
YouTube Review
First impressions and early progression
The game throws players into a procedurally generated underground world. You are an unnamed explorer who is teleported next to the mysterious Core, which you need to power back on with three different crystals. The game doesn’t explain much about what’s happening or how to play, so if you are new to this sandbox genre, it will take some time to adjust.

In this world, your main goal is exploration. Just as in Minecraft or Terraria, you can destroy walls, dig holes, gather wood, mine resources, automate your farm, and build your own base. Along the way, you’ll encounter various wildlife depending on the biome you’re in. Every item you find has a use, whether for crafting or decoration. In the first few hours, you’ll spend most of your time mining walls with copper or iron pickaxes, dealing with hunger, and fighting enemies with a rusty sword. It may sound generic, but trust me—it’s different. Core Keeper carves its own path, offering a unique mix of exploration, combat, crafting, and base-building. While many ideas are borrowed from other similar games, there are improvements here and there.

Interestingly, Core Keeper has a skills system similar to Skyrim. If you attack foes in melee, you’ll gain experience in melee combat. If you go fishing, mine walls, or harvest plants, you’ll earn XP in the corresponding skill. Each skill has its own passive tree that can make your gameplay easier, but maxing out a single skill can take considerable time. If you want to unlock everything, I recommend starting with fishing as early as possible, as it requires the most time and dedication. Fishing isn’t useless either—you can find valuable items in water or lava, like high-quality fish for crafting meals, equipment, or even a permanent health boost!
Once you get used to Core Keeper’s core gameplay—pun intended—craft your first workbench, and build your first base, you’ll realize the need to expand. Roaming around your first biome, you’ll eventually face the first slimy boss. Defeating it and retrieving its fragment will activate one of three generators for the Core and unlock special items. Finding all the bosses can be tricky, but you can craft scanners to detect them on the map. Once you defeat all three bosses in their respective biomes, you can progress to a much higher difficulty.
Beyond the starting area

This is where the actual game begins. After defeating all three bosses, it’s time to dive deeper into the new, much larger, and more challenging biomes. These areas introduce new tools, weapons, higher-tier gear, and mining veins— all essential for progression. There are three new large areas to explore: Wilderness, Sunken Sea, and Desert of Beginnings. You can explore them in any order, but I’d recommend starting with Wilderness since the other two are more difficult and require better equipment, such as higher mining power to break walls. However, the game doesn’t penalize you much for using lower-tier pickaxes. In fact, you can stack enough mining power to destroy blocks with a copper pickaxe, though it will be slower. This trick can save time if you want to rush to the best available tools. Could you imagine doing this in Minecraft—trying to get diamonds with a stone pickaxe? Probably not.

Each of these biomes has one primary and one or two optional bosses. You’ll also find points of interest like Titan Temple, Labyrinths, or Ancient Forge, which can lead to the most powerful gear in Core Keeper (Spoiler: Rune Song Sword, Soul Seeker Pickaxe or Phantom Spark Bow). I won’t spoil the details, but finding and defeating these bosses will require preparation. Crafting, passive skills, and co-op will be your best allies. Killing the primary bosses unlocks new passive powers for your character, which you can activate or deactivate at any time in the Powers tab, located next to Skills.
Exploring new biomes always offers something new—workbenches, pickaxes, unique armor, and more. There’s a constant sense of progression, and your character only gets stronger. Even if you revisit older areas, you might find something you missed, like rare materials, recipes, plants, dungeons, or optional bosses.

Since the world is vast and your backpack is limited, you’ll need to travel frequently. The game offers several ways to do this: using Recall idols to return home, building railroads with carts, or placing expensive but reliable portals. These portals allow you to travel between zones, though they require many resources to craft and take 20 minutes to charge.
Improving your base camp is also crucial, not just for aesthetics but for organization and crafting. You’ll need to arrange workbenches, anvils, garden, craft, and sort items into chests. Creating traps and farms to spawn specific entities for extra resources is also helpful. Although optional, automation and good management skills can save you a lot of time. Core Keeper offers drills, machines, conveyor belts, and sprinklers. If you enjoy the machinery from Minecraft or Factorio, Core Keeper is definitely worth trying.

