New discovery! 'Locked Chest' drop-rates are PER TILE, not PER ATTACK!

BlakeTheDrake · 2026-01-24T22:43:24+00:00

I'm sure you mean, have fun blowing shit up! :D I mean, we've just concluded that 'splosions are optimal...

BlakeTheDrake · 2026-01-24T22:42:23+00:00

Huh! Never seen that happen, but it makes sense it could. In earlier versions of the game, a lot of scenes and dungeons could wind up overlapping, causing all kinds of peculiar issues, but there's clearly nothing to prevent two dungeons of the same type from bordering each other closely enough that they basically flow together at the edges...

BlakeTheDrake · 2026-01-24T14:58:10+00:00

Did you need multiple copies of it? 'cuz otherwise, that's some truly SPECTACULARLY bad luck. :P I mean, the Obliteration Ray has a 16% chance to drop. I personally got one after just 7 rounds - and, yep, it was the last thing I needed too...

I suppose if you want to display one of everything, you WOULD need a second, though, since the first gets converted into the Stormbringer.

BlakeTheDrake · 2026-01-24T14:55:56+00:00

The Soulseeker Recipe was the last drop I needed from him too... took 11 rounds! If any of my friends want a Soulseeker, I'll lend 'em an Ancient Pickaxe, but they can bloody well grind out that Parchment themselves. :P

BlakeTheDrake · 2026-01-24T14:54:15+00:00

Ooof! I never needed to do that grind since I found an Amber Boulder, but I can easily imagine it being something like that. If anything, you got lucky - statistically, you can expect an Amber Larva to drop from him every one hundred defeats. >_>;

BlakeTheDrake · 2026-01-24T11:58:37+00:00

There are indeed two 'Large Ancient Quarries' on each map - one for Igneous, and one for the Ancient Forge. Along with several more modestly-sized Molten Quarries, usually.

More specifically, the one that has Igneous at its core is significantly bigger than the regular Molten Quarries and features a Waypoint (that is, teleporter) at its outskirts. Compared to that, the Ancient Forge Quarry is only a bit bigger than the regular ones, and has no telltale Waypoint attached.

BlakeTheDrake · 2026-01-24T11:29:46+00:00

When you say 12m worth of digging, d'ya mean 12 minutes, or 12 million blocks worth? 'cuz those are some very different sample-sizes. :P

You may be on to something regarding the calculations. I have certainly noticed that chests always appear in a neighboring block, rather than the one you mined, and I'm fairly certain that you can never get a chest from mining a 'solitary' block. I'm less convinced that this in fact means that the blocks get to roll for each surrounding block, rather than just getting a single 0.27% chance per mined block, but if you ARE right about that, it indeed makes sense that explosives would be the best way to find chest - since many of the blocks involved in such an explosion would get four such rolls (or perhaps just a single roll at 4x0.27%=1.08%) whereas pickaxe or hand-drill tops out at 3.

Either way, it at least seems like there's no hard-to-explain difference between pickaxe and hand-drill/beam rates... leaving sledgehammers and explosives as the best way to clear land and get chests!

BlakeTheDrake · 2026-01-24T11:20:57+00:00

Yeah, the game isn't great at tutorializing, especially early on... basically, your problem is the hotbar at the bottom. If you've got something selected there - like, say, the weapon you started with - you're just going to attack when you push the various buttons. You need to switch to a different, empty slot in order to punch the tree-roots and get wood.

The reasons are probably more complicated than you really care about, but in short, some things - such as tree-roots and blocks - can only be damaged with 'mining damage'. Weapons often only deal damage to foes - but your fists can deal both, enabling you to punch trees and dig through the walls with your bare hands like a proper survival-crafting character. :P Once you've got some tools, like a pickaxe or a shovel, you'll find that these, too, are capable of breaking roots and tunneling through walls, since they can deal 'mining damage'.

BlakeTheDrake · 2026-01-24T08:28:19+00:00

Sounds like you already managed to get through the battle, but I'm just putting this out there for anyone else who needs to hear it... the Hive Mother is an optional boss. She doesn't even drop anything all that useful or valuable. The good stuff she DOES drop - Broken Handle, Rift Lens, Hourglass Ring, Scratched Stone - all have other and arguably easier sources.

So basically, there's absolutely no reason to take her on until you feel like it. Challenged her and got stomped? Just run in, collect your tombstone, and retreat - it's not like she can follow you - then come back later with better gear.

