Fixed a bug where the Atlantean Worm would sometimes just keep moving in the north direction.
Fixed correct materials to be gained when salvaging the Fang Necklace.
Fixed an issue where Omoroth could be engaged before it was biting the bait.
Fixed an issue where outlines of Go-Karts would sometimes be enabled when the player was not close to them.
Fixed an issue where the Bambuck Kid would get stuck in its movement instead of playing its “baah”.
Fixed an issue where the Bambuck would stand still for a longer duration than intended.
Fixed an issue with Crystal Shard Club hitting a larger area than intended when charged up.
Fixed an issue where Cattle movement would get stuck after breeding.
Fixed an issue where Go-Karts would often not destroy roots in front of them while driving towards them.
Fixed an issue where Merchants would restock their items when restarting a world.
Pets and Cattle no longer block players from hitting Torches with their Mining Picks.
Fixed a bug where some custom scene objects would not drop the intended loot.
Fixed a bug where the Meadow sub-biome music did not play in Azeos’ Wilderness.
Fixed a bug where walking through narrow tunnels in sub-biomes would repeatedly switch the music between sub-biome and main biome tracks.
Loading a world with modded items stored in displays (e.g. on Pedestals) without the relevant mod installed no longer results in extremely low frame rates.
Fixed an issue where Go-Kart tracks appeared behind the Go-Kart instead of underneath it.
Fixed a case where a “Timeout” message was shown instead of the more correct “Connection closed”.
4 Things We Love About the Core Keeper Community!
We’re not sure if it’s because our Valentine’s seasonal event starts tomorrow or because we’ve been reflecting on our Core Keeper journey as we develop the 1.0 version of the game, but we’ve been feeling a little sentimental recently. We’ve got such an amazing community and Core Keeper wouldn’t be where it is today without your input and encouragement.
We could spend all day listing the ways in which we’re grateful for our community, but our community manager demanded recommended that we limit it to just four. So, without further ado, here’s 4 things we love about the Core Keeper community!
1. Your Honesty
It’s no secret that we work closely with our community when it comes to development decisions for Core Keeper. From implementing your feature requests all the way to bug fixes and balancing the game’s progression, your feedback has truly shaped the direction of the game. We really appreciate how open and willing our community is to communicate with us, and we do our best to take on board all of your suggestions so that we can build a game that you’ll love.
One thing we really admire, however, is your honesty. When something isn’t working for our community, we want to know, and we truly value the opportunity to hear both comments and criticisms of the game. Whether you’re reaching out in the Steam Discussions, commenting on Twitter, or sharing your thoughts in the Feedback and Suggestions forums on Discord, we want to say a big thank you for offering your honest opinion on Core Keeper!
2. Your Creativity
Since Core Keeper’s Early Access launch in March 2022, we’ve had the immense pleasure of getting to see just how creative our community can be. You’ve shared fan art, screenshots, music, live streams, walk-throughs, tutorials, opinion pieces, articles, reviews, and more with us over the years, and we’ve been blown away by just how much creativity you’ve put into content inspired by our game.
It’d be impossible for us to share every single piece of fan work that we love, but we wanted to take a more active approach in showing our appreciation, which is why we started our Steam Community Wrap-Ups last year! We aim to share a new one every week, highlighting what’s going on with Core Keeper and the awesome things our community has been up to, so keep an eye out.
3. Your Openness
As a game developer, you never know what your community is going to be like until it is established, and we’ve been so delighted to see how welcoming you are of each other in spaces like the Core Keeper Discord server. Many of you go out of your way to help each other and answer questions in the Steam Discussions, and we feel very lucky to have such an open community where new members are made to feel included. Of course, our fabulous moderation team has had to step in from time to time when discussions have gotten a little passionate (that’s what moderators are for after all), but we’ve genuinely been impressed by how friendly our community is for the most part! We hope you’ll continue to welcome each other as we move forward from Early Access to 1.0 and beyond.
4. Your Support
Finally, we wanted to say a big thank you for all of your support. Your kind words, positivity, and encouragement have made it an absolute joy to develop Core Keeper. It means a lot to us to have you with us on this journey, and we’re very passionate about delivering lots of awesome new content for the 1.0 version of the game. We’ve still got a handful of minor updates coming your way before we leave Early Access, including a language update (more on that soon!) and a summer update too.
