Written by GuillaumeTechProject Deep Core

Deep Core, part 2: pixel art, a crew and a freight yard

From October 24 to November 6, 2026: an interface redrawn in pixel art from code, a mine you can watch, new systems the prototype never had, and a slower pace that opens them one collapse at a time.

Deep Core on November 6, 2026: the Mine tab as a pixel-art cross-section, with two rigs drilling under their headframes, a haulage tunnel and the brick refinery on the surface, and three toasts for a finished contract and two trophies.

Part 1 ended on October 3, 2026, with a Lua port that matched its prototype number for number and a few changes that went past it. Three weeks later, on October 24, the whole interface was replaced with pixel art. Over the next two days, the game gained systems the prototype never had. On November 6, a new pace started opening them one collapse at a time. The screenshots in this article come from the November 6 build.

Table of contents

Pixel art drawn in code

The redesign has no image files and no font files. Every glyph of the font is written in the code as rows of # and .. Capitals are 7 pixels tall and lowercase letters 5, with two more pixels for descenders. At startup, the game builds a LÖVE image font from them, and the bold face is the same glyphs smeared one pixel to the right. The sprites for the items, the icons and the foreman are built the same way, from grids of text. Panels and buttons have a pixel bevel, and the palette is soot, amber and cyan. Purple is gone. Aetherium turned lime, Core Shards and the Legacy panel turned cyan, and the Fortune branch turned copper. The Google Fonts of the first version were removed.

To keep the pixels square at every window size, the game draws text, sprites and scenes at a whole number of screen pixels per art pixel. The two scenes render into small canvases, about three logical units per pixel, and are scaled up with nearest filtering.

A mine you can watch

The Mine tab used to be a grid of shaft columns. It’s now a cross-section with a sky that goes from day to night, pines, walking workers, a headframe and a shaft for each rig, drills cutting through the strata, ore buckets going up the cables, a haulage tunnel with carts, the lift, the refinery with smoking chimneys and lit windows, and a trading post. Clicking a headframe starts that rig, clicking the refinery goes inside, and clicking the trading post sells.

Inside, the Refinery tab is a factory floor. Each building is an animated machine fed by ore pipes from the ceiling: the kiln’s fire, wire spools, a crucible pour, a stamping press, brewing vats, a saw, a void portal. The goods drop onto belts, and a card on the side manages the selected building.

The Refinery tab in pixel art: twelve machines in four rows, from the Kiln and Wire Mill down to the Neutron Press, Solar Crucible and Quintessence Still, under ore pipes. On the right, the Kiln's card with its Speed, Quality, Resource and Masterwork upgrades.
The refinery floor, with the Kiln selected.

Striking the rock

The rock became a real clicker. Quick strikes build a combo up to ×2, one strike in twenty is a critical hit worth ×8, and a boulder breaks after 24 hits for twelve strikes’ worth of ore. The foreman swings at it in a little camp scene, with chips, floating numbers and screen shake. Every tenth boulder is a bedrock boss with a face, a health bar and a 30-second clock. Beating one raises strikes by 5% for good.

Around the rock:

  • Lucky veins. Every 50 to 130 seconds, a glinting nugget appears somewhere on the screen for 13 seconds. Clicking it pays cash, a few geodes or a buff. Gold Rush multiplies sale prices by 4, Overdrive multiplies rigs and buildings by 4, and Pick Fever multiplies strikes by 12.
  • Rockgrubs. Every 4 minutes, a grub burrows in beside a running rig and eats 5% of its ore, growing fatter with time, even offline. Popping it gives the belly back ×1.15, or ×3 for a gilded one.
  • The powder magazine. Five charges refill at one every 6 minutes of real time. Each blast does one thing, such as 10 minutes of ore from every rig at once, rigs ×6 for 30 seconds, or a flare that calls a lucky vein. One blast in ten misfires and drops rubble on a rig until you click it out.

