing fully on improvements to what is already in the game, and change over to focusing on adding new content.

I was hoping that the first point of the roadmap would be done to release alongside this update, but sadly it isnt ready quite yet. The first proper update will see metal alloys added, a use for all the different kinds of metal ores currently in the game (as theres a few that were added by backer reward that dont have an in-game use yet), and finally something to distinguish the different metals and other materials from each other. Well have some stats on materials such as hardness which will be used to determine how effective that material is when used to make an item, specifically weapons. For example, though they might look pretty, weapons made out of gold are not particularly effective as gold is a relatively soft metal that does not hold an edge very well. This is actually why alloys were invented in the first place mixing some tin with copper produces bronze which is a much more effective material for weapons than copper alone, and this is why we have the historic period known as the Bronze Age.

So look out for that update coming hopefully in the next couple of weeks. Apologies again for the lack of updates more recently compared to when we were able to still focus on development full-time (and still had a team!) in the run-up to and after the Early Access launch. I dont think the game is ever going to be successful enough to switch back to that (though Ill keep hoping for a miracle), but regardless Im as determined as ever to see this thing through and keep working on it whenever I can. See you next month then!

Adjusted chances of creating items from mining (stone is less likely, ore is more likely) and made this moddable
- Deconstruction of furniture can now be cancelled
- Skeletons will now eventually disappear
- Made hops quicker to grow
- Reduced the chance of fire from jobs that can cause fires
- Barrels now need 2x staves and hoops to craft
- Fire now lasts longer between state transitions (more time to extinguish it)
- Fix for a crash when a creature has no schedule
- Ignoring save file location when under Microsoft OneDrive as this causes many saves to fail.
- If affected, you will need to move your save files out of OneDrive to a different location (see preferences.properties file for your new location) if you want to continue using them.
- Fix for a crash when a cooking job ingredient hauling has been cancelled
- Fix for a crash when attempting to dump a stack of items that are partly allocated elsewhere

Fix for liquid hauling jobs not working i.e. filling of water barrel
- Improvement to furniture that collects items such as kitchen worktop

Settlers will now hold on to their waterskins for a lot longer
- Fix for walls and bridges not being built
- Attempted fix for trading chests getting stuck and no longer collecting coins
- Hauling items to stockpiles will now default the job to the priority of the target stockpile (room or furniture)
- Note that this does not affect the priority of jobs already created

Reduced toughness of the undead (though they're still very hard to kill - bring hammers)
- Made collection of ammo while in military more important than other goals (i.e. standing on guard)
- Dwarves will no longer fight each other to the death because of a stray arrow hitting a friend in the back
- Idling is no longer interrupted by low needs to ensure dwarves get themselves unstuck from under furniture
- Fix for a crash when attempting to attack but no opponent is selected
- Fix for a crash when a military squad member has been completely obliterated from the world
- Fix for a crash when spawning a particle effect for an item and the target material can not be found
- Fix for a crash that can happen when requesting items to a construction
- Fix for a crash when closing the game multiple times(!)
- Fix for a crash due to missing code in an AI action to refill waterskins
- Fix for the game not launching on MacOS

Reduced toughness of the undead (though they're still very hard to kill - bring hammers)
- Made collection of ammo while in military more important than other goals (i.e. standing on guard)
- Dwarves will no longer fight each other to the death because of a stray arrow hitting a friend in the back
- Idling is no longer interrupted by low needs to ensure dwarves get themselves unstuck from under furniture
- Fix for a crash when attempting to attack but no opponent is selected
- Fix for a crash when a military squad member has been completely obliterated from the world
- Fix for a crash when spawning a particle effect for an item and the target material can not be found
- Fix for a crash that can happen when requesting items to a construction
- Fix for a crash when closing the game multiple times(!)
- Fix for a crash due to missing code in an AI action to refill waterskins

Hi everyone! May was a particularly exciting month because we launched into Early Access!!

Im very happy with the response from most people so far, lots and lots of you are enjoying it, many YouTube and Twitch streamers have picked up the game and almost all of those enjoyed it too, though unfortunately Mountaincore is sitting at Mixed on Steam due to hovering just under 70% positive reviews. If youve bought the game directly on Steam (and I believe previously purchasing King under the Mountain from Steam would count as well) and youre enjoying it so far and eager to see what we can add to the game, please leave a positive review. Theres no greater impact on the sales (or not) of a game if someone gets to a store page with the difference between Mixed and Positive for the overall reviews. Sadly all the keys granted for the pre-Early Access dont count to the review score, or wed be sitting at 85% Very Positive! So thats a real shame, because the game sitting on Mixed will kill off what are already pretty mediocre sales figures and we simply wont be able to afford to see out the full roadmap of what I want this game to develop into throughout Early Access.

As mentioned there, sales have been pretty poor but about what I was expecting given that we were forced to release Mountaincore on very short notice after being forced to go dark on comms for so long after the publisher backed out, and the reliance was on the publisher to cover marketing which hasnt happened. That cant be helped now though, and theres a good base to build on so theres still hope that as we add more to the game, add polish and fix the issues that people are having, perhaps it will start to attract a wider audience.