Until then, we want to wish you all a happy Valentine’s Day for tomorrow and remind you that seasonal events can be enjoyed at any time of year, toggled, or switched off completely from the Gameplay Settings menu. Okay, we’ll stop being soppy now and get back to dev work!
Community Wrap-Up 9th February 2024
Another week has flown by and we're settling into February quite nicely. You might have noticed a couple of patches and hotfixes addressing some of your community feedback recently. We want to say a big thank you to everybody who makes reports using our bug report form and submits their logs, as this gives us the most important information when it comes to addressing fixes for the game! Now, let's see what else we've been up to this week...
Celebrating the Lunar New Year in Style
We've been having lots of fun dressing up and decorating our bases with our new Lunar New Year seasonal event, but did you know there were some cool permanent additions to the game with this update too? Things like rotating planter boxes (which was a big community request!) and a substantial change to the way wall and ground tiles work. Find out more here.
Cattle & Pets Pokémon Types
We've been imagining what types some of our Cattle and Pets might be if they were Pokémon! Which six would you have in your party? We think Strolly Poly, Keple, Subterrier, Embertail, Owlux, and Slime Jr would make a fairly balanced team!
Guess the Fake Name!
We asked our followers over on X if you could guess which of the following were real early name concepts for Core Keeper, and which was the fake!
Cave Keeper
Nethervein
Underminer
There were lots of good guesses, but a big congratulations to anyone who realised that Underminer was the fake. Cave Keeper and Nethervein were all very real considerations for us, along with Hartcore, Downcore, Cavecore, and Veincore!
Base Building with Aminala!
Twitch Streamer, Aminala, shared some very cool screenshots from a recent Core Keeper stream with us. We're glad you've rediscovered your love of base building, Aminala, and we hope to see more streams from you in the future!
New Years Base
Community member, Him(TW), shared this fantastic Lunar New Year base featuring some of their favourite seasonal items, which we love!
Fixed a crash after receiving an error from the Discord rich presence integration during play. This happens if Discord quits while playing Core Keeper, but we have also seen reports of some players getting other errors with the Discord connection, often during early startup. If you were having issues with not being able to start the game, then this might mean that Discord rich presence will not be working and we’ll investigate these issues further. Right now we are stopping the Discord integration on any error to avoid potential worse issues like adverse impact on game performance.
Minor Post-Update Patch - 0.7.3.1
Bugs:
Fixed a minor error when interacting with the Seasonal Merchant the first time.
Fixed the Valentine chest to not look like a Solarite chest.
Fixed the icon of Dark Stone Ground to not use the block version. This only affects players who had Dark Stone Ground in their inventory from before, as newly mined tiles should drop the block version.
Add missing Lunar New Year season category in creative mode.
Fixed an issue where the hoe would not harvest plants if there was a Red Envelope on the same tile as the plant.
Fixed an issue where the emissive parts of the Furnace, Smelter Kiln, Campfire and Cooking Pot would render in front of other objects.
Fixed an issue where meadow and dungeon-specific music looped indefinitely once triggered.
Fixed an issue where Bomb Scarabs would be scaled up sometimes.
Fixed an issue where the player would not get any experience from walking.
Fixed a bug where the player would get more experience from walking than intended.
Fixed a crash after getting some specific errors when initializing the connection to Discord.
Fixed a bug where hitting with a broken Flintlock Musket would still push back the player.
Fixed a bug where the Seasonal Merchant would have white eyes when no season was active.
Fixed a bug where pets gained twice the experience when fed with Pet Candy.
Fixed errors and potential crashes when breaking Easter Egg Flower Pots.
Fixed jerky movement for other players when using boats.
Community Wrap-Up 2nd February 2024
This February, we've got two fun seasonal events for you, Explorers! We're kicking the month off with our Lunar New Year update, which is running right up until midnight on February 13th. We then swap over for Valentine's on the 14th, which will run all the way up until the 28th, making for a busy month. In the meantime, let's take a look at what's been going on in the Core Keeper Community!
Lunar New Year!
We're a few days into this seasonal event now, and it's been a real joy to see you getting stuck in and creating wonderful bases with Paper Lanterns and Guardian Beast Statues! Remember, if seasonal events aren't your thing, you can always switch these off (or toggle between them!) in the Gameplay Settings menu.
Games in Sweden Festival!
