We hope your 2025 has been full of joy, Explorers. We know ours has (in no small part, thanks to you!). As we approach the end of the year, things are winding down here at Pugstorm and Fireshine Games and we wanted to take a moment to wish you a merry Christmas, happy holidays, and a wonderful new year.
We’ve got plenty to look forward to in 2026, including our brand-new Void & Voltage update coming in January. There’s also plenty more Core Keeper fun on the horizon, but we’ll have more to say about that in the new year. For now, it feels like a great time to sit back and reflect on some of the wonderful things from the year gone by.
January 2025: The Core Keeper Digital Soundtrack went on sale on Steam! Created by the talented Jonathan Geer, the Core Keeper OST features 42 enchanting compositions that give our mysterious underground world the ambience you know and love. We also released our Lunar New Year seasonal update, adding the Folding Screen, Lucky Cat, and Potted Tree with Red Envelops to the game 🧧
March 2025: The month of Bags & Blasts! Our first major content update since our 1.0 launch, Bags & Blasts brought with it a whole host of inventory management features, a new explosives skill tree, new weapons, a new sub-biome, a brand-new boss, new cattle, a new pet, and MORE! Read the full patch notes here.
April 2025: We teamed up with the awesome folk over at Deep Field Games to bring you a Core Keeper x Abiotic Factor crossover! This included a new custom scene filled to the brim with GATE branded items, equipment, and consumables, as well as the cybernetically augmented Electro-Pest. Oh, and a much more cuddly Electro-Pet!
May 2025: A minor update that addressed some MAJORLY requested features in the form of Pet Beds, cattle colour variations, improvements for the Warlock/Summoner build, and more. We love it when we can bring our community’s requests to life!
August 2025: Dedicated servers received a cool new update, allowing PC gamers playing on different PC storefronts to get together in the same worlds. That’s right, it doesn’t matter whether you’re playing Core Keeper on Steam, Epic Games, GoG, or the Microsoft Store, you can now enjoy dedicated servers with your pals no matter what PC storefront you’re using!
September 2025: Our very first Reddit AMA! We had over 507 comments from our wonderful community and we did our best to answer as many as possible! We spoke about the future of the game and updates (we plan to continue building on the game’s story with free updates!), our ideas for future updates (we teased a lot of Void & Voltage content), and there was a big discussion about whether a hotdog is a sandwich (we couldn’t decide, but we know for sure that pizzas aren’t!). Check it out here.
November 2025: This was the month we announced the release date for our next major content update: Void & Voltage! We’re so excited for this one and you can find a brief overview of some of the new content on its way here – it was hard not to reveal EVERYTHING in the date-announcement post! A new boss, new biome, new sub-biome, and a bunch of new automation features are really cool…but we have to admit, we’re just super stoked about the new flamethrower!
December 2025: We wrapped this year up with a bang, raising over £30,000 for Make-A-Wish through the Core Keeper Survive-A-Thon charity relay. This was a 24hr livestream relay featuring talented creators from across the globe playing Core Keeper and raising money for a wonderful cause via the Jingle Jam! We just want to say a HUGE thank you to everybody who got involved, whether you were one of our streamers or viewers, whether you donated or amplified our message, every little interaction helped us raise an amazing amount for charity and we couldn’t be happier.
We’re really grateful to have such a wonderful community supporting us as we work on developing the game and we’re looking towards 2026 with big smiles on our faces all because of you wonderful folks. For now, we’re going to be getting some much-needed rest and relaxation and we hope you’ll be doing the same.
All our love,
The teams here at Pugstorm & Fireshine Games ✨
P.S. Big shout out to Tito Bandito for the awesome Christmas base featured in this post's cover art!
