Core Keeper is an engaging sandbox adventure game that throws you into a mysterious underground world. At first glance, it might seem simple, but beneath the surface lies a wealth of depth and complexity. This Core Keeper Guide is designed to be your comprehensive starting point, walking you through the essential mechanics, deciphering the HUD, and providing a step-by-step walkthrough to kickstart your subterranean journey.
Once you progress, you’ll unlock thrilling features, from battling formidable bosses like Glurch to zipping around in a go-kart and catching elusive bugs. But first, let’s master the basics. We’ll begin with a clear breakdown of the Heads-Up Display (HUD).
Understanding the Core Keeper HUD
Navigating the world of Core Keeper effectively starts with understanding your HUD. Here’s a breakdown of each element:
- Health: This is your lifeline in Core Keeper. When your health bar empties to zero, it’s game over. Health doesn’t regenerate on its own. To restore it, you’ll need to consume food, use health potions, or take a rest in a bed. Certain items can also grant passive health regeneration.
- Mana: Mana is your magical energy reserve. It’s essential for casting spells and using magical weapons. Mana replenishes relatively quickly over time. However, be mindful that powerful magical attacks can consume a significant amount of mana.
- Hunger: This meter indicates your character’s hunger level. Letting your hunger deplete will result in stat penalties, hindering your abilities. Conversely, keeping your stomach full grants the “Well Fed” buff, temporarily boosting your stats. Regularly eating is key to maintaining peak performance.
- Buffs/Debuffs: Located beneath the Hunger bar, this area displays all active buffs (positive effects) and debuffs (negative effects) affecting your character. Hovering your mouse over an icon will reveal detailed information about its effect and duration. Pay close attention to these to optimize your gameplay and mitigate negative impacts.
- Minimap: The minimap provides a localized view of your immediate surroundings. It’s invaluable for navigation and exploration. Crucially, icons for discovered bosses will appear on the minimap, guiding you towards your next challenging encounter.
- Hotbar: This is your quick-access inventory bar. Items placed in the hotbar can be used instantly by pressing the corresponding number keys. Hotbar slots also function as regular inventory slots, offering dual utility.
- Off-Hand Ability: If you equip an off-hand item, such as a shield, its special ability becomes accessible via this button. Some off-hand abilities have cooldowns, indicated by the bar beneath the icon. Manage these cooldowns strategically during combat and exploration.
- Interact Prompt: This prompt illuminates when you are near an object or entity you can interact with. Keep an eye on this to identify lootable items, interactable NPCs, and more.
- Map Button: Pressing this button opens the world map. The map is essential for charting your explored areas, marking points of interest, and planning your expeditions further into the underground world.
- Inventory: Access your full inventory by pressing this button. The inventory is where you manage your collected items, craft new tools and equipment, and organize your resources. Efficient inventory management is crucial for survival and progression.
Core Keeper: A Beginner’s Guide to Mastering the Basics
With the HUD demystified, let’s dive into the fundamental mechanics of Core Keeper. While the game boasts considerable depth, the initial learning curve is quite manageable, especially compared to some other games in the survival genre.
Creating Your Core Keeper Character
Your adventure begins with character creation. Core Keeper offers a range of cosmetic customization options. Don’t fret too much over appearance at this stage, as you can later alter your character’s look by crafting a Magic Mirror and Dresser at the Carpenter’s Workbench.
A more impactful choice is selecting your “Background.” Backgrounds are pre-set skill and equipment packages that provide starting advantages. Importantly, no Background is truly exclusive; you can eventually acquire all skills and items regardless of your initial choice. For new players, the “Miner” Background is highly recommended. Starting with a Copper Pickaxe provides a significant early-game boost, as mining is a core activity from the outset.
Clearing the Core Area
You’ll materialize into the world atop a Waypoint, directly in front of the Core itself. Encircling the Core are three statues, each representing one of the initial bosses you’ll face: Glurch, Ghorm, and Malugaz. However, before confronting them, your immediate priority is to clear and organize the area around the Core.
Utilize your Pickaxe to break down the wood logs cluttering the Core area. Open your inventory and craft a few basic Chests. Place these chests strategically to store your accumulating items and resources, establishing a rudimentary storage system. Next, craft a Basic Workbench and interact with it. This workbench is the cornerstone of your early crafting capabilities.