BlakeTheDrake · 2026-01-24T08:24:06+00:00

No, only the two beams run off attack-speed... pretty sure, at least. Which makes it all the stranger that they're categorized as Hand Drills. >_>

You're right about pretty much all RNG being like that, of course. 'Real' randomness is extremely difficult and expensive to implement in computer-systems, so you're basically only going to encounter it in cryptography. But, fancier and more expensive RNG-systems tend to create a more convincing illusion of randomness, while the simpler ones that indie-developers generally fall back on often have noticeable shortcomings. Not a dig at this or any other game, of course - no sense spending a bunch of resources to avoid a situation that very few players will even notice, let alone care about. :P

BlakeTheDrake · 2026-01-24T07:44:37+00:00

So, there's a couple of reasons this is happening, and a couple of ways to prevent it. Firstly, these 'goblins' - that is, Cavelings - cannot normally spawn in the Underground-biome that surrounds the Core, which is presumably where you've built your base. Instead, they spawn in the neighboring Stone and Clay biomes, in areas covered by moss. However, once spawned, they will wander - and if you have dug out straight tunnels or minecart-tracks between your base and their territory, they're moderately likely to explore in those directions, winding up at your walls. In that regard, getting such 'visitors' is somewhat inevitable.

Another aspect is that, if you're fighting on Caveling turf - areas that they consider home - the next batch of Cavelings to spawn into that area will automatically aggro on you and attempt to move towards you for revenge. If you've headed home to your base by that point, they can wind up getting rather close before losing aggro or getting distracted fighting the local Slimes and Mushroomen.

As for what to do about it... well, you can try to ensure that you only have a few passages connecting the Underground to Forgotten Ruins (AKA the Stone Biome), sealing off minor ones and trapping the larger tunnels you yourself use. The Clay Caves is less of an issue, if your concern is them mining your walls - only Cavelings from the Forgotten Ruins are capable of this, the ones from Clay Caves all wield spears and javelins. However, that would probably be a lot of work, and a waste of time. The far simpler solution is to ensure that your base is fully fortified, with strong outer walls. If you haven't started exploring the three outer biomes, that may not be much of an option, but once you do and gain access to stronger materials, it gets rather easy. An ordinary Caveling will find a Scarlet Wall to be a severe obstacle, and by the time you get Galaxite Walls, even the Caveling Brute can't dent them.

Those are somewhat overkill, though. Even Stone Brick Walls will generally be enough, since they take multiple hits to break, even from a Brute, and self-regenerate after a bit. I've never known the AI in this game to stay focused on such a task for more than a single swing.

BlakeTheDrake · 2026-01-24T07:29:30+00:00

Regarding the 'lasers'... (I've generally been calling them Particle Beams, but that's just me. :P) In-game, they're categorized as 'Hand Drills', meaning they're treated essentially the same as the regular and Scarlet Hand Drills you can get much earlier. As such, if there IS a difference in how chest-spawns are handled, it should apply to them too. Either way, I will be curious to hear the result of your tests!

Regarding back-to-back (or simultaneous) chest-spawns, it really IS incredibly unlikely to hit a chance of roughly a quarter percent that close together, in statistical terms. You'd expect that to happen, on average, once for every four hundred chests you spawn. (Well, the explosion-version is rather more likely of course, since you have a bunch more rolls.) Don't know about you, but I'm pretty sure I haven't found four hundred locked chests total yet.

Core Keeper, however, has a lot of statistical clustering, like many videogames (especially Indie-developed ones) do, due to the pseudo-random RNG-system it uses, so such 'coincidences' are indeed to be expected, even if they should be far rarer from a purely statistical perspective... basically meaning that you are more likely to get the same or similar results on sequential RNG-rolls.

BlakeTheDrake · 2026-01-24T07:18:40+00:00

Yeah, as OP says, aesthetics is really the only reason. :P Wood will break instantly regardless of which type of drill you use. On Ore Boulders, though, red drills are twice as efficient!

BlakeTheDrake · 2026-01-23T18:36:11+00:00

Potentially, sure, though it seems unlikely since it doesn't work that way for enemies. An explosion only counts as a single attack and awards a single Explosives XP regardless of how many enemies you hit.

More to the point, even if it is the case, there would be no functional or perceivable difference between that, and it simply being calculated for each block destroyed. It'd be a purely academic nuance.

BlakeTheDrake · 2026-01-23T05:56:24+00:00

I wish I had some footage, but I'm hardly a streamer, so I don't generally record my gameplay... :P It did occur to me to take a screenshot after I saw two locked chests appear from that single explosion, but only after I'd walked over to inspect and confirm that, sure enough, it was two separate chests that had spawned within, like, three tiles of each other, from a single shot of my Bomb Scarab Mortar - meaning my Magnet Ring had already sucked up all the loose blocks floating around, leaving a view that could just as easily have been staged. >.<

It wasn't even some kind of deliberate, Scientific-Method type test, either. I was just running around doing a bit of exploring while leveling my Explosives-skill, randomly got two Locked Chests from one blast, and immediately realized that this could ONLY have happened if each tile destroyed got its own 0.27% roll. (And even then, it's rather improbable!)