Goals, trophies and milestones

The Goals tab always holds three contracts: mine so much of an ore, refine so much of a good, strike so many times, earn a sum, catch a vein. Their size follows what you have done so far. Each one pays coins, geodes and one point of Fame, and each point of Fame raises sale prices by 1% for good. A cabinet holds 73 trophies, kept across collapses, each worth +2% on sale prices. Milestones double output at levels 10, 25, 50, 100 and beyond, on a building’s Speed or a rig’s Bit and Hopper. Upgrade buttons buy ×1, ×10 or as many as you can afford.

Each rig also got slots for a bit, a lamp and a winch, made from refined goods. One stocked item at a time is the hot commodity and sells ×3 for 10 minutes. Offline progress no longer needs Night Crew. The mine works for 2 hours while the game is closed, and for 12 with the perk.

The dig wall and the heartstone

The Dig tab is a small game of its own. Lamp oil opens a wall of rock tiles. The pick takes one layer off a tile, the sledge takes more but shakes the wall harder, and the goal is to dig out specimens, geode pockets and nuggets before the wall caves in. Sixteen specimens fill the four drawers of a cabinet. Copies raise a specimen’s tier at 1, 3, 8, 20 and 50 copies, and a full drawer adds a bonus of its own. Rigs, grubs, bosses and expeditions find specimens too.

The Dig tab: a wall of brown rock tiles with a few finds showing through, Pick and Sledge buttons under it, and the Topsoil and Bedrock drawers of the specimen cabinet below.
The dig wall and the specimen cabinet, 11 of 16 found.

On the camp wall, a heartstone ripens over 22 hours of real time and falls by itself 4 hours later. Heartstones buy Masterwork levels for buildings, +25% goods each, and those survive every collapse.

A crew with careers

The Crew tab hires up to eight people from job letters. Each letter has a name, a surname, a hometown and a trait, and the job is picked at hiring, for life. Crew members level up in their job, offline too. Pickers strike the rock. Drillers, Haulers, Smelters, Traders, Prospectors and Diggers each add a stat per level. Scouts lead parties down side tunnels for 30 minutes, 2 hours or 8 hours of real time, and come back with geodes, ore, specimens and relics, twelve in all, kept forever.

On October 25, the crew got careers. Every fifth level, a member’s XP stops until they pass an exam for the next rank: Apprentice, Journeyman, Skilled, Senior, Chief, Master. Each rank makes the job bonus ×1.25, and a Master gets a nickname, like Cora “Ironhand” Vance. Exams are short mini-games, one per job, harder at each rank. Pickers time their strikes, Drillers hold a pressure gauge in a band, and Scouts remember a tunnel. A failed exam can be retaken after 5 minutes per rank. The other five jobs pass their gates on their own until their exams are built. The Employment Office, a Legacy perk, puts three letters on the desk instead of one. Transfer Papers, in the Third Circle, let crew change jobs.

The Crew tab: eight crew cards with a portrait, a name, a hometown, a trait and a rank, two of them with a green "Sit the Journeyman exam" button, then three expedition parties and a relic shelf with six relics out of twelve.
Eight hands, two exams ready and Hob's party back from an 8-hour expedition.

The freight yard

The same day brought freight. Every sale now also loads a crate for the company that buys the good. There are fifteen companies, one per ore and its product. The sale still pays in full, and a delivered crate pays a bonus on top. Crates wait in a yard of 24, and rival haulers take the oldest ones beyond that.

The line hauls the oldest crates on a timer, offline too, for +25% each. Wagons and Boiler upgrades make it carry more and run faster, but it always leaves 12 crates in the yard for the hump. On the hump, wagons painted for their buyer roll off one by one, and you throw three sets of points to send each one into the right depot. A crate pays +50%, plus 10% for every one in a row, up to +200%. Three refused wagons end the shift. Deliveries build standing with each company, +10% on its prices per level, until the next collapse.

The Freight tab: the hump, a set of tracks that splits three times toward four coloured depots named Kessel, Ashgrove, Halloran and Lindqvist, with wagons on the tracks and crates waiting in the yard. Below, the line with a small locomotive, the Wagons and Boiler upgrades, and the buyers.
The hump: throw the points so each wagon reaches the depot painted for its buyer.

