Why Early Access?

“Aethel Mine is a deterministic factory-building simulation on a custom engine. The first nine launcher projects are playable today, and the rest of the game (interstellar travel, new ores, new machines, a redesigned interface, multiplayer) is still to be built. We are releasing in Early Access because we want players' experience to shape that work: which production ratios feel wrong, where the difficulty curve is too steep, what is missing from the factory-building toolbox, and which problems appear on real machines with real, large factories.”

Approximately how long will this game be in Early Access?

“We plan to stay in Early Access for around a year, and we will adjust that as the work goes on. The time frame is a plan and not a promise.”

How is the full version planned to differ from the Early Access version?

“The Early Access version is a complete single-player game up to launcher project 9 and stops there, telling you so. We plan to add, roughly in this order:
- Travel between star systems, with new worlds, new ores and their ingots, alloys and components, and a much more powerful power source.
- More things to build, including larger storage chests.
- Later launcher projects, up to the fifteen currently designed.
- A redesigned user interface.
- Cooperative multiplayer. It is not in the current build.
- Steam features such as achievements.
Content and order may change with player feedback; we will describe each update in its patch notes.”

What is the current state of the Early Access version?

“The current version (0.2.2) is a single-player game you can play from your first drill to the ninth launcher project:
- A procedurally generated world for each seed, with terraced terrain, lakes and several biomes; other worlds of the star system can be visited.
- A tech tree of several hundred items and recipes, with smelters, assemblers, refineries and chemical plants.
- Belts, splitters, mergers, pipes, roads and rails, with gravity and pressure limits on slopes.
- A power grid with visible lines, and heat that machines radiate.
- Fourteen milestones handed to the headquarters, then a launcher that takes numbered projects.
- Background music with a volume setting. Sound effects are limited and will be extended.
Known limits: there is no multiplayer yet, the interface will be redesigned in a later update, and the game ends at project 9 for now.”

Will the game be priced differently during and after Early Access?

“We plan to raise the price as substantial content and features are added, so the Early Access price reflects a game that is not yet complete. We do not plan to change it before there is significant new content.”

How are you planning on involving the Community in your development process?

“We read the Steam community hub and player reports, and the game has a built-in bug report (pause menu: it writes a plain-text report that you can read and send yourself). Feedback on balance, on difficulty, on what is missing from the tools and on performance with large factories decides the order of what we build. We publish patch notes with each update.”