Total Miner

Overview

Total Miner is an indie game developed and published by Studio Forge (formerly Greenstone Games) for the Xbox Live Indie Games platform and Windows PC.

The Current price is $9.99 on Steam.

There are currently 3 Main modes. Dig Deep, Survival and Creative.

Dig Deep

Dig deep is sort of a objective based survival mode, depending on the difficulty, the Player will spawn with a wooden pick 2 obsidian blocks and a few gold coins, there will be 2 shop blocks next to the spawn point. One sells tools and items, the other sells Blocks, these can be mined and placed elsewhere at any time.

If Played on a highest difficulty, the player will spawn with nothing, no shops, no pick.. and no on-screen map or compass

Creative Mode

As the name suggests.. Creative mode is all about building stuff, Shops will give any block or item in an infinite amount, for no charge. Players can fly in creative mode and have different options when creating a world, such as terrain material, shape and size of the map, and many tools to make world building much easier

The most noticeable difference between Total Miner, and Minecraft.. is Total Miner has a focus on the vertical aspect of the game. Map depth goes down over 5000 blocks, with multiple layers of different material making up that.

Some examples of the layers would be Dirt, Clay, sandstone, Basalt, Dacite, Marble, Tuff, etc etc.

The different layers require different tools to mine, different tools can only be aquired by finding the blueprint for them.. which can be found by following the on-screen compass, this makes finding new blueprints quite a challenge on Hardcore difficulty.

Crafting

Crafting is very simple, once the player finds an items blueprint, he/she can then craft it using a crafting table, finding a blueprint also unlocks the item in the shop, should the player prefer to buy it instead of making it.

Smelting

Using a Furnace, the player can convert many different blocks into different blocks or items.

Some examples of this are as follows.

Sand = Glass

Diamond Ore = Diamond gem

Gold Ore = Gold ingot

Iron Ore = Iron Ingot

Iron Ingot + Carbon Block = Steel Ingot

There are many recipes, some are more complex than others, such as Making steel and Titanium Carbide.

Food can also be cooked in the Furnace.

Multiplayer

The player can also Create or join a multiplayer game through the main menu, there are options when hosting a Game to give, and take away player permissions, so if you have something you don't want people to destroy you can give them fewer permissions to reduce the chance of them destroying anything, using tnt, flooding etc.

to be continued..