Core Keeper

You wake in an enormous cavern in front of a dormant Core, with a pickaxe and no explanation. Everything past arm's reach is solid rock. The entire game is what you dig out of it.

Mechanically it sits exactly between Terraria and Stardew Valley: a top-down pixel sandbox with mining, farming, fishing, cooking, base building and a boss ladder, played from a single underground map that you reveal a tile at a time. The reveal is the whole feeling. Every session ends with the explored area a little bigger and a little stranger.

• The Core is your anchor: it powers your base, marks your respawn and is what the bosses are about.
• Light matters. Torches are not decoration, unlit tunnels are how you get ambushed.
• Skills level by use: mining, melee, ranged, running, cooking, fishing, gardening. No class choice, ever.
• Automation arrives sooner than you expect. Drills, conveyors and robot arms turn a mine into a factory.

1. 1

   Dig out a room and place the basics

   Workbench, torches, a bed. Stay near the Core at first, the ore you need is all within a short tunnel of it.

2. 2

   Mine copper, then tin

   Copper tools first, then bronze from copper plus tin. Bronze is the first real jump, and it comes fast.

3. 3

   Plant a farm and fish

   Seeds from the grass you cut, a hoe, a patch of dirt near water. Cooked food buffs are large in this game and cheap to keep running.

4. 4

   Follow the glowing pillars

   The three early bosses each sit at the end of a distinct biome trail. Slime pillars lead to Glurch, a worn dirt track circles for Ghorm, glowing larva hives point at the Hive Mother.

5. 5

   Kill the first three bosses

   Glurch the Abominous Mass, Ghorm the Devourer, The Hive Mother. Their remains go into the Core, which is what opens the rest of the map.

6. 6

   Build a real base

   Once the Core is fed, you have somewhere worth coming home to. Chests near crafting stations, a cooking pot, and a bed you actually sleep in.

• Food buffs. A cooked two-ingredient meal gives real stat bonuses for a long time. Cook before every expedition.
• Skill levelling. Everything you do levels a skill and skills unlock talents. Doing the boring thing is progress.
• Automation. Drills mine, conveyors move, robot arms load. A copper ore farm built early pays for the whole midgame.
• Pets and mounts. Both exist, both save time, both are worth the detour.
• The map is one continuous cave. There is no fast travel until you build it, so portals and tunnels ARE your infrastructure.

After the first three bosses the Core wakes up and the map opens into much larger biomes, each with its own titan-scale boss, its own hazards and its own ore tier. That is the loop for the rest of the game: new biome, new material, better gear, next biome.

• Scarlet, octarine and galaxite are the later ore tiers, each gated behind the biome that holds it.
• The Sunken Sea, the Forgotten Ruins, the Desert of Beginnings and the molten depths are all distinct problems, not reskins.
• Titan bosses are set pieces and want preparation: cooked food, the right damage type, and an arena you dug yourself.
• Endgame is a mix of boss rushes, full automation and decorating a base that nobody outside your server will ever see.

Core Keeper tells its story in almost no words. You are a keeper, drawn underground to a Core that has stopped. Feeding it the remains of the things that grew in the dark is what starts it again, and nothing ever explains why that works.

• The ruins are the loudest voice: someone built this place, wired it, and left machinery running that still works.
• The bosses read as overgrowth rather than as villains. They are what the cavern became once nobody was keeping it.
• Statues, murals and the deeper biomes hint at a civilisation with a relationship to the Core that the game never spells out.
• The tone is calm rather than dreadful. This is an archaeology game wearing a survival game.

• Up to eight players share a world, and it scales well: mining is faster with friends and bosses get harder with more people.
• Split by trade. Somebody farms and cooks, somebody mines, somebody builds the conveyor spaghetti.
• Progress is per world, so a friend joining late gets the map you already opened, which is a fine way to start.
• Dedicated servers exist if your group plays at different hours.

• Torches, always, everywhere. The dark is where every ambush comes from.
• Keep a scanner ping handy. It points at nearby ore and saves aimless digging.
• Build your base ON the Core, not near it. Respawn, storage and crafting in one place.
• Cook every new ingredient combination once. Some of them are absurdly good.
• Bring a bed and a spare torch stack on long expeditions.
• Dig a straight highway to each boss arena. You will go back more than once.

• The official Core Keeper wiki for boss trails, ore tiers and cooking combinations.
• The in-game bestiary and crafting menus, which are unusually good at showing what you are missing.
• Ask in our Discord. This is the sleeper pick of the whole shelf.