A day-and-night loop built around mining and selling
Mining Merchant is a side-scrolling mining and shopkeeping game. Your uncle's jewelry shop has fallen apart, and the job is to bring it back. The loop is simple: dig underground during the day to pull out ore, gems, rare metals and hidden treasures, then smelt and shape what you found into rings, necklaces and other goods to sell at night. Crafting is interactive and physics-based, so you are smelting, shaping and setting stones by hand rather than clicking a menu. Between runs you level up to mine faster, dig deeper and carry more loot, and you expand the shop with new floors and upgraded rooms. Underneath all of it sits the mystery of the nightly earthquakes, which gives the digging a reason to keep going deeper.
Playing it together in online co-op
The whole game runs solo or in online co-op with up to 4 people. In co-op the work splits naturally: some players head underground in mechs to extract materials while others handle the shop side, stocking shelves and serving the picky customers who walk in. Profits are pooled, so the group runs one operation and shares what it earns rather than keeping separate purses. That makes it a good fit for a Discord group where people like doing different jobs in the same run — one person obsessed with digging, another who just wants to arrange the shop and deal with customers. Everyone levels up and upgrades along the way, so the mechs, truck, character and shop all improve as the group plays.
What to know before starting
The tone is deliberately relaxed. It is a casual, family-friendly game with colorful pixel graphics, and the pressure comes from rebuilding a business rather than from combat or timers. Progress is steady: dig, craft, sell, upgrade, dig deeper. The world is procedurally generated, so each descent into the Underground Head lays out differently and the finds shift from run to run. Character customization is available, so your group can tell each other apart while working the same site. Expect a game that suits a slow evening session where people chat between shifts as much as one where you are pushing for a goal — the shop, the depths and the earthquake mystery all reward coming back.