Core Keeper is a new mining sandbox adventure game currently in Early Access on Steam. Here is our Core Keeper: Beginner’s Guide to get you started in the game!
It can be played alone or with seven other friends. Many say that the game feels like a cross between Terraria and Stardew Valley, so if those games appeal to you then give this game a try! Below is a guide to help you get started.
Core Keeper: Beginner’s Guide
You begin the game by spawning at the Core.
The surrounding area is very dark, with the Core being the only source of light.
Thankfully, there is a lot of surrounding wood that you can break and collect with your bare hands. With the collected wood you can create your first set of items:
- a wood pickaxe
- a wood shovel
- a crafting table
- torches
The priority should be making an initial base camp at first, a small area at or around the Core will do. You’ll notice the core is surrounded by three statues, each statue representing a boss you must defeat. The bosses will drop unique items you can socket into their respective statues and power the core. Once fully powered, it will allow you to pass the Great Wall and let you explore even further.
Before you can fight these bosses however, here are some things you can do to prepare.
Mining
In the starting biome area, you may notice some shining objects in the rock, those are Copper Ores. You can mine them and smelt them in a Furnace to turn them into Copper Bars.
Copper Bars can be used to craft things like Copper Armor or Copper Tools.
In deeper areas, like the Clay Caves and Forgotten Ruins, you will find better ores like Tin and Iron. You can use these ores to make even better equipment, with Iron being the best of the three. Be careful as you explore, the deeper you go the more powerful the enemies you’ll face.
Food, Farming, and Cooking
Aside from your health bar, you also have to keep track of your hunger bar.
There are many items you can find in the caves that you can eat like Heart Berries, Glow Tulips, and Bomb Peppers. These plants can drop their respective seeds when you collect them. Enemies can also sometimes drop seeds when defeated.
You can till the ground using a hoe to plant any seeds you find there and water them with a watering can. A crop takes approximately 10 minutes to fully grow and has a 75% chance to drop seeds when harvested.
Once you’ve created a Cooking Pot, you can combine two food items into better consumables than their raw counterparts. Each cooking ingredient will give the cooked dish a special effect.
For example, when eaten alone these foods will give the player:
- Mushroom (+9 food and +2.1 health per second for 20 seconds)
- Bomb Pepper (+6 food and -11 health)
But when cooked together, they create a Mushy Pepper Wrap (+28 food, +4.2 health per second for 20 seconds, and a 21% movement speed buff for 1 minute)
Skill Tree
Core Keeper has nine skill trees that encompass multiple aspects of the game
These skill trees are:
- Mining
- Vitality
- Gardening
- Running
- Crafting
- Fishing
- Melee Combat
- Range Combat
- Cooking
Some of the skills from these trees are extremely useful such as an increased chance of obtaining ores or having a 100% chance to obtain a seed when harvesting crops.
In order to increase your skill tree’s level, you just have to repeatedly perform activities pertaining to that skill tree. Mining and Running are the easier skill trees to level while Fishing and Cooking may take a while.
Core Keeper Bosses
Once you have established your camp and crafted your equipment and tools, it’s time to fight the bosses.
Glurch the Abominous Mass
Glurch is likely the very first boss you will encounter. It spawns approximately 65 tiles away from the core, you’ll notice some shaking when you are near its area.
Normally Glurch would be easy to dodge, but the area is filled with ground slime that halves the player’s movement speed. Furthermore, Glurch becomes enraged when it reaches 30% health which will cause it to jump and attack faster.
A good strategy for this boss is to run in the direction it is jumping from. Since it is jumping into you, running to the spot it came from is a great way to avoid damage.
Upon its defeat, it will drop a Ghorm chest and regurgitate the Bearded Merchant. If you want to keep this NPC at your base, then Glurch also drops Slime Oil. The Merchant will move to any habitable room that the Slime Oil is placed in.
Once you socket the Glurch Eye into its respective statue, you’ll be able to purchase trackers for the next two bosses.
Ghorm The Devourer
Ghorm is a large worm that circles the area 250 tiles from the core, around the Clay Caves and Forgotten Ruins biomes.
Ghorm is constantly moving and will ignore the players. However, it will still run over players that stand in front of it as it moves. If you want to keep Ghorm to stay in your vicinity, then you will have to enrage it by depleting it to 70% of its health. That will cause it to start charging at you and returning when it misses. This can be done by placing Spike Traps on the route it makes. You can also create Bombs from the Alchemist’s Table which explode upon contact with Ghorm.
Once you’ve enraged it, you need to constantly dodge its charges at you while dealing damage to it with your weapons, spikes, or bombs.
When defeated, Ghorm drops a Ghorm Chest which contains Ghorm’s Horn, a Mysterious Idol, and other goodies. The Mysterious Idol is used to summon the Caveling Merchant, which works similarly to the Bearded Merchant. It just needs to be placed in a habitable room.
Meanwhile, Ghorm’s Horn can be socketed to its statue to continue your quest in powering the core.
The Hive Mother
The Hive Mother is usually the last of the three that players fight. She can be found in the Clay Caves.
Her primary way of attacking is to launch acid at a player, leaving ground acid slime which will damage the player when stepped on. She can also summon larvae to fight for her if you’re not quick enough in destroying the Hive Eggs around her.
The Hive Mother is a stationary boss and won’t attack unless you initiate the fight, so you can take all the time that you want to prepare for this fight. One way to deal with her minions is to wall them in with Larva Hive Walls. She can summon as many larvae as she wants, but they are not a problem as long as they are blocked behind sturdy walls. Now all you have to deal with is her acid sprays. You can keep attacking her while circling around and avoiding the acid. Make sure to bring Healing and Enrage Potions from the Alchemist’s Table to make the fight easier.
She drops the Heart of the Hive Mother which is the last item you need to power the core.
Plug it in the statue and watch the cutscene unfold.
You are now able to get past the Great Wall and adventure even further out into Core Keeper’s world!
And what’s our complete Core Keeper: Beginner’s Guide! Looking for more content? Check out our main Core Keeper guides page.