Dwarven colony builder Mountaincore is out now

Enjoy games like RimWorld, Dwarf Fortress and The Settlers? You'll likely quite enjoy dwarven colony builder Mountaincore as well. It's just hit Early Access and works well on Linux desktop and Steam Deck with full support.

Technically, this isn't a new game. It was previously called King under the Mountain until their publisher dropped-out so they had to go through a rename but it comes with a huge upgrade. Now it's properly back and they developer is continuing on with development. Always nice to see a win for a small team.

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The developer mentioned the game is based around these central pillars:

• A simulated world - The game world is built on a series of interlocking systems which combine together to simulate a living, breathing world. As night changes to day, trees and plants will grow (or not) based on sunlight and rainfall. The local environment and changing seasons have effects on the native flora and fauna. Your settlers and other characters have their own personal social and physical needs that you'll have to fulfil to keep them happy (or at least stop them from breaking and going insane!)
• Procedural generation - Every map is randomly generated from an initial seed (a large number) so that no two maps will ever be the same - unless you choose to use the same seed! The art assets for the game have been created in such a way that they can be drawn by the game engine for near limitless variation in colour - so every tree, plant and character will have their own unique combination of colours and appearance.
• Peaceful expansion - It's an important design goal that it's possible to play the entire game without getting into armed conflict with other factions (if you choose to). Although weapons and combat can be significant parts of gameplay, we wanted to make sure you can peacefully build up a fully-functioning town to have the satisfaction of sitting back and watching your settlers go about their business productively.
• Player-driven content - Have you ever spent hours in a creative game building something, only for it to sit hidden away on your computer? In Mountaincore, players can opt-in to automatically upload their settlements for other players to visit. This drives the basis of the adventure mode - you put together a party of champions from your settlement's population, and go off on an adventure to explore another player's creation. This mode will involve tactical combat as you explore and battle through another player's fortress, claiming rare resources that may be difficult or impossible to acquire otherwise. It's important to note that nothing will be lost by either player in this encounter - you don't actually ?attack? the other player, only a copy of their settlement, and there are benefits to be gained by both parties. Note that the adventure mode is not implemented yet and coming later in development.
• Mod friendly engine - Another big design goal is that everything you see or read in the game (and the variables behind them) are fully open to modification. In fact, the base game is built as an engine with one base mod applied to it (which modders can look at to see how things work). The game is fully integrated to mod.io (game page at https://mod.io/g/mountaincore) to download and update mods automatically.

Seems like a nice big upgrade over their previous release, which due to the issues with their publisher hadn't seen a public update in many months. They have a lot of plans for the future of this game, so it's another that's going to be fun to keep digging deep into at various updates. For now though, it's already full of things to do so worth checking out.

Native Linux support and works just fine on Steam Deck.

You can buy it on itch.io and Steam.