Core Keeper News

Love is in the air…and in the underground. We’re delighted to announce that we’re bringing you something very special this February in the form of our Quality of Love update!

Part seasonal event, part update, you can expect lots of new content and fixes coming to Core Keeper, with some new additions remaining in game even after the Valentine’s seasonal event has ended! Whether you’re a mushy romantic who wants to see pretty pink flowers in the underground or you’re hankering for some fresh new features (musical instruments, anyone?) and visual improvements to the game, there are lots of reasons to get excited about this one.



The Quality of Love update will be launching on the 8th of February, with our Valentine’s seasonal event running until the 28th!

As we mentioned above, some of the content from this update will remain permanently available – even after the Valentine’s seasonal event has ended – and we’ve been working hard on quality-of-life adjustments as well as optimisations that should improve the overall performance of the game.



[h2]What Can We Expect in the Quality of Love Update?[/h2]

Great question, and the answer is a lot! While the Quality of Love Update isn’t a major content update like The Sunken Sea or The Desert of Beginnings, we think you’ll be pleased with the new additions and changes we’ve made to the game…

[h2]Major Changes to Lighting and Rendering[/h2]

We’re making some major changes to the way things like lighting and rendering work across Core Keeper, which should improve performance while giving you more control over your visual experience of the underground. Here’s where it gets a little technical…

Core Keeper currently uses Unity’s Built-In Render Pipeline, which we customised as much as possible to fit the needs of the game. Since this render-pipeline was designed to function with many different types of games, we soon discovered that there were various features and functions that we wanted for the rendering in Core Keeper that it just didn’t support. Because of this, we decided to completely rewrite our graphics pipeline as a custom Scriptable Render Pipeline.

The result? Full control over how everything is rendered in the game and improvements to performance and framerate! If that wasn’t technical enough for you, a full breakdown on the lighting changes will be coming in another Steam post soon. In simple terms, this means Core Keeper is going to look a whole lot nicer with the potential to run much better too!

[h2]New Features and Content![/h2]

For Valentine’s, we’ve added a romantic wash of rose petals to the ground tiles across the underground, and you can expect to find plenty of seasonal items (think Love Letters and Valentine’s Presents) along with some extra-cute cosmetics and equipment! As in all our seasonal updates, you’ll also spot a fun, themed variation on the merchant, who’ll have some new stock for you to browse.



We’re also really excited about a brand-new feature we’re bringing to the game in the form of musical instruments! That’s right, Explorers can now express themselves creatively by crafting and playing instruments such as Harps, Flutes, and Cellos. You’ll also be able to find sheet music in Core Keeper that can be used with the musical instruments to automatically play looping melodies – some of which you might just recognise from a few of your other favourite indie games. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg! We’ll be adding new environmental items, features, and mechanics that we can’t wait for you to uncover.

We think that “Quality of Love” is the perfect name for this update because we really wanted this to be an expression of our love for the community. A lot of the content you’ll see in this update is the result of community feedback, and we hope you’ll enjoy experiencing it as much as we enjoyed creating it. With just a week to go, make sure you join the conversation and let us know what you’re most excited about on our official Twitter and Discord channels!

Core Keeper is currently in Early Access, and we’ve got an amazing community across Steam, Twitter, and Discord. We cannot thank you enough for your support as we work on developing the game. However, there’s one area of our community that we wanted to show a little extra love to today, and that’s our modding community!

It takes a lot of skill, talent, and passion to work on modding a game that is relatively fresh in terms of its lifecycle, and we think it’s amazing that so many people have been getting excited about what they can do to mod Core Keeper while it's still in the early stages of development. We’ve seen people chatting about mods across all our social media platforms, and we thought it was about time that we gave them a dedicated space to discuss their projects.

With that in mind, we created a modding channel on the official Core Keeper Discord. Here, modders can chat to each other about what they’re working on, collaborate, and share tips, tricks, and even tutorials! Modding can look very different from game to game, but for Core Keeper, we’ve seen things like the implementation of “creative-mode” style features such as item spawning and the augmentation of skills all the way to the addition or alteration of in-game mechanics and features.

Modders use a wide variety of tools and plugins that work with the game’s engine (Unity) when working on their projects, and the modding community has even been so kind as to provide a “Getting Started With Modding” wiki and a modding library resource! You’ll find tool recommendations, advice on adding assets to Unity, and guidelines on modifying the game’s behaviour in the wiki, as well as a library of features that make modding Core Keeper easier in the modding library.

As always, we advise you to make backups of any and all files that you choose to modify whenever you’re doing something that could impact your data or the game’s code - just in case you need to reinstall for whatever reason.

We’ve seen some great stuff from the modding community so far, including mods that allow more precise tile placements when farming and building; a mod that gives the player XP when watering crops; and a mod that streamlines the fishing process by showing you the name of the fish on your line and automatically pulling it up for you.

We’re keen to see all the amazing ideas and creativity that’s still to come from Core Keeper
modders, and we hope that giving you a place to discuss these things lets you know that we, the developers, support the modding community and that we're exploring the possibility of making modding more feasible in the future.

Welcome to 2023! We’re very excited to ring in the new year with such an amazing community, and we hope you’re all looking forward to what this year will bring for Core Keeper.

You can expect a new roadmap from us this year, with details on the Crystal Biome and beyond! You’ll also be pleased to know that our seasonal events will be recurring throughout 2023, and we miiiight just add some new content to these if the opportunity presents itself. Though we can’t say much at the moment, we can assure you that there’ll be plenty to look forward to over the coming months, so keep an eye out for news and updates in the Steam announcements – as well as over on our Twitter and Discord channels.

