Core Keeper Riders of the Underground: mounts, and when to buy

On 21 September, Pugstorm pushed Core Keeper Riders of the Underground live — version 1.3, the first of three planned updates, and the one that finally lets you saddle the cattle that have been wandering your caves since 2022. It is free, it is large, and it arrived a week after the game's cheapest tracked offers bottomed out.

That last detail is the useful one. A big free update is the moment a game stops being quietly discounted and starts being bought, and the price record for Core Keeper shows exactly that shape over the past few days. Here is what 1.3 actually contains, taken from Pugstorm's own patch notes rather than the roundups, and what it should do to what you pay.

What Core Keeper Riders of the Underground actually adds

The studio's Steam post lists the changes in enough detail to be worth reading in full, but the spine of it is this: a new sub-biome, a new way to travel, a new weapon class, and a rework of the summoner build that players had been asking for.

The Moss sub-biome sits inside the existing Forgotten Ruins — dark, humid and, in Pugstorm's own description, "surprisingly lush". It houses the Orex, a new species of cattle that looks like a raptor and behaves like a cow, eating insects and Moorshrooms rather than adventurers.

Core Keeper's loop has always been base-first: you dig outward, then drag the infrastructure with you. 1.3's traversal tools shorten the dragging. (Official Steam screenshot)

Mounts are the headline, the hookshot is what you will actually use

Every cattle type in the game can now be ridden. You craft a Saddle — or a Racing Saddle — walk up to the animal, place the saddle on it, and it becomes a mount. A dedicated saddle interface lets you rename it and set what it does while you are not riding. Take the saddle off and it goes back to being livestock.

It is charming, and for a game whose world is procedurally enormous it genuinely helps. But the item that changes how you move is the Hookshot, a new off-hand category with two entries at launch, including a Gilded version. It latches onto solid surfaces and pulls you across pits and water, which means the chasms that used to demand a bridge now demand a button press. Anyone who has spent twenty minutes laying platform across a lake to reach one chest will feel the difference immediately.

The launch trailer, posted on Pugstorm's own Core Keeper channel — this is the primary source for the 21 September date, not a mirror upload.

Summoners got the biggest rework in the patch

This is the change that will matter most to anyone with an existing character. Minions used to run on a timer and expire; now they persist indefinitely. Two talents in the Summoning tree have been replaced with two new ones to reflect that, the cooldown on spawning minions is gone entirely, and you can summon your full complement in one action instead of one at a time. You can also dismiss them deliberately, which was not previously an option.

Alongside it, a new weapon type arrives for the Warlock playstyle: Scepters, seven of them at launch including a Legendary. There are three new staffs and rifles between the Corrosion Staff, the Blizzard Staff and a Sniper Rifle, two new enemies in the Wingling and the Searpent, and a craftable Training Dummy so you can actually measure whether any of it is an improvement.

The summoner rework is the sort of change that only lands two years after launch, once the studio can see what people actually play. (Official Steam screenshot)

The quality-of-life list is longer than the feature list

Ten new armour pieces, fifteen rings and fifteen necklaces go in, along with dedicated loot chests for Azeos the Sky Titan, Omoroth the Sea Titan and Ra-Akar the Sand Titan, and four new achievements. Three pets arrive too — the frog-like Hoppet, Azeos Jr., and one Pugstorm will only say is "something lazy" hidden in the Desert of Beginnings.

But the changes that will be felt hourly are smaller. Boats, minecarts and go-karts no longer vanish into your grave when you die; the vehicle drops and returns to your inventory. Go-karts get a handbrake, tighter turning and less inertia. Waypoints and portals activate faster. You can compare gear before equipping it, cycle loadouts with a keybind, customise the cursor and crosshair, and resize any paint brush up to 5x5. Reconnecting after a disconnect now restores your health from the last state the client had, rather than whatever the server thought.

Automated bases are the reason the 1.3.0.2 hotfix mattered within a day: drills are load-bearing for a lot of item sorting. (Official Steam screenshot)

Pugstorm also shipped a hotfix the following day, 1.3.0.2, for a bug where drills dealt damage on the first tick after receiving power — which had broken circuitry builds that use drills for item sorting. If you run an automated base, update before you go looking for what went wrong.

Where 1.3 sits in the Road to the Maw

Riders of the Underground is not a standalone drop. Pugstorm laid out a plan in August called the Road to the Maw: three interconnected major updates, originally scoped as one enormous release and then split so players would not have to wait years to see any of it. The studio has said the first two parts deepen existing systems, building towards 1.5 revealing what lies beyond Breaker's Reach.

The announcement teaser from earlier in September, also on the official Core Keeper channel.

For a buyer that matters more than any single feature. It means the content pipeline is funded and public, and it means two more of these are coming to a game that has never charged for one.

What the update does to the Core Keeper price

Do not take a number from an article — check the live listing on the Core Keeper game page, which puts the official stores and the resellers side by side. What the tracked record does show, as of today, is a clean pattern: the cheapest offer reached the lowest point of Playze's tracking window in mid-September, then drifted upward across the days either side of the 1.3 launch.

That is ordinary. Discounts thin out when attention arrives, and they return when it leaves. If you missed the mid-September floor, the honest advice is that this is not the week to buy — the same thing happened around Valheim's 1.0, and we wrote about what a version milestone does to a price then. If you want the mechanics of why the lowest number is not always the right moment, our piece on historical lows covers it.

Core Keeper supports one to eight players in the same world, and the price-per-hour maths changes completely once you are running three or four. (Official Steam screenshot)

Who this is actually for

Core Keeper is a top-down mining sandbox from Pugstorm, published by Fireshine Games, which left early access on 27 August 2024 and sits at 93% positive on Steam. If you have bounced off Terraria because the combat is twitchier than you wanted, or off Valheim because the survival pressure never lets up, this is the gentler cousin: the same build-dig-fight loop, a fixed camera, and eight-player co-op that works without a dedicated server.

The farming layer is deeper than the pixel art suggests, and 1.3's rideable cattle give the livestock pens a second purpose. (Official Steam screenshot)

If you want the farming and the decorating more than the boss ladder, Stardew Valley is still the better purchase, and our roundup of what plays like it makes the case. For the co-op angle specifically, the group-buy list is a better starting point than this one game.

The bottom line

Riders of the Underground is a genuinely substantial free update — a new traversal item that changes how you move, a summoner rework that changes how a whole build plays, and a quality-of-life list long enough to matter. If you already own Core Keeper, update and go find the Moss.

If you do not, wait. The discount curve is pointing the wrong way this week and there are two more major updates promised on a public roadmap, which means there will be a better week before there is a better game. Wishlist it, watch the game page, and buy on the next real drop.