Accessibility and difficulty settings in Coal LLC

I love myself an incremental indie game, and lately my past time has been occupied with playing Coal LLC; Where you mine increasingly absurd amounts of coal using some dubious, but effective, mining techniques. Fill your quota or die. Simple as that, yet so addicting!

But I have not seen anyone talk about the accessibility in the game, and who this game is playable for. So let’s take a look at accessibility in Coal LLC.

Difficulty settings:

Coal LLC have three difficulty settings, standard game, peaceful game and slow mode.

Standard game (standard mode) – You have an incremental increase in the coal you need to collect every day to not lose the game.

Slow Mode (Easy mode) – All coal quota is halved, but there are no bonus cash at the end of each day.

Peaceful game (Peaceful mode) – You have no quotas of coal you need to reach every day. Play as long as you want without the stress of getting enough coal. Ther are no cache at the end of the day. Important to note that some steam achievement is not possible to get if you play on peaceful mode.

Coal LLC do not have any enemies or QTE (quick time events) in game, but every day has a timer.  

Settings:

The game let you access settings from the start, but none of them are explained. The settings are divided into “Gameplay”, “Sound”, “Display”, “Keybinds” and “Controls”.

“Gameplay” settings is where you can set the “Max Employee entities drawn” which is helpful when you have a lot of employees at one time. This goes from 50 to 2000.

There is also a “chunk size (CPU) that goes from 10 to 16, and a “Max Item Drop Entities” that goes from 200 to 600.

“Sound” is where you find volume slider for all sounds, and they can be individually changed to make sure you can hear the important stuff. They are divided up into a slider for “Master”, “Music”, “SFX”, “SFX – Pet Dog Bark”, “SFX – Lightning Pickaxe Buzz” and “SFX – Airstrike”. The game is fully accessible for people that are Deaf or Hard of Hearing. The only sound I wish we had a slider for as well would be for the vacuum, as the constant buzzing makes my autism a bit overwhelmed.

“Display” settings gives you the possibility to change the brightness, contrast and saturation of the game. V-sync can be turned on, off or set in “Adaptive mode” or “mailbox mode”. Since none of the settings are explained I sadly do not know what the last two does.

You can also set the Max FPS and turn on Fullscreen mode. There is also the possibility to turn Camera Smoothing On or Off, and you can also slide a Camera Smoothing speed bar. There is also a setting to slide Camera max zoom out from 0.10 to 12.00.

For your cursor, you can choose to “Lock Cursor to Window” and use your system cursor instead of the in-game one.

The game is played in third person, and I have had no problem with motion sickness while gaming.

You can rebind your keys in Coal LLC, and the game do say you can keybind your controller, but the game is sadly not fully playable with controller only.

All actions can be rebinded into three different inputs.

I also want to note that when playing the game you can click left mouse button which is toggle to hold for your weapon, which is a huge help for people with limited mobility in their hands. Sadly, there are no toggle to sprint, which is quite missed in late game. I hope to see this in a future update.

The game do have a controls settings page, where you can turn on auto sprint and slide the “(Gamepad) Pointer Joystick Deadzone”. I hope this means that we will have controller support in the future, and I will update the post if that happens.  

This game is not fully blind accessible, as it is not voiced over and have no other indicators of where you character are on the screen at any given time. There is also no possibility to change text, UI or HUD size. There is a possibility to zoom in quite far, making your character quite large on the screen.

Flashing lights and repeating patterns:

I think the biggest concern for this game is its use of flashing lights and repeating patterns. If you have epilepsy or are in any other way sensitive for flashing lights, be careful when playing Coal LLC. Some of the tools, like mortar bombs and mortar guns, send out a small blink when they explode. It doesn’t cover the whole screen, but if you activate many of them at once it can be quite overwhelming. I really wish there was a setting for this to be turned off. I HOPE the devs read this and can give it us that in an update.

You can also incurred flashing lights or rapid patterns going across your screen if you have a LOT of employees at the same time. At one point I had over 200.000 employees being loaded in at the same time, and that can be a bit harsh, so be careful.

There is a setting to change the “Max Employee entities drawn” which might help you a bit, just remember that this only take effect at the start of a new day.

The reason why I say to be careful when playing, and not discourage the game all together, is that every playthrough of the game is different, and it is up to you as the gamer to choose what tools you want to use. That means that there are MANY possibilities to play this game without any flashing lights or repeating patterns.

And that was it for Coal LLC! I will update if they add any more accessibility settings, or if there are any good accessibility design in the game worth noticing.