Core Keeper News

Happy birthday to us and happy Language Update day too! It's a very cool week for us and the community, so let's take a look at what we've been up to.

[h2]It's Our 2nd Anniversary![/h2]
Time sure does fly when you're developing a game you love. We're super excited to be celebrating our 2nd anniversary today, and it feels surreal to think about the fact that we're entering 1.0 later this year. We could go on and on about how grateful we are for the support of our amazing community, but you must be tired of hearing that by now (we can't help it, we love you!) So, instead, we'll just say that today really is a day for celebration!



[h2]Don't Panic![/h2]
When fighting Azeos, it's important to keep a clear head and not to let fear get the best of you...and to avoid those thunder beams. Always avoid the thunder beams.



[h2]Sounds of The Shimmering Frontier[/h2]
Why not sit back with a nice warm drink and take it easy this weekend listening to the magical music from the Shimmering Frontier?

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[h2]Shimmering Frontier Concepts![/h2]
Speaking of the Shimmering Frontier, check out this concept art from our fantastic Lead Artist, Julian! You'll surely recognise the Lucent Oak and the ore boulder, but some of the plant designs didn't quite make the final cut.



[h2]Placement Plus[/h2]
We wanted to highlight a mod our community loves this week! Make sure you check out kremnev8a's Placement Plus mod, which allows Explorers to place items and dig in grids of up to 7x7 (amongst other things!).

[h2]Link's Awakening in Core Keeper![/h2]
YouTuber, Nelson TheAwesome, has created an awesome build showcasing the entire map of Link's Awakening in Core Keeper's Creative Mode! Thanks for sharing your awesome work with us!

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

Follow us on X: http://www.twitter.com/corekeepergame Join the Conversation on Discord: http://discord.gg/corekeeper

Good news, Explorers! We’ve just dropped our Language Update, which means Core Keeper is now playable in French, Italian, Traditional Chinese, and Brazilian Portuguese. We’ve also included some bug fixes and improvements with this one that we hope will enhance your gameplay experience.

These include updates to mod support by introducing notifications for mismatches between the game version and the version supported by mods, as well as performance changes that improve efficiency when it comes to data caching and memory allocation. For a full list of what’s new, check out our patch notes here.

[h2]Your Requests Matter![/h2]

It always feels good to be able to offer a game to a whole new group of people, and your requests are incredibly helpful when it comes to making localisation decisions for Core Keeper. We had lots of community feedback across our social channels that helped inform this update, plus a little behind-the-scenes insight into who’s playing Core Keeper thanks to Steam!

There’s no doubt that there was a high demand for us to add these languages to the game, and we’re very happy to have been able to make these additions on the road to 1.0. We’re still listening out for your requests, so if there’s a language you’d like to see Core Keeper in, then we encourage you to make some noise! You can tell us over on X, Discord, or in the Steam Discussions.

[h2]Happy Birthday Core Keeper![/h2]

Today is a very special day for us because it also happens to be our second birthday! That’s right, Core Keeper launched in Early Access on March 8th, 2022. It’s been an amazing journey so far, and it’s not over yet. We’re working hard on our 1.0 release and we can’t wait to bring this to you in Summer 2024.

Until then, you can enjoy Core Keeper’s Anniversary seasonal event. Grab a delicious and nutritious (*cough*one-timepermenanthealthboost*cough*) Anniversary Cake from the Seasonal Merchant, along with some Party Hats, and gather your friends for a little jam sesh using our Happy Birthday Sheet Music! Of course, seasonal events can be toggled or turned off entirely in the Gameplay Settings menu if you’re not really a “birthday” person.

[h2]Thank You for Another Awesome Year[/h2]

It’s been another fantastic year for Core Keeper and we wanted to sign off by saying a huge thank you to our amazing community. Whether you’re brand-new to the underground or you’ve been with us since the beginning, we couldn’t be happier to be celebrating our birthday with you, Explorers.

• New languages added to the game
  
• French
  
• Italian
  
• Brazilian Portuguese
  
• Chinese (Traditional)
  

• Fixed an issue where a rock in the Desert of Beginnings showing drawings of Hunters would be invisible.
  
• Fixed a bug where the Core would appear on the map while in creative mode.
  
• Fixed an issue with the Materializer always playing spawn effects when entering the screen if any enemy spawned from it was active.
  
• Fixed a bug where Shroomans would not fully play their bump animation when hitting a player.
  
• Fixed an issue where the shortcuts window would sometimes go outside the screen in certain languages.
  
• If the player exits the game while dying or teleporting using a recall idol, the game now waits for the player to spawn before exiting to avoid issues previously occurring in these cases.
  
• Players can no longer fish while the inventory is open.
  
• The fishing line tension bar now looks correct if the map UI is open while fishing.
  
• Fixed a bug where sometimes the wrong wire on the Alien Event Terminals would light up during the event.
  
• Fixed a bug where Alien Event Terminals could be destroyed with bombs after completing the event.
  
• Fixed the description of the Glass Piece in the Glass Smelter.
  

• Store unchanging parameters once per object type instead of once per object, thereby reducing the in-memory size of many of our game objects. In addition to reducing the game’s memory footprint, this more compact memory layout also makes processing the objects for various tasks more efficient.
  
• Process health changes in a more efficient way by storing them in a central location instead of having it attached to each game object.
  
