Core Keeper Roadmap 2026: Beyond 1.0, Mod Tools & What Hosts Should Plan For

The Core Keeper 2026 roadmap: Pugstorm’s post-1.0 cadence, mod tooling expansion, and what dedicated-server admins running long-term cooperative mining communities should plan around.

Where Pugstorm Communicates

Pugstorm posts roadmap updates to the Core Keeper Steam page and runs a Discord with regular dev presence. The studio is small and direct: patch notes are detailed, and the community gets advance notice of major systemic changes.

Where the Game Stands Now

Core Keeper left Early Access with 1.0 and Pugstorm has kept a steady post-1.0 cadence of content updates and quality-of-life passes. The current roadmap, announced on 13 August 2026 and titled Road to the Maw, is the studio’s plan for the rest of the cycle. The mod ecosystem is small but growing.

Road to the Maw: What Is Actually Dated

Road to the Maw is three connected major updates, numbered 1.3, 1.4 and 1.5. Pugstorm first planned it as one release and split it into three so players would not wait as long for any of it. Only the first has a date.

• 1.3, Riders of the Underground, releases 21 September 2026. Pugstorm published the full feature list on 10 September. Travel and transport is the theme: rideable cattle via a craftable Saddle, a new Moss sub-biome in the Forgotten Ruins, a Hookshot for crossing small pits, a mage and summoner rework, three new pets, and a large batch of armour, rings, necklaces, enemies and weapons.
• 1.4 and 1.5 have no dates. Pugstorm has said the first two parts focus on deepening existing systems rather than the usual new-biome-new-boss format, building to the 1.5 reveal of what lies beyond Breaker’s Reach. Anyone giving you a date for these is guessing.

Our Core Keeper 2026 roadmap wiki page carries the full 1.3 feature breakdown and is updated as Pugstorm posts.

What 1.3 Means If You Run a Server

Nothing in the announced 1.3 list changes what the server process does. Mounts, the new sub-biome and the reworked talent trees are world and character content, so the practical impact is the ordinary one for any Core Keeper content update:

• Back up before 21 September. A talent rework touches existing characters, so take a copy of the world before the update lands rather than after.
• Expect the world file to grow. A new sub-biome means more excavated and generated terrain on long-running worlds.
• Check your mods. The mage and summoner rework restructures talent trees, which is the sort of change that breaks talent-facing mods until authors update them.

What Server Admins Should Plan For

Hardware

• 1-4 players, vanilla → Plan S
• 4-8 players, vanilla or modded → Plan M

Long-running world planning

Core Keeper saves grow steadily as the world is excavated. Run daily backups, retain at least 14 days, and restart the server weekly for state hygiene.

Bottom Line

Core Keeper in 2026 stays small, friendly, and steady. Pugstorm’s pace is unhurried; their mod-tool expansion is the development thread to watch. Hosts have it easy: modest hardware, mature multiplayer, growing mod scene.