Hi Miners! ⛏️

After Hours update is now live!

With Phase 2, Ore Factory Squad expands beyond the factory floor and brings more life to Redstone City after a long day of mining.

Buy your own place, customize your vehicles, try new casino and table games, track your company stats, and enjoy major improvements across belts, controls, optimization, and more.

Here’s what’s included in today’s update:

🏠 Purchasable Homes

You can now buy your own place in Redstone City.

• Two purchasable homes are now available on the map, giving you a place to return to after work.

• Small Apartment is a 1+0 studio apartment located right across from the factory. It includes a fridge with free sandwiches, a simple 2-player board game called Four Lines, a bed that skips the day and gives a buff, and a personal computer.

• Luxury Loft is a stylish loft near the center of the map. It includes a 2-player Billiards game, a bed, and a personal computer.

🎰 New Casino Games

The Casino now has more ways to win or lose your hard-earned factory money.

• Try the new digital Pachinko machine.

• Sit down at the new Blackjack table, playable with up to 4 players.

• Roulette received UI improvements.

• Slot Machine and Pachinko now support a quick interaction shortcut. When standing in front of them, you can press the jump key to quickly Spin or Launch without moving the camera to the interaction point.

🚗 Redstone Customs

Your work vehicles no longer have to stay factory white.

• Redstone Customs is now open as a new vehicle customization garage.

• You can customize vehicle paint, license plates, tires, rims, and accessories.

• Whether you want a cleaner company look or just something that stands out, your vehicles can now feel more personal while hauling materials around the city.

⚡ Belt Rework

The belt system has received a major rework for cleaner automation, smoother item flow, and better performance.

• Belts now stop properly when items have nowhere to go, instead of letting items fall, pile up, or scatter around machines.

• If a machine cannot accept an item, or if the belt line is full, the belt will now wait until there is room again.

• Belt placement has been reworked. You can now drag to extend belt paths automatically, including turns and final piece behavior.

• Belts are now handled by a single central system. Only belts actively carrying items cost performance, so empty belt lines are effectively free regardless of length.

• Belt connection rebuilding is now batched into a single pass, improving load times for large factories.

• Item movement along belts should now feel smoother and more consistent, including handoffs into machines, pallets, and sorters.

📊 Statistics App

The computer now gives you a clearer look at how your company is doing.

• The new Statistics app tracks production, mining, contracts, expenses, bank activity, employees, and gambling.

• Income and expense breakdown charts show where your money is coming from and where it is going.

• Gambling stats are also tracked, in case you want to know how much damage the Casino has done.

🗺️ Map UI Update

The map interface is now easier to read and navigate.

• You can now zoom and pan around the map.

• Location names appear when hovering over icons.

• These changes should make it easier to find your factory, properties, homes, garage, and other important locations.

🎚️ Difficulty Modes

You can now choose how demanding your run should be.

• Choose between Easy, Normal, and Hard difficulty modes.

• Difficulty can be changed in both new games and existing saves.

• Easy offers a more relaxed experience with more efficient ore deposits, free belts, and cheaper properties.

• Normal uses the standard intended balance.

• Hard makes the game more challenging with tougher contracts, more expensive machines, and more expensive properties.

🌍 New Language Support

A new language has been added:

• Ukrainian

🚜 Excavator Improvements

The Excavator has received several control, physics, and multiplayer fixes.

• Added optional Excavator mouse controls, including mouse invert and sensitivity settings.

• Improved Excavator digging physics, especially in cases where the vehicle could lose too much speed while cutting into terrain.

• Reduced small sliding and drifting issues that could happen while the Excavator was standing still.

• Fixed an issue where the Excavator light was not turning on correctly for client players in multiplayer.

🛠 Other Fixes, Improvements & New Stuff

• Added Special Contracts. These appear less often than regular contracts, ask for more resources in a shorter time, and offer better rewards when completed.

• Added a new Control Type setting, allowing you to choose between Automatic, Keyboard & Mouse, and Controller input detection.

• Added a Save Repair system. If a deleted or corrupted save file can be found in your backup data, the game will now offer recovery options to help restore it.

• Oil Pipes can now be connected to the Mining Lift, making it easier to route oil out of deep dig sites.

• The depth achievement now unlocks at 10 meters.

• Added general performance improvements, especially for larger factories, busy automation layouts, and later-stage saves.

• Improved loading times, with especially noticeable improvements for larger saves and factories.

• Optimized Merge Robot scanning to reduce stutters in larger warehouse setups.

• Reworked occlusion culling and quality presets to help improve performance in heavier scenes.

• Fixed an issue where contracts could fail to load correctly after save/load due to a missing link between contracts and their property.

• Improved localization across multiple languages and fixed several incorrect translations.

• Improved save/load consistency for several gameplay systems.

• Fixed several other reported bugs and small inconsistencies.

✨ Supporter Pack DLC

This is a small cosmetic DLC for players who want to support the continued development of the game. For those who do, we wanted to make it feel like a little thank-you gift in return.

It includes:

• Gold-plated tool skins for the Shovel, Pickaxe, and Jackhammer

• Exclusive Inspect animations for all three tools

• Golden factory customization options including special Wall, Floor, and Sign styles

All items in the Supporter Pack are purely cosmetic and do not affect gameplay or progression.

Thank you again for all your support, we’re excited to see your homes, customized vehicles, casino losses, and new Redstone City moments in After Hours.

• 💬 Feel free to [join our Discord](https://discord.com/invite/NrRTWhkusj) to report issues, share feedback, or follow development more closely.