Core Keeper Lunar Update 0.7.3: New Seasonal Items, New Block, & More

(Estimated Read Time: 10 minutes)

It's time to celebrate the Lunar New Year in Core Keeper with a bang with Update 0.7.3! True to its 2024 Roadmap, players can acquire a limited-time currency to exchange for exclusive items at the Seasonal Merchant during this season. This update also brings other additions and changes. So, keep reading to dive into the Core Keeper Lunar Update 0.7.3.

What’s Coming in Core Keeper Lunar Update 0.7.3?

First, the Core Keeper Lunar Update 0.7.3 adds Red Envelopes, which players can find and get from around the world. Opening the envelopes can give Lucky Coins. Use these coins at the Seasonal Merchant NPC to exchange them for season-exclusive items, including a Guardian Beast Statue and a Dragon Mask cosmetic item. However, these seasonal items will only be available during the event. These items will disappear when the season ends. Note that the Lunar event in Core Keeper occurs from January 31 to February 13, 2024. Next, there’s also a new block type that players can place on the ground or the wall. If placed on a wall, these new blocks replace the natural walls on the map. Aside from these additions, Update 0.7.3 includes various graphics, audio, and performance improvements. For instance, the UI and buttons in the pause menu have received a visual overhaul. The ambient audio also has been tweaked to make exploring more immersive than before.

Core Keeper Lunar Update 0.7.3 Full Patch Notes – January 31, 2024

Here are the full patch notes for the Core Keeper Lunar Update 0.7.3:

Gameplay

• Naturally spawned wall and ground tiles of the same type will now drop a shared block object instead when mined/dug up. This new type of block can be placed both as a ground and a wall tile depending on placement. These blocks will replace the natural walls that players have in their inventories but will not affect existing ground tiles that players have already picked up unless they place them out and dig them back up again.
• Workbenches can now also access items from diagonally placed chests when crafting.
• The Seasonal Merchant now has a new seasonal skin and new seasonal items for sale. The skin will revert to its original appearance after the event ends, but the items will remain available.
• Red envelopes can be found dropped on the ground throughout the world. Pick them up and see what’s inside! Any envelopes left on the ground after the season ends will disappear and any picked up envelopes will be kept. The envelopes will continuously appear randomly in the world throughout the season.
• Lucky coins. These are used to buy new items from the Seasonal Merchant.
• Items sold by Seasonal Merchant: Guardian Beast Statue Paper Lantern Mystic Knot Tassel Wall Paper Lantern Cosmetic: Dragon Mask

Graphics

• Visual overhaul of the UI and buttons in the pause menu.
• Updated some armor loot sprites with newer graphics.
• The Core Keeper main menu logo has been updated with a new seasonal appearance.

Audio

• Tweaked volume levels of ambient audio.

Performance

• Ported many common game objects to our in-house sprite rendering solution, including chests, torches, and crafting stations. This results in less stuttering when they load in, as well as better rendering performance.
• Made sweeping changes to the game hierarchy, which describes the relationship between game objects. Most objects now have a much smaller hierarchy, and its structure no longer changes every time a new object appears on screen. Each object type also resides in a dedicated hierarchy, reducing the number of recomputations needed when an object changes position.
• Made several improvements to our conversion system in order to reduce load times. We also no longer create large numbers of object types that never appear in-game. The latter reduces overhead when scheduling jobs, in turn making it more worthwhile to move small work loads to worker threads.
• Tweaked some custom scenes to avoid creating extra game objects that had to be converted separately each time a world was loaded.
• Fixed sudden lag spikes from the memory manager allocating a large number of new objects if the number of objects on screen exceeded the preallocated amount. Objects exceeding the preallocation are now created on-demand.
• Tweaked memory pool sizes to reduce allocation of unused objects. In particular, there are no longer multiple hidden copies of bosses.
• Many particle systems are now pooled separately from other game objects and are only claimed when a game object wants to display the effect. This reduces the number of particle systems kept in memory at any given time.
• The player character displayed in menus such as the in-game inventory and the character selection screen no longer has a large number of unused particle systems.
• Removed several managed memory allocations that caused the garbage collector to run more frequently than necessary.
• Reduced the in-memory size of many of our game objects. In addition to reducing the game’s memory footprint, this more compact memory layout also makes processing the objects for various tasks more efficient.
• Replaced our custom Translation component with the LocalTransform component introduced in Unity Entities 1.0. This removes the need to copy positional data multiple times each tick.
• Used more efficient constructs from Unity Entities 1.0 when looking up entity components in jobs.
• Rewrote key game systems to use the Burst compiler, which improves their performance and reduces overhead when scheduling worker thread jobs.
• Animator components no longer look up the properties they animate twice when a new object appears on screen.
• Values in the condition effect UI are now cached to avoid updating them from scratch every frame.

Bug Fixes

• Fixed an issue where ranged weapons would hit objects like torches and bushes.
• Fixed correct terms for cooked food in Spanish.
• Fixed a commonly reported bug where baby cattle would never grow up.
• Newly allocated objects no longer run their initialization logic twice.
• Fixed an error in the calculation of the additional damage gained from melee and ranged damage increase stats as well as the Well-Trained Aim and Miner’s Strength talents.
• Fixed an error in the calculation of the damage value shown in the stats window. Special thanks to Toozy for helping us find this issue!
• Fixed a bug where Slime pets would repeatedly bump into the Hive Mother rather than attack.
• Exiting the game in Azeos’ battle arena no longer causes the boss to briefly appear while the game fades out.
• Fixed a bug where the Halloween seasonal coins would not behave correctly outside the Halloween season.
• Fixed a bug where crystal water buckets spawned via the creative UI did not place any water when used.
• Fixed a bug where drill sounds would not play after moving away from drills and then moving back to them again.
• Seeds that can be planted on tilled dirt ground can now also be planted on tilled meadow ground.
• Fixed a bug where the Burnzooka would not pierce Meadow Walls.
• Fixed a bug where projectiles that can pierce through walls would sometimes not pierce through painted versions of the same wall.
• Fixed an issue where Sunrice and Lunacorn would sometimes not be fully grown in Crystal Biome areas.
• Fixed an issue where Omoroth could be summoned when the player had too low fishing skill for the Sunken Sea water.
• Fixed an issue where walls would be destroyed with a small delay sometimes, typically happening when destroying walls in two hits.
• Fixed hardcore characters being killed permanently if using the “I’m stuck” option to respawn and then immediately exiting the game.Tweaked the collider for the radiation crystal to better reflect their in-game appearance.

Other

• Rich presence for Steam & Discord. Allows players to display their current Core Keeper game activity directly on their Discord and Steam profile.
• Planter Boxes can now be rotated.
• Removed swing anticipation from attacks.
• Added your character's name to chat logs.