Hello there!

Murder Miners is a little bit buggy, but it's worth working around it to play it. It just bangs that hard :)

Unfortunately, a lot of issues can be difficult to figure out for newer players, so I'm here to demystify them! This guide will explain strange problems, things to avoid doing to prevent crashes and softlocks, general precautions and how to prevent strange problems from happening!

See the table of contents for each common issue.

The Murder Miners workshop doesn't work like any other game I've seen.
Maps will only download when you click Subscribe while the game is open. Unsubscribing from maps on the workshop does absolutely nothing, and subscribing to maps while the game is closed also does absolutely nothing.

Once you download your maps, you can find them in My Maps/Steamworks. It's a subfolder that's at the top of the list. It looks like a header and it may be easy to miss for newer players. I've been there :)

This is fixed in Update 40, but it's not out yet.

Steam invites work, but the game needs to be open already when you accept the invite.

This happens when a block update happens (or a new map is loaded) while the Murder Miners window is inactive and in fullscreen.

To fix this, press ESC to open the pause menu and enter Map Options and select "Reload Map".
Using windowed mode or borderless fullscreen will prevent this from happening in the first place.

If you've ever played Infection and sometimes felt like the respawn time is longer than usual, this is actually because the game's waiting for you to select your weapons. The game's supposed to skip the weapon wheel entirely when you're a zombie, but sometimes, it just decides not to. The weapon wheel is actually there, but invisible. Simply select two weapons or press E to spawn sooner/

This is about the Reload Map button in the map list for the lobby host and not the one in Map Options.
In the current version of the game, this button will crash the game if the currently loaded map is not a default map. So don't press it!

You may have sometimes been in a lobby where the match starts, you spawn, and then the map changes and you're under the map now and you die.

This happens because Murder Miners sends the map to each player one at a time. The host can see this on the right side of the screen, where ammo pickups are listed, shown as "MAP SENT TO [USER]". The game doesn't stop you from starting a match before all users have received the map.

If you're a host, remember to wait for the "MAP SENT TO [USER]" messages to stop appearing before starting a match!

You may have noticed in lobbies with all blocks unlocked and turbo fire on and all that, that on some maps, every player will begin spawning in the bottom corner of the map rather than on any actual ground and will immediately fall to their death!

Murder Miners has a system to spawn players on valid ground if the map has no set spawn points. If the map does have set spawn points, the same system will be used but will be limited to spawning players within the set spawn zones. Therefore, if there is no valid ground within the spawn zones, there is no valid place to spawn at all. It doesn't fall back to what the game does when there's no spawn zones and instead spawns players at coordinates 0,0,0.

If your map has spawn zones and they're not working, make sure there's ground for the players to spawn in inside them! And if you want the map to be fully unlocked, it may be good practice to make the spawn zones dip into the ground a little or make the ground they cover out of locked blocks.

The AI zombies in this game are really dumb, and the way they work makes it difficult to design maps with them in mind.

Murder Miners spawns players (and zombies) as far away from currently living players as possible. With AI zombies, this means they'll almost always spawn in the opposite corner of the map from you and all other players.

Zombies also don't pathfind. They will try to walk straight towards you and will sometimes jump really high, and will only attack if a player is within a 4 block radius of them. If you're playing Horde and wondering where all the zombies are, you probably picked a pretty bad map to play Horde with.

Zombies also have a limited lifetime and will die on their own after long enough, and because of how they spawn as far from players as possible, this means even on a completely flat map, they might not even be able to reach any players before dying if the map is too big. If you want to play Horde, stick to smaller maps with less height variation so the zombies can do. Anything

The energy sword's melee will block normal punches. There is no feedback for this and itll just look like your punches don't work. There's a sound for two swords hitting each other but not for that.
Just saying this to save some frustration :-)

I got this game for splitscreen, and I can imagine people buying the game now might have found it via the splitscreen tag as well. Sadly, while splitscreen does work great once you have all the players set up properly, the process of setting it up properly is really broken. I've figured out a consistent way to not break everything when getting ready for splitscreen play.

Murder Miners doesn't consider the gamepad connected to slot 1 as Player 1 all the time. If there are multiple controllers connected, the game tends to assign the highest number gamepad to Player 1, but this doesn't seem consistent.

You can easily identify which controller is Player 1 by which one is able to navigate to either Find Games or is able to start hosting a match. All connected controllers can navigate the menus, but only Player 1 can open the lobby list or start hosting.

(Unless you're trying to do 2 player splitscreen with one player on gamepad and the other on keyboard and mouse!)
If Player 1 joins as a splitscreen player, even if you back out of it, you may have to restart the game in order to get four controllers connected properly. This puts the game in a weird state and you'll often end up with one controller controlling multiple players or one or more controllers being assigned to nobody. It sucks!

Joining as splitscreen players as all other players should work fine. Once everybody is in, join or host a game with Player 1 and go murder some miners!

This is fixed in Update 40, but it's not out yet. I highly reccomend keeping backups of your player_save file (in Documents/My Games/Murder Miners on Windows) if you're gonna be playing splitscreen often.

This guide is a quick draft! I wanted to get something like this out quickly as The Homer Arena is happening again and tends to draw in new players.

If any info is incorrect or missing, find me in the Murder Miners Hub discord server. Thanks!