Deep Core

Deep Core is an idle mining game. You strike the rock by hand, buy rigs to dig a shaft 500 levels deep, feed the ore to a refinery, and when the run slows down you collapse the mine and start over, stronger. It runs on LÖVE, in Lua, on desktop and phones.

How it plays

• The shaft. Seven soil types in the first 50 levels, then eight deep strata of 56 levels each, down to Singularium near the bottom. The depth limit opens 10 levels at a time, and every rig has its own Depth, Bit speed and Hopper upgrades.
• The refinery. Buildings turn raw ore into goods worth more than their parts: coal into coke, iron and coke into steel, gold and steel into alloy. Each one levels up in Speed, Quality and Resource optimisation. Past level 50, every new ore unlocks a deep building you have to invent: its ore must be reached and its inputs already made.
• Field Perks. Rigs slowly form geodes as they drill, and geodes buy nodes in an 84-node web, in the style of a passive skill tree. Drag to pan, zoom, hover a node to see what it gives. They are lost when the mine collapses.
• Collapse and Legacy. Collapsing wipes coins, ore, rigs, buildings and Field Perks, and pays Core Shards for what the run earned. Shards buy Legacy Perks in a second 84-node web, and those survive every collapse.
• Away time. With the Night Crew perk the mine keeps running while the game is closed, up to 12 hours, doubled by each perk of the Legacy Crews branch. Coming back opens a “while you were away” summary.

How it’s built

The game started as an HTML/React prototype; Deep Core is its port to Lua, then pushed further: the shaft went from 50 to 500 levels, the perk lists became node webs, and auto-sell now keeps what running buildings need.

• Proven, not assumed. A parity harness runs the original JavaScript and the Lua port through the same 782-step scenario (fresh start through four collapses, every perk bought, every building maxed) and compares 8,502 values per snapshot. Outside the deliberate changes, they match bit for bit.
• One layout, every screen. It draws in logical units at 1440×960 and scales from there. Below a certain width the layout stacks, the sidebar becomes its own tab, and it follows phone rotation mid-run. A smoke test draws every tab at nine window sizes and fires about 41,000 synthetic clicks to check that every button actually does something.
• Offline progress replays the time away through the same simulation step the live game uses, so an hour away gives exactly what an hour of play would.
• No network, no native modules: built to be packaged for Steam, Android and iOS.