• Data specifically related to saving the world to disk is now only checked periodically and when a new save is pending, rather than in every frame.
  
• Gravestones and boss chests no longer recompute their appearance every frame.
  
• Disabled a large number of particle systems (most notably for torches) when the particle quality setting is set to low.
  
• Moved part of the recomputation of tile appearances to a worker thread.
  
• General statistics for the tile types close to the player are now computed once on a worker thread and reused instead of being computed from scratch multiple times per frame.
  
• Improved performance for computing ambient sounds and cache the result to reuse for multiple frames.
  
• Objects that the player can interact with now only update if the player is sufficiently close.
  
• Changed how graphical object updates are called to avoid calling objects that don’t need to update.
  
• Many UI elements now cache the data they display and do not update unless this data has changed.
  
• Created dedicated shader for the health and hunger bars to make them more efficient to render.
  
• Some features related to mod support are now skipped when no mods are installed.
  
• Refactored several systems to use the more efficient ISystem types available in Unity Entities 1.0.
  
• Removed several sources of managed memory allocations.
  
• Improved how objects that are synchronized between client and server are created.
  
• Game objects are no longer disabled all at once, which avoids lag spikes when leaving areas containing large numbers of objects.
  
• The player animator no longer runs in an expensive separate animation pass.
  

• A mod that fails to load will now abort the entire mod loading process and show an error message to the player. The player can choose to disable the mod to get rid of the error.
  
• A mod which doesn’t explicitly support the current version will not load by default. The player will be shown a message where they can choose to disable the mod or load the mod anyway.
  
• The text in the main menu indicating how many mods have been loaded has been improved to be less obtrusive and also to show if there are any pending changes in what mods are loaded.
  
• Pet names are now hidden as well when choosing to hide character names in the UI settings.
  
• Changed some text input fields to use the ‘*’ character to hide the input.
  

Can anybody guess why March is our favourite month? It might have something to do with it being our birthday! That's right, Core Keeper is turning two on March 8th, so get your party hats ready, Explorers.

[h2]Bye-Bye, Valentine's[/h2]
Our Valentine's Seasonal Event came to a close around the end of February, and we said farewell to a rose-dappled underground. Valentine's is always a fun event and, to see it off, we created this cute little Valentine's themed café! If you didn't get a chance to play Core Keeper during the event, don't worry, you can switch it (and others) on at any time of year from the Gameplay Settings menu.



[h2]Birthday Countdown![/h2]
We're counting down the days until our second birthday, which is next Friday, and we just can't wait to get our party on!



[h2]Language Update Reminder[/h2]
The next new update on our roadmap is set to be our Language Update, coming in Spring 2024! We'll be adding FOUR new playable languages to Core Keeper and, while we can't tell you what these are yet, we can tell you that your community requests have definitely had an impact!

[h2]"This Sandbox RPG is a Hidden Gem..." by Dxmonick[/h2]
We had a lot of fun watching this video from Dxmonick. Follow him from his first day in the underground all the way up to his battle with Ra-Akar, summarised into just 12 minutes 34 seconds! Little bit of a content warning for our younger Explorers: This video does contain some swearing!

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

[h2]Update from Owlunae[/h2]
The talented Owlunae has been kind enough to share an update on the world that we featured in last week's update! This is a closer look at their base and is actually 200 screenshots stitched together. We appreciate the time and effort that must have took, even with the World Snapshot Mod, Owlunae!



[h2]Alien Starship[/h2]
Discord user, MadFoxArtz, showed us their interpretation of a Caveling Starship in Creative Mode! You can check out the full image set in this post on the official Core Keeper Discord.



That's all for this week, Explorers. Until next time, au revoir!

Follow us on X: http://www.twitter.com/corekeepergame Join the Conversation on Discord: http://discord.gg/corekeeper

Howdy, Explorers! This is the last community wrap-up of February. We can't believe how quickly 2024 is going, but that also means it'll feel like no time at all before we're at 1.0. Shall we see what's been going on in the community this week?

[h2]Random Acts of Kindness[/h2]
According to the internet, it was Random Acts of Kindness Day on the 17th, and who are we to argue with the internet? To celebrate, we ran a giveaway on X asking you to tag a pal who you thought deserved a Core Keeper key. We had a tonne of responses and ended up giving 3x Steam keys away to our lucky winners!

[h2]Feelin' Cosy[/h2]
We ran a little poll on X and Discord asking you if you thought Core Keeper was a cosy game. An overwhelming amount of you (58.8% on X, and 455 of you on Discord) thought Core Keeper was super cosy! 35.6% of you on X and 281 of you on Discord feel like it can be a cosy game depending on how you play it. However, just 5.5% of you on X and 27 of you on Discord weren't getting cosy vibes at all. 🤯

[h2]The Age-Old Question...[/h2]
Which do you prefer, Embertails or Subterriers? Can't decide? Maybe this video will help you make up your mind!

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

[h2]Zaka's Stream Screenshots![/h2]
VTuber, Zaka, played Core Keeper with his pal MaiSecret and built some cool stuff, which they were kind enough to share with us on X!



[h2]Owlunae's Seasonal Map[/h2]
Discord user, Owlunae, showed off this amazing seasonal map in the Core Keeper media forums. We're particularly fond of the adorable pumpkins for autumn!



Follow us on X: http://www.twitter.com/corekeepergame Join the Conversation on Discord: http://discord.gg/corekeeper