// GAME GUIDE //

Moon Miner

Free online mining game · dig, sell, upgrade · no download, also on Steam and mobile

Moon Miner is a free online mining game in the Motherload tradition: drill through the lunar strata, haul ore back to the depot, sell it, upgrade the pod, go deeper. It runs in your browser with no download and no account, and the same game ships on Steam, Google Play and the App Store.

What is Moon Miner?

Moon Miner is a digging and upgrading game set on the Moon. You pilot a small mining pod, drill down through procedurally generated strata, fill your cargo bay with ore, and haul it back to the depot to sell. Every run funds upgrades that let you dig deeper, carry more, and survive longer. It is the classic loop that made games like Motherload so hard to put down, rebuilt for the browser.

Deeper layers hide rarer minerals and bigger payouts, but also bigger risks: your power cell is finite, the rock gets harder, gas pockets and magma start to appear the deeper you go, and the way back up gets longer. Scattered through the dig are Echo shards, fragments of a story sleeping at the core of the world, so there is more down there than ore.

How to play

• Dig: steer your pod into the ground and drill through soil and rock. Different minerals are worth different amounts.
• Sell: return to the depot and sell your cargo before your power runs out.
• Upgrade: spend your earnings on a stronger drill, a bigger power cell, a larger cargo bay, a wider lamp, a tougher hull, or Cargo Insurance, which refunds part of your cargo's value in credits if your pod is destroyed.
• Descend: each upgrade tier opens deeper strata with rarer ore. Repeat until you own the Moon.

Controls

On desktop, fly and drill with the arrow keys or WASD. On phones and tablets the game is fully touch-controlled with a one-thumb floating joystick. Moon Miner was built mobile-first and runs in any modern browser with no download and no account.

Tips from the developers

• Power is the real currency. Upgrade your power cell early, because running out of charge deep underground is how most runs end.
• Don't sell-run half full. A bigger cargo bay pays for itself faster than almost anything else.
• Ore gets rarer the deeper you dig, but it is worth more too. Weigh a deep push against your power cell and hull before you commit to it.
• Relics are rare, independent finds worth a real payout on their own. They are worth a detour whenever you spot one.
• A wider lamp radius shows more of the rock ahead before you commit to a drill line, which matters most in the deep strata where a wrong turn costs power you don't have.

Under the hood

Moon Miner is developed by MobX Games, a small indie studio in Germany. The whole game is written in plain JavaScript on a 2D canvas, with no game engine underneath it. The Moon you dig through is not stored anywhere: it is generated as your drill reaches it, so no two mines are laid out alike. If you are curious how that works, we explain it in How Moon Miner builds a Moon out of one number.

FAQ