Crafting Essential Early-Game Items
The Basic Workbench unlocks a suite of crucial crafting recipes that are vital for establishing your base and progressing in the early hours of Core Keeper. Here are the must-have items to prioritize crafting:
- Furnace: The Furnace is essential for smelting raw ore into metal bars. These bars are fundamental crafting components for tools, weapons, armor, and more. Efficient ore smelting is a cornerstone of progression in Core Keeper.
- Cooking Pot: The Cooking Pot allows you to prepare food. Cooking enhances the benefits of raw ingredients, providing better health and buff restoration compared to eating raw food. Cooking is crucial for sustained exploration and combat readiness.
- Salvage and Repair Station: This station serves two key purposes. Firstly, it allows you to repair damaged equipment, extending the lifespan of your tools, weapons, and armor. Secondly, it enables you to salvage unwanted items, breaking them down into Scrap Parts. Scrap Parts are used for repairing and reinforcing equipment, making salvaging a valuable recycling mechanic. A useful early game strategy is to craft a few cheap tools specifically to salvage them for Scrap Parts, giving you a ready supply for repairing your better gear.
- Copper Workbench: The Copper Workbench is your next major crafting upgrade. It unlocks the first tier of Copper-level crafting recipes, allowing you to create Copper tools, weapons, and armor. Progressing through workbench tiers is essential for accessing increasingly powerful equipment.
Core Keeper features biome-specific resources. You begin in the Dirt Biome, rich in Copper. As you explore, you’ll venture into The Clay Caves Biome for Tin and The Forgotten Ruins for Iron. Each biome offers new materials and challenges, driving exploration and progression.
Advancing to new material tiers requires upgrading your workbenches. You craft the Copper Workbench at the Basic Workbench. The Copper Workbench then unlocks the Copper Anvil, which further expands your Copper crafting options. This tiered workbench system continues as you progress, with the Tin Workbench crafted at the Copper Workbench, and so on, encouraging a steady progression through material tiers.
Setting Up Your Bed and Building a Base
Placing a Bed is your next priority. Beyond providing a respawn point, a Bed allows you to rest and rapidly restore health over a short period. Without a designated Bed, death will result in respawning back at the Core.
Establishing your base near the Core is generally a wise early-game strategy. The Core features a pre-existing Waypoint, offering convenient teleportation to other locations you discover. Crafting your own Waypoints and Portals is resource-intensive, especially in the early game. Leverage the Core’s Waypoint to your advantage and build your initial base in close proximity. This minimizes travel time and keeps essential resources and teleportation readily accessible.
Gathering Copper Resources
Your immediate resource focus should shift to acquiring Copper Ore. Copper is essential for crafting your first set of Copper armor, weapons, and tools. Obtaining a ranged weapon early on is highly recommended. Early-game enemies can be surprisingly aggressive, and ranged combat provides a safer approach.
Copper Ore is readily found throughout the Dirt Biome. A full set of Copper Armor provides sufficient protection to take on Glurch, the first boss. However, Core Keeper offers flexibility in progression. You can choose to advance to Tin and even Iron tiers before engaging any bosses, offering different paths to power.
Confronting Glurch, The First Boss
Once you feel adequately equipped, it’s time to hunt for Glurch. Glurch is the first major boss, a colossal slime that perpetually bounces around its lair. Explore the areas surrounding the Core, listening for a distinctive thumping sound. This sound indicates you’re nearing Glurch’s location.
Before engaging Glurch, clear the immediate area around its lair. Pick up any slime tiles on the ground and eliminate any hostile enemies present. This creates a safer combat arena. Then, cautiously approach Glurch and initiate combat.
Glurch possesses a powerful jump attack with significant range. Upon landing, Glurch’s jumps can destroy nearby wall tiles. Be extremely cautious not to inadvertently lure Glurch towards your base during the fight. Ensure you have ample open space to maneuver and evade its attacks.
Defeating Glurch rewards you with a chest containing random loot and a crucial crystal. Collect all items, including the chest itself! Then, place the Glurch Crystal into Glurch’s statue near the Core. This action partially powers up the Core, unlocking new crafting recipes at the Glurch statue and marking a significant step in your progression.