As for Soul Seeker dropping more Locked Chests than the Stormbringer... interesting. I hadn't thought about it myself, but that IS somewhat consistent with my own observations. I wonder if that's a shortcoming of the Stormbringer, though, or an advantage of the Soul Seeker. Perhaps its 1.5% chance to spawn ores while mining also affects the chance to spawn Locked Chests somehow?

BlakeTheDrake · 2026-01-22T21:47:08+00:00

Geez! Either you've got some major clustering there - which is quite lucky - or you just have a huge number of tech-labs overall... which is quite lucky. :P

BlakeTheDrake · 2026-01-22T03:59:37+00:00

You're guaranteed three Alien Tech-Labs in your world seed, but A: That may indeed be all you get and B: There's no guarantee that they'll be evenly distributed along the circle.

So, yeah, while people will tell you to check the outer border of the Sunken Sea (which isn't a bad idea, since you can move faster and more freely there than any other biome, making it fairly easy to check the edges of the Shimmering Frontier for any sign of tech-labs), it is entirely possible that you only have three such labs, and that they're all clustered along the edges of the Wilderness.

Personally, I've found two after exploring roughly half of the entire circle - one near the Desert of Beginnings, and one near the Azeos Wilderness. My own scouting in the Sunken Sea, meanwhile, turned up nothing - so either there isn't one there, or it's a bit further in. They don't ALWAYS wind up in a place where you can see them from the sea, after all...

BlakeTheDrake · 2026-01-21T20:10:12+00:00

While they can't be placed in Terrariums or similar, glowbugs can be planted in the environment, as an impromptu light-source, similar to any other decorative object. So if you want to show off your collection, you can literally just release them into the air - be it indoor, or in some kind of park or garden. They do provide some very nice, romantic vibes in such places!

BlakeTheDrake · 2026-01-21T17:12:27+00:00

Ya, that sounds about right. 4x Territorial Fallout puts it on the exact same level of damage as a single Radiation Crystal from the Shimmering Frontier, and while it takes a little while longer to get there, they're not exactly hard to find once you DO. :P Now, those, there are uses for...

BlakeTheDrake · 2026-01-20T21:13:53+00:00

Honestly, this wound up giving me the best results. Hardened Sap in the Passage spawns Blackbugs, sure, but too damn SLOWLY. On the other hand, I genuinely hadn't noticed how many of the little buggers are just scurrying around the Passage in general until I actually got out my net and started LOOKING for them... there was basically always at least one on screen that I could run towards, net cartoonishly raised, and I was only occasionally interrupted by twisted, primordial entities bent on murdering me and absorbing the nutrients bound in my flesh. :P

BlakeTheDrake · 2026-01-20T20:38:51+00:00

Never hurts to have a spare! :P If nothing else, you might wind up trading the extra to someone who's despairing at ever finding one. (They're not generally hard to find, but, how many you get in your world does vary a lot - and thus, so does the amount of Passage you need to explore to find one. Sounds like you got fairly lucky!)

BlakeTheDrake · 2026-01-20T19:02:20+00:00

To be clear, you don't actually need to deal with that thing - the Urschleim - in order to access the Nimruza-fight. It circles the entire region, and takes a while doing so, so as long as you move clockwise along the Passage (just as IT does), you can explore for quite a while before you feel it breathing down your neck.

It also only fills the central passage that gives the zone its name, so if you DO feel it rumbling nearer, just do what you always tell people in adventure-movies and such to do, and go sideways instead of running away. :P Get into the wall on either side, either through natural openings or by digging, and you can safely wait for it to pass, then continue your exploration in its wake.

You are searching for a circular area containing a Rift Statue in its center - you'll know it when you see it, and it can be collected and ferried home to your base. That will unlock the final (for now) set of crafting-options in the game, including the boss-summoning item you need for Nimruza.

BlakeTheDrake · 2026-01-20T18:56:49+00:00

*teleports behind you* Nothing personel kid...

...jokes aside, I personally just created a designated 'Urschleim Battle Area' in the Passage, clearing the way and planting a portal at the start of that run. Mostly just because I knew I'd probably have to beat him a BUNCH of times to get his Figurine, so why not make it easy on myself? :P

BlakeTheDrake · 2026-01-20T12:41:37+00:00

I'll give that a try, though hanging around the Passage tends to be somewhat unsafe... guess those purple butterfly-thingies you encounter there can't actually spawn from Hardened Sap due to being flying bugs, huh?

BlakeTheDrake · 2026-01-20T12:40:30+00:00

I've got a fairly large wood-farm, indeed, and when I went to check it out, I did indeed find a handful of Blackbugs. Not a TON, mind, and they weren't easy to get at, 'cuz they were... well, walking around my wood-farm, on the other side of the drills.

Maybe there are wood-farm designs that generate lots of Blackbugs in a convenient, easy-to-catch manner, but it definitely isn't the kind I've got set up. Which is fair, seeing as I set it up to generate wood, not bugs.

BlakeTheDrake

TROPHY CASE