Throughout your adventure, you’ll also find special spawners that can be placed at your camp to summon merchants, similar to Terraria. To make them settle, you’ll need to create a small room with a door, bed, and light. Once they arrive, you can trade coins for valuable items like ores, schematics, decorations, potions, or fishing bait.
Pets are another addition to the game. You can hatch eggs to receive a random companion that will assist you in battles. Pets also gain experience, and with each level, you can assign skill points in their personal skill tree to complement your build.
Gameplay and Visuals

What makes Core Keeper engaging are its combat mechanics and visuals. The game offers a variety of combat options including axes, swords, staves, crossbows, bows, rifles, and magic spells. Whether you prefer melee or ranged combat, each weapon type complements different playstyles. For instance, swords and axes allow you to charge up powerful attacks by holding the right button, while bows and staves release additional projectiles when the attack is held. These mechanics create dynamic outcomes, especially when you’re outnumbered, and additional support from pets or off-hand items can make a big difference.
Off-hand items and armor sets provide significant boosts to your character. Each set offers its own benefits depending on your progress in the game. Some boost armor, attack speed, crit chance, crit damage, thorns, or mining power—familiar stats for any RPG player. For example, Iron Armor enhances raw damage and increases defense when you’re at low health, while Assassin Armor boosts movement speed, attack speed, and dodge chance, making you a nimble fighter. My personal favorite is the Miner’s set, which makes mining easier and boosts melee damage based on your mining power.
You can mix and match different armor pieces to create a custom build, and if you have extra resources, you can upgrade your favorite sets or weapons at a special workbench for even better stats.

The visuals in Core Keeper are another strong aspect. The game looks stunning even on low-end GPUs like the GeForce 1050 Ti, running smoothly at 60 FPS on low or medium settings. Despite its pixelated art style, the game offers beautiful shadows, lighting, and reflections. The biomes are vibrant and distinct, from dirt caves to lush forests, vast deserts, crystal-clear oceans, and lava-filled caverns. Each environment is visually unique, and the soundtrack enhances the sense of exploration.
Despite running on the Unity engine, Core Keeper is highly optimized, both in terms of hardware and netcode. I’ve never encountered synchronization issues or connection problems, even when playing co-op with friends. The game has been incredibly stable with no crashes, disconnects, or frame drops. One surprising feature is the game’s impressive draw distance—whether you place drills or forges and move miles away, they’ll continue operating in the background without needing to be near them or within a specific chunk, which is a huge convenience.
Extra Content
Aside from the base game, Core Keeper developers have introduced a lot of seasonal content, improving the game experience without resorting to things like battle passes or microtransactions. They offer in-game events themed around holidays like Halloween, Valentine’s Day, Easter, Christmas, and more. Each event includes exclusive, time-limited items that players can collect, though participation is optional. These events add variety and show that the developers truly care about keeping the game fresh.

If you miss any seasonal events, you can still change the theme in the game settings whenever you want. This flexibility allows players to enjoy the seasonal atmosphere whenever they choose.
Another excellent addition is mod support. If you want to tweak the game beyond its vanilla version, you can easily install mods created by other players. This feature works similarly to Steam Workshop, letting you customize nearly anything in the game. Examples include adding enemy health bars, enabling auto-fishing, using chat commands, or making newly placed portals charge instantly. The possibilities are extensive, and modding ensures the game will continue to evolve, with more mods likely to come in the future.
Core Keeper’s replayability is enhanced by procedurally generated worlds, cooperative multiplayer (up to 8 players), constant updates, and modding. Playing with friends makes the game even more enjoyable as you can collaborate to mine resources, defeat bosses, build a base, and share loot. This teamwork creates a strong sense of accomplishment.

