I was going to put this in the Indie games thread, but I have a feeling that this will be pretty popular around here. It’s an early access title right now, but it’s very playable, and very good. The basic game play is that you dig through a massive underground system finding materials, loot, enemies, seeds, etc, to build up your home base area. Ultimately you are seeking 3 bosses that once defeated, power the core which helps you track down the real boss. The “base building” isn’t quite as robust as it sounds. You basically carve out rooms to then furnish as a bedroom, crafting area, garden, etc. There aren’t any structures or anything like that. You can, however, recruit several traders to live in your base by building them a bedroom and finding the item that will attract them to stay there.
The best I can liken this to, is… almost like a version of Craft the World, where 1 dwarf can become powerful enough to win, instead of needing a clan of dwarves. Some Steam reviews compare it to Terraria, which I guess is fair, but it’s been so long since I’ve played that game, I don’t find the direct link. I put about 15 hours in over the weekend, and defeated the 3 initial bosses. Each of these required different tactics to take down, and surprisingly, there is more than 1 tactic you can employ to defeat them. I saw one You Tube player defeat a boss in a completely different way than I did.
I have yet to attempt the overall boss. So it’s not terribly long, but to me seemed just long enough. I’m sure future updates to the game will add more areas and bosses.
If you play with a controller, there’s no bound way to “deposit all like items” into a quest. So you need to add one but there aren’t a lot of good options (I use d-pad up) unless you have a fancy schmancy controller.
Likewise, navigating between inventories and the like on controller is a little obnoxious. I don’t think there are bound ways to split stacks or the like. There needs to be a way to “move selected item to chest/inventory” quickly.
Gameplay is otherwise pretty good but there’s still a lot of content coming, and probably also a considerable amount of balance too. There’s simply no real reason to engage in the high end machinery at the moment (you can set up drills on special ore nodes and then use conveyor belts to deposit ore places). The cost of this stuff is so expensive that you’ll have been able to craft everything you want from the current max-tier stuff instead (and then some), so there’s no point in waiting. Also skill progression feels like it might be a bit slow, especially for certain skills. Each skill has its own tree and these are ok.
And be forewarned: it’s possible to clear crops (either those you’ve built or naturally occurring) in such a way that you don’t get gardening xp. You want to use right-trigger (I think this might correspond to right click on the mouse but not sure). This is a pretty strange and janky interaction, I think it has to do with “right click/trigger tends to be for interacting with an object in the targeted space, and left is for interacting with the floor on the targeted space”, and shovels can do both things (you can use a pickaxe to clear gardens and get xp. Pickaxes cannot interact with floors).
From this moment onwards, players will have the option to operate their own dedicated servers for multiplayer worlds that can be accessed at any time without requiring a host to be in the game. If dedicated servers aren’t your thing, you’ll be pleased to know that in-game player-hosted multiplayer is still available at any time, and this now uses Steam’s networking back end when connecting players – solving many of the networking issues users have been reporting. We’ve also added a new admin functionality that will give players the option to kick people from their worlds across both dedicated servers and player-hosted games.
If you’d like to host your own dedicated server you can do so using Core Keeper’s own dedicated server hosting application, which will be available to run from the Tools menu in your Steam Library. If you helped us test dedicated servers on the experimental branch, you may remember that port forwarding was required, but this is no longer necessary.
I’ve been playing the hell out of this between PC rig and Steam Deck. It’s primed perfectly for the latter thought between the two platforms there are some things I wish worked better. The things I love about this are it scratches several itches: minecraft-like, terraria/stardew valley mixup, and a generous helping of building/collecting and making things beautiful while you also get ready for boss battles. Here, versus Terraria, you have more room to roam around bosses and come back later, but also to prepare the battlefield a bit beforehand if you’re a Fraidy Cat like me. I tend to really, really take my time doing bosses in these games but this one seems perfect because of that.
The most amazing part of this game is that it is still early access. It reminds me of Minecraft very late into beta when most of us playing thought, “it’s not done yet???”
There’s been an announced mashup between Core Keeper and Terraria, so if anyone still thinks this looks interesting, it certainly adds to that now. There’s one boss in and perhaps a bit more to come.
I will add that the things that make it work well on Steam Deck (UI scale/font size, controller support) make it great as a TV couch game too! :)
I’m pretty new to the game, only played an hour or so.
edit: there is one immediately annoying thing that is kind of ‘101’ for these types of games imo… crafting stations don’t have access to the mats placed in chests in the same area!
Yep I noticed that as well. Apparently there are chest sorters later on, electricity, etc. Akin to some minecraft mod perks, but it would have been nice to have mats pulled automatically. I do like the button to move anything in my inventory that matches what is in a chest over to the chest.
I’ve heard there are a limited number of mods out already. I hope that continues.
But I am following here with interest so please keep posting. I’m dabbling off and on, I like this kind of game and this one is good, but I’ve just spent a lot of time working instead the last few weeks. Not much gaming at all.
No worries. This game still reminds me of modded minecraft in a way that it scratches the itch but also makes me have fond memories of modded minecraft for that matter.
Today I set up multiple auto-drill mining rigs. Those are on the big 2x2 ores you see scattered about that require a drill. The, “auto,” part just means setting up conveyor belts to move the mined ore over to a grabber, which puts things into a smelter. This makes it so that you just run there every so often and empty the smelter of processed ores. Unfortunately they put the drill and setup thereof pretty far along in the game. After the initial 3 bosses the game opens up and that’s when things like that start. That also leads to getting further and further from the core, thus me now building minecart tracks out from there to other areas.
I tend to spend a ton of time within the game loop of more ore, more loot, more foods and not that much time in boss prep. Bosses are farmable in this game, unlike a lot of others. So I read about people fighting them multiple times in order to get specific loot, or more of one particular thing (like double chests.)
I (Steam Deck) am playing this with my girlfriend (she’s on my laptop, Ryzen 7 5800U, 16GB RAM, 3050ti), and this may be the worst optimized game I have ever played. Despite looking like a (nicely lit) Super Nintendo game, it would not run at anything like an acceptable framerate on my old laptop (which had a GTX 970), and while it runs fine on the above devices, it absolutely destroys the batteries, like it draws more power than Warzone 2, and it heats up the Steam Deck worse than Sekiro or Nioh (maybe the most graphically demanding games I’ve tried on it). I joked on the Steam forums that maybe it’s running like five cryptominers, but I really have absolutely no idea what this game could be doing to draw so much damned power. Performance has been a major complaint on the Steam forums for over a year, it seems, so since the beginning, and the devs said they would “look into it,” but they must just lack the technical skills required because nothing appears to have changed at all.
Funny you mention that but it was the first game I blew through my Steam Deck battery with. I just didn’t notice how badly since I play mostly plugged in now. I also run it on PC but didn’t have too much issue there, or at least didn’t notice it on a beefier rig.
Very fun game though. They’ve added quite a bit since I last played and I have yet to get back in and try the new stuff and areas.
This game got it’s hook into me really good for the first 10 hours. I beat the first boss, had paths everywhere, had one Railroad line and was working on another when, after trying too many times to count, I simply can not catch a single fish.
The people on the forums say there is a pattern, I can not discern any pattern AT ALL.
But after fishing in so many other games, it’s really perplexing on they take a supposedly chill activity, and introduce some sort of mechanic to make me just quit and uninstall in frustration.