Bigger perk trees

Owning the four keystones of a circle now breaks the seal on the next one: a Second Circle of 104 nodes, then a Third Circle of 128, in both Field and Legacy Perks. That makes 316 nodes per tree. Each circle opens with a reveal: a flash, the camera pulling back, a shockwave and the nodes lighting up behind it.

The Field Perks tab during the reveal: "SECOND CIRCLE, 104 NEW NODES" over the first web, with a ring of new nodes lighting up around it and a "Second Circle opens" toast at the top.
The Second Circle opening, mid-reveal.

The Legacy tab also got charters. Before collapsing, you can pick one. It puts a handicap on the next run, such as rigs 90% slower, three rigs only or no geodes, until the run reaches the charter’s level. After that, its bonus stays forever.

The Legacy tab in pixel art: a cyan "Collapse the mine" panel offering 378 shards after 13 collapses, then the charters, two of them done, and three others, Blackout, Lean Times and Cold Furnaces, each with its challenge, goal and reward.
Charters: a harder run now, a bonus for good.

A slower pace

All of this sat on top of the shard formula from the prototype, the cube root of earnings. The cube root grows a thousandfold with every nine decades of earnings, and once the deep shaft opened, it handed out millions of shards. The November 6 update rebuilt the pace around collapses.

  • One system per collapse. A first run now has the mine, the refinery and the two perk trees, and nothing else. The Refinery, Perks and Legacy tabs stay hidden until they are of use: the first kiln you can afford, the first geode, the first shard. Each collapse then opens one more system, in this order: the deep shaft, milestones, Goals, lucky veins and the hot commodity, the dig wall and specimens, grubs and bosses, the powder magazine, the crew, expeditions and relics, rig parts, the heartstone and Masterwork, freight, and charters. The Legacy tab names the next one, and a toast announces it. Everything is open after the thirteenth collapse.
  • Shards. A collapse now pays the square of the decades earned this run past $10B, counted in steps of 1.53 decades. That gives 1 shard at $340B, 4 at $11T and 9 at $390T. Shard Resonance stops at +100%.
  • Clicks and depth. The pickaxe adds one strike per level instead of compounding 11% a level, so clicking helps early and the rigs do the rest. The deep shaft opens 10 more levels with each collapse. Deep ores are worth about 2.5× the stratum above, so a new stratum multiplies income a few times instead of a few thousand.
  • Cheaper Legacy Perks. The Second and Third Circles of the Legacy tree cost ×1.5 and ×4 the first circle’s outer prices, instead of ×10 and ×100. The first node of each arm costs 1 shard.

To check the result, tools/pace.lua plays the game headless. A player who opens it for ten minutes every two hours reaches the first collapse after about a day and a half, for three shards, then buys a handful of Legacy Perks with every daily collapse. The save moved to a new file, so every game starts fresh under the new pace. The parity harness from part 1 still passes. Every new system stays neutral in classic mode, so the prototype’s formulas are still compared to 2e-16.

Still on every screen

The redesign kept the stacked layout. On a phone, the camp with the rock, the powder magazine and the stockpile is its own tab. The smoke test now draws every tab in an early and a fully unlocked state at nine window sizes, from 1920×1080 down to 320×480, then fires about 41,000 synthetic clicks. It also opens every crew exam and the “While you were away” window, and checks that nothing behind them takes a click.

Two phone screenshots side by side. On the left, the Mine tab with the tabs in three rows and the cross-section of the mine. On the right, the Camp tab with The Last Rock, a tier 5 boss with a face, and the powder magazine.
On a phone: the Mine tab and the Camp tab, at 430×932.

By the numbers

  • About 5,100 lines of Lua on October 3, and 12,800 on November 6, in 31 files instead of 18.
  • 316 nodes in each perk tree, 73 trophies, 16 specimens, 12 relics and 15 companies.
  • 8,502 values compared in every parity snapshot.

The Deep Core story

  1. From an HTML prototype to LÖVE
  2. Pixel art, a crew and a freight yard (this article)

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