Manic Miners

Manic Miners is a mining and excavation game in which you direct Tiny Miners through dangerous landscapes to collect jewels and return them home. You assign abilities such as digging, bashing, climbing, building and floating, while avoiding hazards that can kill a Miner in seven ways: falling, drowning, being crushed, poisoned by gas, burned, blown up or by suicide. The game includes one-player play, two-player online games and a landscape editor.

Direct your Miners

A deployed Miner walks forward until you give an instruction. You can tell Miners to dig up or down, bash left or right, climb, float, breathe, block, build, turn or use weapons. Underground, they finish their current square before starting another activity, so you need to time commands around what lies ahead. You can select abilities with icons or keyboard commands, and Miners retain climbing, floating, breathing and building abilities until they die. Digging, bashing, blocking and bombing use an icon each time a Miner starts that action.

Collect jewels, then guide Miners back home to receive payment for what they carry. A Miner can carry up to 255 jewels, each worth 500 when returned. If a Miner dies while carrying jewels, they try to leave a bag: on a loaded map it contains all their jewels, while on a generated landscape it contains half. Coins pay immediately: bronze coins are worth 50, silver 100 and gold 200. Miners cost 1,000, and ability icons have different prices.

Landscapes and hazards

A landscape number from 1 to 99,999 seeds procedurally generated scenery and object placement. Landscapes can be flat or shaped by curves, which may become steps; objects may appear individually or in horizontal or vertical lines. The seed also determines features such as the sky and earth textures, grass and water colours, water level and movement, rainbows, trees and dinosaur skeletons. Difficulty controls the number of objects, generally placing more useful objects such as jewels and fewer dangerous ones on Easy, with the reverse on Hard. Maps measure 256 by 256 squares, or 4,096 by 4,096 pixels.

You encounter soil, brick, rock, boulders, metal, jewels, coins, eggs, explosives, ice, smileys, bulbs, bags, wormholes, gas pockets, gas clouds, smoke and sparks. Rocks and boulders can fall, and boulders can roll sideways when unsupported. Wormholes transport Miners elsewhere if their exit is not blocked. Gas pockets release a finite number of clouds: blue gas rises, green gas falls and red gas tends to linger and is acidic. Gas is poisonous to Miners who cannot breathe; it can be vented by tunnelling to open air, while red gas is instantly fatal and can eat into and detonate explosives. Explosions, weapons, bulbs and sparks can ignite gas clouds.

Metal cannot be dug, moved or otherwise penetrated, and can produce sparks when struck or scraped by certain objects and weapons. Brick can be blasted, lasered or burned through; rock can also be pushed and dropped. Jewels and coins are affected by gravity, eggs are fragile and hatch new Miners, and ice can be pushed to set off explosives from a distance. Bulbs shine and can ignite gas. A Miner can collect up to two smileys to permanently heighten their senses; further smileys provide random weapons. Dead Miners carrying jewels can leave bags behind.

Game modes

In one-player play, you excavate a landscape and try to bring jewels home. The game also has randomly occurring Manic-Miners-Mini-Missions, each with a 60-second limit. Tasks include collecting smileys, opening a wormhole or a non-red gas pocket, digging to half the maximum depth, and having multiple Miners carry specified numbers of jewels at the same time. Other missions change coin values, ask you to uncover particular objects, or give all Miners infinite TNT for 10 seconds.

Two players can play online by inviting a friend. The player who sends the invitation chooses the landscape and difficulty and plays from the hut on the left; the player who accepts plays from the hut on the right. Two-player games can be saved and loaded. Players can build walls to protect territory and resources, or undermine the other player's hut foundations to win.

Weapons and walls

Miners can use TNT, fuse bombs, lasers and flamers. TNT must be thrown upward. Fuse bombs are placed on the map and explode when their fuses run out; lasers are aimed with the mouse, while flamers can fire left, right, above or below. Miners can also build brick or metal walls in nearby empty squares that can support them. Brick can be placed on firm soil or another solid object to make vertical walls; metal can also be placed beneath or beside metal of the same colour to form horizontal structures.

Miners and maps

The ten Miner types are Walker, Climber, Floater, Breather, Bomber, Blocker, Builder, Basher, Downer and Upper. New Miners hatch from eggs, and each starts with one TNT. Generated landscapes use different starting numbers of Miners, TNT and ability icons for Easy, Medium and Hard.

The landscape editor lets you shape a map with curves or make it flat, adjust whether curved terrain is stepped, and set grass, earth and water colours, water height, textures, scrolling and rainbow properties. You can place and remove objects, set difficulty and the number of jewels required to finish a level, and choose its starting Miners, TNT and ability icons. Maps can include collectible ability icons; on those maps, abilities cannot be purchased and must be collected. The editor can also upload maps to Steam Workshop.