The real bad news is that with such poor sales, we cant afford to continue the small-team full-time development the game has benefitted from over the past year. Mountaincore will have to go back to being a solo-dev hobby project that I work on whenever I can in my free time, and any revenue generated will go towards commissioning freelancers to produce artwork and the other assets that are needed to see out the rest of the roadmap.

So on that note, we have an updated roadmap! As mentioned on the Roadmap page, its been broken up into a main part of the roadmap, and a series of Stretch Goals which Id love to add but will depend on the game finding enough success to finance it. Ive been working on Mountaincore for close to 8 years now, and progress will probably be relatively slow while its just done in my free evenings by a single developer, so I need to keep the upcoming roadmap to something manageable. This means Ive cut back a bit on the scope creep that was afflicting the King under the Mountain roadmap if you were familiar with the old roadmap. That said, Im pretty sure theres already some things I intend to add to this roadmap, and/or some small updates from the feedback and suggestions given so far in the Discord server that didnt need their own section. Anything really important that were missing? Well, yes, theres many many things that could be added to this game. Let me know in the comments or on Discord!

In June Ill still be responding to the feedback received on improvements for the existing features and systems in the game, as well as some bugs weve still to get under control. Turns out that its really easy for a very complicated game to have bugs in it! Hopefully Ill have also made a start on the roadmap features too though. See you next month!

Attempted fix for weapons sometimes going missing
- Disabled exclusive full screen mode on Mac until we can fix the OS-level crash this is causing
- Dwarves can no longer drink from the water barrel in a brewery to avoid blocking the production of wort
- Note that this change will auto-deconstruct any existing brewery water barrels
- Health and Safety inspectors have banned the dwarves from drinking beer directly from fermentation tanks

Updated underlying engine library to latest version
- This fixes some small issues like being able to launch the browser on Mac
- It also means we can have a splash screen!
- Settlers can no longer die due to food poisoning (there is still a happiness malus)
- Disabled beer tappers will no longer bring beer barrels to themselves
- Farmers are now responsible for harvesting crops, rather than Haulers
- Stonemasons are now responsible for placing pipes, rather than Haulers

Settlers will now collect a stack of seeds when farming again rather than one seed at once
- Reduced happiness malus from going sober
- Fix for duplication of bread and rations placed on a feasting hall table
- Settlers will no longer use disabled beer tappers
- One of the starting settlers is now a Carpenter/Woodcutter rather than Woodcutter/Carpenter

Settlers will now never interrupt a job to move food to the feasting hall
- Fix for construction of flooring, walls and roofing not working correctly

Settlers should now collect items needed to work on jobs before waiting until all other work is completed
- Made the main menu background image smaller to reduce memory usage
- Fix for a crash when destroying a butchery station

Reduced repelling force due to many entities in one location to avoid issues in very busy locations
- Fix for the game not working in a Turkish locale
- Fix for when cauldrons get stuck in transit between kitchen and feasting hall
- Fix for a crash due to sorting algorithms making use of a random element
- Fix for a crash when removing a zone from a region that no longer exists
- Fix for a crash when a doorway was constructed with no materials
- Fix for a crash when laying power lines along the map edge
- Hopeful fix for a crash due to misallocation of funds when trading
- Increased minimum memory usage to 2GB (We want to know if this affects you negatively)

"Add tiles" button when a stockpile is selected will now correctly use that stockpile's (first if several) stockpile group
- Adding a stockpile will now use the settings of a stockpile that is being extended rather than what was selected
- Note that merging two existing stockpiles together will keep both of their settings
- Fixes and improvements to butchery station
- Transferring water to soup cauldrons is now the responsibility of a Chef (was a Hauler previously, which was incorrect)
- The construction of a feasting hall cauldron (and hauling a cauldron of soup to it) now gets set to the priority of the kitchen it is coming from
- Improved logging to avoid writing too much to disk
- Improved crash handling to keep stack trace instead of it being lost sometimes

Added a label to export pallets to warn when a production limit has been reached
- Updated French translation, with thanks to Crono Natsuga

Fishing now only has a chance to catch a fish (depending on skill level) rather than always being successful
- Ore crushing is now performed by the stonemason rather than blacksmith
- Corn and Hemp now grow a little faster
- Exposed the colour codes for roofing view to modding
- Fix for a crash when a liquid container no longer has a valid access zone

Corrected weapon rack tags
- Prevented placement of rooms over irrigation channels
- Removed state file for Asset Editor tool to prevent a crash

Fix for crashes and other problems with messed up room tiles
- Fix for a crash when merchants are paying but all coins are assigned elsewhere
- Fix for a crash when a material is lost
- Corrected an issue where merchants paying for items could cause extra piles of coins to appear in the resources screen
- Added (crossbow) bolts to weapon rack storage

• Fixes for a few crashes when changing professions
  
• Corrected file format of new music track
  
• Renamed pallets in Trading Depot to make more sense