Core Keeper is the latest mining sandbox game to pick up in popularity, quickly rising through the Steam charts and gaining players by the day. A fun, rewarding world where players are free to design their underground cave the way they want to, fighting and mining wherever they choose to go.
Core Keeper gives the player a lot to do and this can be overwhelming. It's advisable for players to craft items that are most necessary to them as soon as they can to smoothly progress through the game further. Some items are more important to the player at the start of the world than others and can be obtained quite easily. Players can sink hundreds of hours into a game like Core Keeper, and it looks set to become even more popular as updates are added to it.
6 Basic Workbench
When players start a game, there will be wood in the immediate area that they can harvest bare-handed. There will be enough wood for players to build the basic crafting station where copper equipment can be crafted, as well as better workstations. Players will be familiar with this concept if they enjoyed Stardew Valley.
These workstations can cook food, forge armor, smelt ores, and repair equipment, but none will be obtainable to the player without first building a Basic Workbench. This should be a player's first port-of-call when beginning in a new world before looking for other items that should be crafted quickly.
5 Wooden Pickaxe
While not a strong piece of equipment, the Wooden Pickaxe only costs 4 Wood to craft and can mine through dirt walls much quicker than bare-handed. Once Copper is inevitably found nearby, it is recommended to upgrade to Copper. In the meantime, Wooden Pickaxes are useful and cheap to make in the early game and can speed up a player's progress so that they can move on to the more in-depth phases of the game.
If players are patient and don't mind the mining times, they can stockpile Wooden Pickaxes to use so that the Copper and other resources they find can be saved to be used on something else. While a slower way to progress it is more efficient for a player's available resources. In any amazing survival game, there can be slow-going rough periods, but players who want to be efficient will embrace this slower pace.
4 Furnace
Once the player has a pickaxe and can start exploring, you'll collect the dirt walls they one through, of which 20 can be used to craft a Furnace. A Furnace can be used to smelt the Copper Ores that players will find while traversing the cave and help them to begin upgrading their set-up. All games with base building mechanics have Furnaces, so players shouldn't be surprised to see them in Core Keeper.
The Furnace is highly useful to a player, especially at the beginning of the game as it helps them to actually start making use of their resources and building up a setup that can handle longer mines throughout the cave map.
3 Cooking Pot
As players explore, they'll come across food such as Peppers, Mushrooms, and Berries. These can be consumed to keep the player's Food Bar up, preventing Starvation debuffs. The Cooking Pot allows the player to combine two different foods together to create a meal. Meals are important, because not only do they fill the Food Bar with larger amounts than a single piece of food would, but they give the players different buffs depending on the ingredients they used.
The Cooking Pot costs 2 Wood and 6 Copper Bars to craft, which is not so difficult and can be obtained rather quickly after the player creates a new world. It is pretty much mandatory to obtain and use a Cooking Pot if a player wants to get anywhere fast in their world, and they are worth a place in the player's best home designs.
2 Chest
As the player explores they will find many resources around the cave. Chests are featured in any game, and in a mining sandbox, they are pretty much mandatory, so players will intuitively know they need to build a Chest during the early game of Core Keeper.
Luckily, Chests are quite easy to build, costing 5 Wood. Once the chest has been built, players should keep this at their Base Camp whilst exploring. As players get further into the game, more chests will need to be built to hold more resources. Games with infinite replayability usually mean that Chests fill up with items rather quickly, so players should always keep some Wood around to build more Chests.
1 Copper Anvil
Once a player has acquired enough Copper, they should create a Copper Anvil which costs 8 Copper Bars in order to craft some armor and make them better protected. A Copper Anvil allows the player to craft Wooden and Copper Armor. These sets will take different resources to craft but follow a logic. A full Wooden Set, for instance, will cost 29 Wood but does little in the way of protection. On the other hand, Copper Armor offers good protection to players and costs 28 Copper Bars, which can be obtained after some grinding from the player, nothing too steep.
As players can probably imagine, this system requires that players craft better Anvils in the future, however starting off with a Copper Anvil will allow the player to craft items that they need at the time while relaxing in this casual open-world game. Regardless, players should always be on the lookout to upgrade their gear while mining around the cave.