The game is also approachable for players of all experience levels. Whether you’re returning after a break or just starting, there’s always something new to discover. With multiple modes available, Core Keeper caters to different playstyles. Standard or hardcore mode is ideal for players who love survival and exploration, while creative mode is perfect for those who enjoy building, much like Minecraft or Terraria. Although it doesn’t match Minecraft’s sheer number of blocks, it’s still possible to create impressive structures and share them with the community.
That’s a wrap for the review, but before I conclude, I’d like to point out a few issues that could be addressed.
Some Issues
Newcomers to the genre might encounter some difficulties despite Core Keeper’s low entry threshold. The lack of quests, dialogue, or tutorials means that players can feel lost, especially without guidance. There are only minimal tooltips in the inventory to help out. The game tries to maintain a minimalistic and intuitive approach, but this can sometimes make it feel directionless. You might wander around the first biome for hours before realizing that you need to collect artifacts from bosses and place them in the cores to progress.

The story itself is also fairly simple and underdeveloped. You and other explorers enter a cave, touch a relic, and suddenly you’re teleported to the underworld. The main goal seems to be finding a way back, but there’s not much lore or world-building to explain the setting. There are hints of an ancient civilization that used the cores, but their knowledge is lost, leaving the fate of these people a mystery. While this can lead to speculation, there’s little guidance for uncovering these mysteries, similar to games like Elden Ring, where players are left to piece together the story on their own.
Another issue is the procedurally generated world. With an infinite map in classic worlds, it can be extremely difficult to find unique artifacts or Legendaries. I had to resort to third-party tools and editors to locate specific items, which would otherwise take ages to find in such a vast area. However, this problem seems to have been mitigated with the introduction of limited-sized worlds, so if you’re planning to play with the classic world generation, keep this challenge in mind.

Overall, these are the main issues I encountered in Core Keeper. Despite these concerns, the game offers interesting, straightforward mechanics that are easy to grasp, and the gameplay remains uncluttered by unnecessary features. Progression is also clear and simple, with no major inventory issues. In the past, item disposal was a problem, but now there’s a handy hotkey for that. Optimization is excellent as well. My GPU is far from cutting-edge, yet the game runs smoothly at 60 FPS on 1080p resolution. I can’t speak for laptops with integrated graphics, but I imagine the game should run well, especially if you’re using an AMD CPU.
Pros and cons of Core Keeper
Pros:
- Charming visuals
- Good optimization and net-code
- Well-implemented crafting system with tiers and upgrades
- Several difficulty levels and modes
- Character customization
- Many biomes to explore
- Decent loot with different stats and set pieces for creating unique builds
- Affordable price for replayability
- Co-op up to 8 players on a local server
- Mods support
- Seasonal events (Halloween, Christmas Eve, Easter)
- Full controller support (PlayStation, Xbox etc.)
Cons:
- No tutorial for beginners
- Barely any story or explanations
- GPU Intensive game
- It’s addictive 🙂
Conclusion

It’s been a long journey for Core Keeper to finally reach its full release. Even during its extended time in early access, the game showed a lot of potential. While the developers didn’t focus heavily on promoting the game, I believe that over time more players will discover this hidden gem.
The developers have built a solid foundation, and now they just need to continue expanding the game by adding new biomes, bosses, achievements, skills, and gameplay mechanics like magic. Core Keeper strikes a nice balance between popular games like Minecraft and Terraria, and for me, that’s exactly what I’ve been looking for. It’s easy to pick up, packed with content, and has great visuals. The developers clearly know what they’re doing, so the game is in good hands.
If you have friends who enjoy games like Terraria, Minecraft, or Stardew Valley, I recommend telling them about Core Keeper. And no, I’m not being paid to say this—the game is just genuinely fun. Whether you’re playing solo or in co-op, you can easily spend a few enjoyable evenings exploring and building.