Dig deep with The Lord of the Rings: Return to Moria’s new sandbox mode
With The Lord of the Rings: Return to Moria’s new sandbox mode, you have a whole new reason to go back into the mines
My first nights trapped in the Mines of Moria have been brutal. I made a small campfire just so I could cook some mushrooms and sleep until dawn—anything to get a little reprieve from the skulking goblins that attack me in every dark tunnel of the quarry—but even that tiny camp was laid waste by the green-skins. A wave of gibbering enemies wearing rusted armor and wielding cruel scraps of metal assaulted the camp, destroying my food table and driving me deeper into the pit. It wasn’t until the third day that I was able to smelt my first iron ingot and start the slow tide-turning of my survival.
When The Lord of the Rings: Return to Moria launched in October 2023, the survival game was as hard as dwarven callouses, but the new sandbox mode—added in the latest update—is even more difficult. Originally, the campaign led you down a specific route through the mines, meaning you always encountered challenges at the same time as you found the necessary tools to overcome them. You no longer have that luxury.
An injection of the unknown
The new sandbox mode is specifically built for experienced players looking for a fresh challenge. While the original release of Return to Moria featured procedural generation—with the layout of every floor of the mine changing each time you started a new campaign—the order of the floors themselves stayed the same.
“Once you’ve played through it, you know more or less where everything is,” Free Range Games’ Senior Software Engineer Russell Borogove says. First came the ruin-filled Western Halls, then the ethereal Elven Woods, and then the deep pits of Moria’s quarries, and so on.
If you select this new mode from the main menu, you’ll generate a world that plays by different rules. “In sandbox mode, after the first couple of zones, you may encounter very challenging areas earlier than you expect,” Borogove says. So each time you break into a new chamber, you could face the low-level goblin-men of the Elven Woods or the wild club-like swings of a cave troll normally found in the Lower Deeps.
When the team first started on the new mode and loosened the reins on the world generation, one of the biggest challenges was making the game generate worlds that “weren’t too convoluted…to navigate, particularly vertically,” Borogrove says. “We had to go back to the drawing board a couple of times before we were happy with that.”
Despite this increased variety and potential for danger, Free Range Games is confident every world generated is completable. You may encounter walls that are impossible to break through at first, requiring a pickaxe made from materials you’ve not yet encountered, but there will be an alternative route to take that leads you to what you need, so you may return later when you’re better equipped.
A keener blade
If you dig a little deeper into this The Lord of the Rings: Return to Moria update, you’ll discover a lot more than this sandbox mode.
“We added a ton of new visual [and] sound effects to weapon swings and hits to make them feel weightier and more impactful,” Design Director Michael Downing says. It may only be a cosmetic change, but it does a lot to bring battles to life and make your attacks feel less workmanlike. Repetitive swinging is more appropriate for a pickaxe than a sword, after all.
Downing explains: “Some controls and camera settings were tweaked to make landing hits easier.” So, for instance, you’re now less likely to miss your target when your dwarf charges at an enemy—a frustrating mishap, particularly when you had poured your limited stamina into a strong attack.
Another significant change allows you to pull off your more impressive attacks more regularly. “We…tweaked the default enemy AI to be less aggressive, so players had more opportunities to pull off combo and charged attacks without interruptions,” Downing says. He also notes that the team ”added a lot of kinetic knockback to combo enders and charged attacks to give them a lot more satisfying power.”
I will say it was immensely satisfying to shield charge up a mighty ax swing to kill the goblin that destroyed my small camp’s meal table—and my waiting breakfast with it. I had to abandon the base in the face of the many greenskins, but I at least avenged the bowl of mushroom soup.
Considering sandbox players may encounter tougher enemies earlier in their journey through Moria, it seems only fair to give them a helping hand. These changes benefit all players, as they apply to the campaign mode, too.
A hard (or easy) journey
If you are worried your adventures in Moria will become too easy, what with all that added heft to your ax-swinging arm, Free Range Games has you covered. The update lets you tweak many of Return to Moria’s difficulty settings, ratcheting up the challenge if you’re a masochist.
You can now choose between preset difficulty modes, such as “story,” “solo,” “normal,” and “hard.” You can also create custom modes, tuning the world to fit what you’re looking for as you play. You can, for instance, increase enemy aggression, up their damage and health points, spawn more enemy patrols, instigate more camp sieges, and make orc hordes spawn more frequently. You could even reduce the number of resources you receive from mining and find in the world. As I said above, you’d need to be a real masochist to turn all those settings up to max.
After my first days in the mines saw my small camp swamped by goblins, I decided I wanted an easier ride so I could explore the new sandbox mode more. I lowered all the combat settings and upped my resource gain, and these quick tweaks let me progress through the tech tree much faster than I could in the base game.
However, there is a limit to how chill you can make Return to Moria. There is still no combat-free path or purely creative mode for the dwarf simulator. “We still want to [add one], but not until we can re-evaluate the feel of the game loop,” Game Director Jon-Paul Dumont says. “We prototyped it, and with no orcs to fight, then the goal formation of crafting weapons and armor start to go away.”
While the team has ideas for a true creative mode, there is a lot more they want to get to first, so make peace with the combat for now. On top of the new sandbox mode, difficulty settings, and upgrades to combat, you’ll also find new armor and weaponry, improvements to base building, and numerous bug fixes. If you’ve already completed Return to Moria’s campaign once, this latest update is an excellent reason to once more go down into the dark of the mine’s depths. I, for one, won’t rest until I avenge my bed roll as well as the wasted mushroom soup.