There's still time to pick up Core Keeper at a whopping 40% discount in the Games in Sweden Festival! If you're new to Core Keeper or simply haven't heard, Pugstorm is a Swedish development studio born in 2018 in the charming city of Linköping. We've grown a lot since then and have team members all over the place, but we're certainly proud of our Swedish roots! Hurry, though, the festival ends on February 5th.
The Year Starts Again
Wow, we love this screenshot from Discord user ム・ラビット＠空腹の変人. The focus on the Dragon Masks makes for a very stunning image. Happy Year of the Dragon, everyone!
Overgrown Temple
Discord user Huabun's Aztec-inspired temple and mountain scene is so beautiful and green that we just had to share it! We also love the use of the Guardian Beast Statues and the Cherry Trees!
Preparing for the Midas Banquet
Twifyre [115k/100k] has been busy again this week, working on exciting new creations in their game. This screenshot features a renovation to the Great Hall of their Sunken Sea base with plenty of rare and wonderful food!
Fixed Lunar season not triggering automatically based on date.
Fixed object spawn on clients breaking when reaching the limit of maximum objects per type.
Celebrate the Lunar New Year With Us!
Our Lunar New Year update is now live! We hope you’ll have fun celebrating the Year of the Dragon in this seasonal event and minor content update.
Collect Lucky Coins from Red Envelopes found across the underground and trade those in at the Seasonal Merchant for awesome decorative items such as Guardian Lion Statues, Paper Lanterns, and the Dragon Mask Helm. Show off your play time, party size, and current biome with an all-new rich presence across Steam and Discord. We’re also introducing a game-changer for your base building experience with updates to the way wall and floor tiles work.
We’ve combined these two tiles into one smart tile (that changes depending on placement) to save on inventory space and streamline the building process. As of the Lunar New Year update, any wall tiles in your inventory will become combined wall/ground tiles. Ground tiles will remain the same as always in your inventory until placed out into the world, where they’ll become combined wall/ground tiles when mined and picked back up again.
Check out our patch notes for a full list of what’s available in this update. And, as always, we’d love to see your seasonal bases and hear what you think of the update over on Discord, X, and here in the comments. Happy Lunar New Year, everyone.
Core Keeper - Lunar Update Patch Notes - 0.7.3
Gameplay:
Naturally spawned wall and ground tiles of the same type will now drop a shared block object instead when mined/dug up. This new type of block can be placed both as a ground and a wall tile depending on placement. These blocks will replace the natural walls that players have in their inventories but will not affect existing ground tiles that players have already picked up unless they place them out and dig them back up again.
Workbenches can now also access items from diagonally placed chests when crafting.
The Seasonal Merchant now has a new seasonal skin and new seasonal items for sale. The skin will revert to its original appearance after the event ends, but the items will remain available.
Red envelopes can be found dropped on the ground throughout the world. Pick them up and see what’s inside! Any envelopes left on the ground after the season ends will disappear and any picked up envelopes will be kept. The envelopes will continuously appear randomly in the world throughout the season.
Lucky coins. These are used to buy new items from the Seasonal Merchant.
Items sold by Seasonal Merchant:
Guardian Beast Statue
Paper Lantern
Mystic Knot Tassel
Wall Paper Lantern
Cosmetic: Dragon Mask
Graphics
Visual overhaul of the UI and buttons in the pause menu.
Updated some armor loot sprites with newer graphics.
The Core Keeper main menu logo has been updated with a new seasonal appearance.
Audio
Tweaked volume levels of ambient audio.
Performance
Ported many common game objects to our in-house sprite rendering solution, including chests, torches, and crafting stations. This results in less stuttering when they load in, as well as better rendering performance.
Made sweeping changes to the game hierarchy, which describes the relationship between game objects. Most objects now have a much smaller hierarchy, and its structure no longer changes every time a new object appears on screen. Each object type also resides in a dedicated hierarchy, reducing the number of recomputations needed when an object changes position.
Made several improvements to our conversion system in order to reduce load times. We also no longer create large numbers of object types that never appear in-game. The latter reduces overhead when scheduling jobs, in turn making it more worthwhile to move small work loads to worker threads.
Tweaked some custom scenes to avoid creating extra game objects that had to be converted separately each time a world was loaded.
Fixed sudden lag spikes from the memory manager allocating a large number of new objects if the number of objects on screen exceeded the preallocated amount. Objects exceeding the preallocation are now created on-demand.
