Core Keeper Mining Boulders Location Guide

Where to find them and how to get the most metal out of them in Core Keeper.

Location and Appearance

Mining Setups

Raw ore is extracted from boulders (ore nodes) using from 1 naar 8 powered drills:

Ore Yield by Number of Drills

Additional drills increase the rate of ore extraction. But with diminishing returns on speed and reduced total yield from the boulder:

Numbers sourced from this Chinese video door “isuckplayer”. Originally transcribed and shared in the official Discord by KokoroSaiko.

Aanvullende aantekeningen

Each drill requires 10 scarlet and 10 Iron bars to craft, at the Automation table. That is itself crafted at the Scarlet Workbench. So you will first need to mine, by hand, enough Scarlet from the Azeos Wilderness, before making your first drill. 25 + 8 + 10 = 43 scarlet minimum.

Priority should probably then be given to mining Scarlet boulders, to make more drills, to increase production rate. Assuming one has easier, more plentiful access to iron.

If you’ve only found 1 boulder, it may be worth extracting ore as quickly as possible, with a full 8 drills, to upgrade all equipment and expand automation. Later, you many want to reduce your number of drills, per boulder, so as to increase the output from each. Almost 50% meer, by reducing from 8 naar 4 drills. Also meaning longer between having to take down and more drills to new boulders.

Echter, even 450 erts (per boulder) is plenty for most playthroughs. And given that the Wilderness is theoretically infinite in size, with every type of (current) boulder available, one should never run out.

One can collect raw ore from them (left and middle image in “Installatie” sectie), or use a more complex setup (rechts) to automate processing the ore into bars, ready for crafting. This is mostly a matter a matter of preference.

But automated processing means carrying more inventory items around, when setting up drilling sites. Ook, the ore won’t necessarily all get processed, if the setup remains far away from the player all the time. The drill output catches up when you return. But the automation won’t have been loaded into game, to fill up the furnace/smelter. So there may be a big backlog left to process.

Electric automation appears to only be fully functional with about 80 tiles of the player. While map features, mobs and conveyor may continue to exist out to 200 tegels, or so (bijv. from the Core to just inside Ghorm’s slime ring).