The Ultimate Guide to Core Keeper Gameplay

The Ultimate Guide to Core Keeper Gameplay

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Once you’ve crafted the cooking pot at the workbench, you can combine ingredients to make dishes that increase your speed, max health, and even make you glow while they fill your health bar back up.

Portal Crafted at significant expense, players can teleport between Portals placed anywhere in the world. Greatly speeding up returning to key locations.

It’s a familiar cadence: use resources to beef up your base, craft items that help you explore further, gear up for the boss fight, make secondary bases, and improve the return routes to key areas. As the paths you’ve created grow more convoluted, you can rely on your map, which you’re able to pull out as an overlay.

’s multiplayer (up to eight people), similarly facilitates a lot of collaboration and strategizing. But the game is far from derivative. It weaves tried-and-true survival sim elements into a tight play loop where the game is the grind in a way that feels meditative without being too repetitive.

Early on, I adored this simplicity, even as a solo player. It was ideal for a two-screen PC setup with YouTube or Netflix playing on the side. Toward the end — and admittedly, in Early Access, there isn’t really an “end” — I started to feel tapped out.

While it doesn’t reinvent the wheels of its genre, Pugstorm’s Core Keeper emerges confidently out of early access and I’m looking forward to revisiting it over and over again in the coming years.

After travelling out to touch and drop the unbreakable barrier wall, players can return to speak to The Core for a second time. This yields a brief description and approximate compass direction for the first outer biome: Azeos' Wilderness.

The workbenches chain from one to the next, as players progress through biomes and their ores. There is no requirement to beat bosses, initially. The Core:

You’ll have goals in mind, sure — maybe you want to find a certain ore to craft a certain helmet with a certain perk before facing a boss — but it can be just as easy to pick a direction, any direction, and start tunneling.

Salvage and Repair Station: Allows you to repair and reinforce your equipment in exchange for Scrap Parts. It can also be used to break down existing tools, weapons, and armor to get Scrap Parts. It's best to craft a few cheap tools and destroy them so you can repair your good tools.

Permanent max health foods have also been omitted. They are rare to find optional extras that will help make a playthrough easier by slightly increasing a character's base health.

I may be in a cave with dirt walls lit only by torchlight, but in that cave I've got a little farm growing lovely, chunky vegetables and a cooking pot where I can combine them for yummy meals. I've built bridges over dark, bottomless chasms and slashed through chambers filled with wriggling larvae only to find the perfect serene fishing spot in a underground pond. 

is really dark when it wants to be, which is most of the time. But you’ll also come across clearings — like a glowing flower-lit river, or a massive chewed-out tunnel that conveniently forms a perfect circle around the game’s Core Keeper Gameplay starting area — and the lighting-fueled atmosphere hits that much harder.

It’s a great value at $13, but don’t let it overstay, either. Just because you can automate rare scarlet ore mining with a drill, conveyor belt, and a robot arm, that doesn’t mean you strictly “need to.” It can feel like progress for progress’ sake.