Tweaked memory pool sizes to reduce allocation of unused objects. In particular, there are no longer multiple hidden copies of bosses.
Many particle systems are now pooled separately from other game objects and are only claimed when a game object wants to display the effect. This reduces the number of particle systems kept in memory at any given time.
The player character displayed in menus such as the in-game inventory and the character selection screen no longer has a large number of unused particle systems.
Removed several managed memory allocations that caused the garbage collector to run more frequently than necessary.
Reduced 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.
Replaced our custom Translation component with the LocalTransform component introduced in Unity Entities 1.0. This removes the need to copy positional data multiple times each tick.
Used more efficient constructs from Unity Entities 1.0 when looking up entity components in jobs.
Rewrote key game systems to use the Burst compiler, which improves their performance and reduces overhead when scheduling worker thread jobs.
Animator components no longer look up the properties they animate twice when a new object appears on screen.
Values in the condition effect UI are now cached to avoid updating them from scratch every frame.
Bug Fixes
Fixed an issue where ranged weapons would hit objects like torches and bushes.
Fixed correct terms for cooked food in Spanish.
Fixed a commonly reported bug where baby cattle would never grow up.
Newly allocated objects no longer run their initialization logic twice.
Fixed an error in the calculation of the additional damage gained from melee and ranged damage increase stats as well as the Well-Trained Aim and Miner’s Strength talents.
Fixed an error in the calculation of the damage value shown in the stats window. Special thanks to Toozy for helping us find this issue!
Fixed a bug where Slime pets would repeatedly bump into the Hive Mother rather than attack.
Exiting the game in Azeos’ battle arena no longer causes the boss to briefly appear while the game fades out.
Fixed a bug where the Halloween seasonal coins would not behave correctly outside the Halloween season.
Fixed a bug where crystal water buckets spawned via the creative UI did not place any water when used.
Fixed a bug where drill sounds would not play after moving away from drills and then moving back to them again.
Seeds that can be planted on tilled dirt ground can now also be planted on tilled meadow ground.
Fixed a bug where the Burnzooka would not pierce Meadow Walls.
Fixed a bug where projectiles that can pierce through walls would sometimes not pierce through painted versions of the same wall.
Fixed an issue where Sunrice and Lunacorn would sometimes not be fully grown in Crystal Biome areas.
Fixed an issue where Omoroth could be summoned when the player had too low fishing skill for the Sunken Sea water.
Fixed an issue where walls would be destroyed with a small delay sometimes, typically happening when destroying walls in two hits.
Fixed hardcore characters being killed permanently if using the “I’m stuck” option to respawn and then immediately exiting the game.
Tweaked the collider for the radiation crystal to better reflect their in-game appearance.
Other
Rich presence for Steam & Discord. Allows players to display their current Core Keeper game activity directly on their Discord and Steam profile.
Planter Boxes can now be rotated.
Removed swing anticipation from attacks.
Added your character's name to chat logs.
Community Wrap-Up 26th January 2024
It's the last Friday of January and it feels like this month has really flown by! We've had a great one this week with an exciting new announcement. Don't worry if you didn't spot our Lunar New Year update reveal, we'll recap below.
Lunar New Year Update Coming January 31st!
We're very excited for this seasonal event / minor update! Expect some cool new Year of the Dragon-themed content plus permenant features that we think you're going to love. Find out the details here and make sure you watch our Lunar New Year trailer (spoiler: there's a cheeky 1.0 teaser in there!).
Do You Play Core Keeper on Steam Deck?
You'll be pleased to know that Core Keeper is Steam Deck verified, meaning you can take the underground with you wherever you go! Our community manager got their very own Steam Deck for Christmas and they've loved having Core Keeper for train journeys and cozy evenings at home.
Hartcore
We had a bunch of working titles before we settled on Core Keeper. Check out this piece of concept art from our Lead Artist, Julian, featuring the working title 'Hartcore'.
Cats and Roses
We can't get over how cute this Valentine-themed pixel art is from Discord user, SnapDragon987! Don't you think it looks like a cross-stitch pattern?
Rainbow Council Bedrooms!
Discord user, Twifyre [94.8k/100k], created a very cool "Rainbow Council" base in Core Keeper a little while back. Since then, they realised that the council also needed bedrooms and built 12 5x5 rooms along with 2 3x3 bathrooms with an awesome rainbow theme!