Understanding Enemy Spawning Mechanics
During your fight with Glurch, you likely encountered patches of orange slime on the ground. These aren’t merely visual hazards; they are enemy spawn tiles.
In Core Keeper, enemy spawning is primarily tile-based. Specific ground tiles dictate the types of enemies that will spawn in an area. Removing these tiles prevents enemy spawns in that location. Interestingly, you can collect these spawn tiles and strategically place them elsewhere to create controlled monster farms. Monster farms are valuable for resource gathering and experience farming.
Welcoming the Merchant to Your Base
Defeating Glurch triggers the rescue of the Bearded Merchant. He also drops Slime Oil, an item used to summon him to your base. To establish the Merchant in your base, construct a small room and place both a Bed and the Slime Oil within it. The Bearded Merchant will then take up residence.
The Bearded Merchant serves as a valuable trader. He sells various supplies and, crucially, items that allow you to re-summon certain bosses, including giant slimes and Ghorm. These re-summon items are purchased and placed on the boss’s rune to trigger their reappearance. This mechanic allows you to farm bosses for loot and resources repeatedly.
Tackling Ghorm and Malugaz: The Next Challenges
With Glurch defeated, your attention turns to the next boss encounters: Ghorm and Malugaz. Locate these bosses by crafting their respective Scanners at the Glurch statue near the Core. Each boss presents unique combat mechanics and requires different strategies.
Ghorm is a colossal worm that perpetually circles the central map area. It doesn’t stop to directly engage until you inflict sufficient damage. Iron equipment, especially a bow for ranged attacks, is highly recommended for effectively damaging Ghorm during the brief windows it passes through openings in its tunnel system.
Malugaz, in contrast, requires a summoning ritual. You must gather 3 Crystal Skull Shards. Place these shards on your Hotbar, and right-click to combine them into a Skull of the Corrupted Shaman. This Skull is then placed on Malugaz’s rune to summon the boss.
Both Ghorm and Malugaz present significantly tougher challenges than Glurch. Victory necessitates employing specific combat strategies and preparations. Consult dedicated guides for Ghorm and Malugaz for in-depth tips and tactics to overcome these formidable foes.
Unlocking Azeos’ Wilderness and Expanding Your Horizons
Upon defeating Glurch, Ghorm, and Malugaz, return to the Core and interact with it. The Core, now empowered by the boss crystals, will grant you the ability to lower the wall surrounding the starting area. This opens up access to three entirely new biomes: Azeos’ Wilderness, The Desert of Beginnings, and The Sunken Sea.
Each of these new biomes introduces at least two new bosses to conquer, along with unique resources and challenges. Azeos’ Wilderness is generally the recommended next area, offering Scarlet Ore. Following that, The Sunken Sea (requiring a Boat for traversal) yields Octarine Ore, and The Desert of Beginnings provides Galaxite Ore.
Opening the wall beyond the initial area marks the true commencement of your Core Keeper adventure. This Core Keeper guide has equipped you with the fundamental knowledge to embark on this expanded journey. Enjoy exploring the vast underground world, and delve into our other specialized guides for more advanced strategies and in-depth information!
Death in Core Keeper: What to Expect
Death in Core Keeper carries manageable consequences. Any equipped armor will suffer some durability loss, requiring repair at a Salvage and Repair Station. Items held in your inventory (excluding those in the Hotbar) will be dropped at your death location, marked by a tombstone. You can retrieve your lost items by returning to your tombstone.
Core Keeper Multiplayer: Playing with Friends
Core Keeper shines in multiplayer. It supports up to 8 players in a single online game. Team up with friends to explore, build, fight bosses, and conquer the underground world together. Multiplayer enhances the Core Keeper experience through cooperative gameplay and shared adventures.
Locating Your Core Keeper Save Files
For backup or transfer purposes, you can find your Core Keeper save files at the following location:
C:UsersUSERNAMEAppDataLocalLowPugstormCore KeeperSteam
Replace “USERNAME” with your Windows username. Within this directory, you’ll find a numbered folder corresponding to your Steam ID. Two key subfolders are:
- saves: Contains data for your created characters.
- worlds: Stores data for the game worlds you’ve generated.
Thank you for consulting our Core Keeper Guide. Expand your knowledge and conquer the depths by exploring our additional guides below!
