Hero image: Moon Sweepers. Image: DragDrop Games
Moon Sweepers — a co-op game about cleaning the entire Moon, which launched on Steam on 23 October — has had a busy first weekend, and its developers have said sorry for some of it.
DragDrop Games, which both develops and publishes the game, posted a message to players on 24 October. It thanked the community and then turned to the problems.
“We also want to acknowledge that the launch hasn’t been perfect,” the post reads. It lists reports of crashes, performance issues, multiplayer bugs, lack of automation and progression balancing.
The same message explains the pace of the fixes. “We’re a small development team of just two people and we’ve been working incredibly hard to fix these problems as quickly as possible.”
The store page sets up the premise in two lines — “An entire Moon to clean. One toothbrush to start.” — and lets up to 16 players team up to collect and sell lunar dust.
The first fixes came in patch 1.0.3, also on 24 October. Upgrades are now shared across the whole crew, hosts can kick or ban players, and the studio reports up to about 20% higher frame rates in its own tests.
Patch 1.0.4 followed on 25 October and goes after the issue the developers had named as a top priority — J.O.O.N.A.S. units stopping when players moved away.
J.O.O.N.A.S. now cleans a sector and launches capsules to the nearest catcher without trips back to its dock. The notes call it “2x Faster Cleaning”, and say it keeps working when no players are nearby.
Saving is the other big change. Large, heavily cleaned bases now save in a fraction of a second rather than up to half a minute, and each save slot keeps up to five automatic backups, taken a minute into a session and then every 30 minutes.
The game has found an audience here regardless. When we read Steam’s Australian top sellers on the morning of 27 October, Moon Sweepers was second, behind only Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4.
On the Australian store it is A$10.83, 15% off its A$12.75 price, until 4am AEDT on Saturday 31 October by our conversion of the store’s sale end. The store page does not say where DragDrop Games is based.
Source: DragDrop Games (Steam) – A Message From the Developers, Moon Sweepers 1.0.4 Patch, Moon Sweepers 1.0.3 Patch, Steam – Moon Sweepers, Steam – Australian top sellers