Morterra adds voice chat, a new UI and eleven metals

The October 9, 2019 update added voice chat to Morterra, along with a new UI, foundries, new metals and metal construction objects. It came three weeks after the foundry update and explained how foundries and the new metals work in practice.

Voice chat

Players can talk to each other in-game. You enable your microphone in the browser, then hold V to talk to nearby players. You can change the volume of other players in the settings tab.

A new UI

The interface got an entirely new design. Our old screenshots show how bad it looked before.

How to build a foundry

• Shape a boulder with a knife.
• Find sand by emptying a pond. It is fairly rare.
• Find lime by mining a boulder, which is also fairly rare.
• Combine sand and lime into cement mix in your quick-craft menu.
• Use the cement mix on the chiseled boulder.

You can put all your metals, wood and coal into a foundry, and it holds them as a central stockpile for your base. You take out whatever metals you need as you go. Basic metals still smelt on fires, but alloys need a foundry.

Eleven metals

Morterra now has eleven metals: tin, copper, iron, aluminum, titanium, tungsten, bronze, steel, aluminum alloy, titanium alloy and tungsten alloy. Each one has properties based on the real metal, and even the rarity of each ore follows the composition of the Earth's crust.

What we planned next

Our main goal was to make the game run well enough that people could play it on almost any computer. These were the content plans for the near future:

• More variety in the environment
• New tree variations, with a unique model for each kind of tree and sub-species of oak and maple
• Boulders in three sizes, each dropping ore to match its size
• Piles of rubble that spawn randomly and hold starting materials, in place of the blunt rocks players mined for flint and sharp rocks
• Fatigue that affects player speed
• Scarcer food, to increase competition over resources
• Looting sleeping players
• Account registration
• Friends lists, clans and clan chat
• A respawn point you can set in your base
• A tutorial for new players

And for later:

• Raiding with explosives that players gather and craft, such as gunpowder
• Farming, with plants that take a while to grow but have strong effects, such as coffee beans that restore fatigue
• Bounty hunting, with bounty boards in your base for placing, finding and collecting bounties
• Trading with other players at trading posts
• Better highscores, with stats such as players killed, bounty hunts, trees cut, rocks mined, time played, animals killed, zones raided and objects placed
• Seasonal titles for the #1 player in each highscore stat, kept through the next season, such as "Bounty Hunter" for the most bounties collected and "Hunter" for the most animals killed

Explosive raiding shipped the following month, in November 2019.