You can probably tell that we’re raring to go full steam ahead into the New Year, but we also think it’s important to take the time to look back and reflect on what a great year 2022 was for us. Here are our highlights!

[h2]Launching Core Keeper in Early Access in March:[/h2]
This was an amazing moment for us, and it was made all the more special by the fact that we already had a dedicated community waiting for the game. From testing and open alphas, all the way to our very first public demo, we were so very grateful for your support as we brought the game into Early Access.

[h2]Our First Seasonal Event at Easter:[/h2]
We had our very first seasonal event not long after our Early Access launch, and this was a fantastic learning opportunity for us. The Easter Seasonal Event lasted for just two weeks and, originally, we had planned for the eggs from our egg hunt to disappear from the world when the event ended.

Thanks to your feedback, we soon realised that it’d be much more fun if certain items from seasonal events remained in the game for you to enjoy year ‘round. We also realised that time-locking seasonal events wasn’t ideal for Explorers who were busy or unavailable during the event windows, and we set the plans in motion to change this for our next seasonal event.

[h2]Our First Major Update – The Sunken Sea:[/h2]
After Easter (and a little work adding dedicated servers to the game), we were ready to bring you our first major update: The Sunken Sea! With a vast ocean and mystical sub-biome just waiting to be discovered, you set off in brand-new boats to battle the likes of Morpha the Aquatic Mass and Omoroth the Sea Titan. We added so much new content to the game for this update, including Portals, Sprinklers, the Dresser mechanic, map markers, new food, new enemies, new music, and more!

[h2]Cozy Caverns:[/h2]
We knew there’d be a little time before our next seasonal event and a little more before our next major update, so we wanted to bring you some fun, decorative content in the interim! Our Cozy Caverns update included lots of new and paintable items, and we added mechanics that would allow you to paint existing items such as rugs, dressers, and pedestals.

We added new mechanics such as the ability for players to sit on objects like chairs, stools, thrones, and (of course) the Caveling Toilet. We also had lots of requests for an update that would allow players to place Torches on walls, and Cozy Caverns seemed like the perfect opportunity to introduce this. It was a joy to see all the ways you got creative with this update.

[h2]Terraria Crossover:[/h2]
We’ve always admired the team over at Re-Logic, and our community had long been asking if there was ever going to be a Core Keeper and Terraria crossover. Well, in September 2022, we were beyond excited to bring King Slime to the world of Core Keeper and to see Caveling Pets as a feature in Terraria!

[h2]Our Halloween Seasonal Event:[/h2]
Things got super spooky in the underground in October when we introduced our second seasonal event for Halloween. We added creepy variations to our enemies, introducing the Dracularva, Spookavelings, Frankenbrutes, and Pumpkings to the game – plus an extra-scary variation on The Hive Mother! We also introduced new equipment and cosmetics, such as the Pumpkin Lantern and Spooky Blanket Cape (because who doesn’t want to dress up as a ghost, right?). Our creepy enemies were dropping some interesting Halloween loot including delicious candy and Grumpkin seeds!

We also updated the way seasonal events worked so that, once a seasonal event has launched, players can activate it at any time by changing their PC’s time and date settings to the window within which the event was running.

[h2]Our Second Major Update – The Desert of Beginnings:[/h2]
After adding so much new content to the game for The Sunken Sea, we were extra proud to be able to bring you even more for our second major update: The Desert of Beginnings. In this update, players were invited to comb the desert sands and battle their way through The Molten Quarry in search of new valuables that would help them in their battle against Ra-Akar the Sand Titan.

You upgraded your equipment with out-of-this-world Galaxite Ore, fought your way past six new enemies, stomped on new critters like beetles and worms, improved your circuitry skills, uncovered new fish, and crafted your very first Go-Karts! And that barely scratches the surface of all the wonderful ways we’ve seen Explorers enjoying The Desert of Beginnings.

[h2]Our Christmas Seasonal Event:[/h2]
As the year drew to a close, we knew we wanted to bring something special to wrap things up (pun intended). Our Christmas Seasonal Event began on the 13th of December, turning the underground into a winter wonderland. A blanket of snow covered certain biomes and enemies got new, festive variations – some of which were almost too adorable to kill. We added a new Seasonal Merchant, as well as lots of new cosmetic and decorative items to the game. Oh, and we added fireworks too!

This felt like the perfect note to end the year on, and we’re looking forward to recurring seasonal events, the Crystal Biome, and more in 2023!

Merry Christmas from the Pugstorm and Fireshine Games teams! We hope you’re all having a lovely time, Explorers – whether you celebrate Christmas or are just enjoying a little break from school/work/responsibilities while everything relaxes over the holiday season.

We can’t believe how quickly 2022 has gone by. It feels like only yesterday that we launched Core Keeper in Early Access, and here we are with two major updates and a handful of smaller/seasonal ones under our belts. We couldn’t have done it without your amazing feedback, and we are truly grateful for such a wonderful community.

We sure hope you’re enjoying the festive version of the underground in our Christmas Seasonal Event, which will be running all the way until the 5th of January. We know how busy things get over Christmas, which is why we want to remind you that you can experience our seasonal events at any time after they’ve launched by either…

1. Changing the time and date of your PC to the window within which the event was running.
   
   
2. Opening your Steam library, right-clicking Core Keeper, clicking on Properties…, then entering “-season Christmas” in the LAUNCH OPTIONS field at the bottom of the General tab of the menu.
   

We’re off to eat lots of delicious food, play games, spend time with friends and family, and be merry, and we hope you’ll be doing the same today. Once again, Merry Christmas, and we’ll see you in the New Year!