To The Core is a minimalist incremental game made by Something Extra. It lets you control a spaceship to mine through planets for resources, which can then be used to purchase skills You can also sell resources for profit.
With an ever-branching skill tree, crafting, and a nice little milestones section for obtaining bonus rewards, this game will certainly keep you busy for hours. Check out our To the Core game guide and tips if you have just started out playing.
Table of Contents
How to Play
You begin your mining adventure on a planet named “Home”. Use the A and D keys to move left and right as the spaceship. With the help of the mouse, you can rotate the ship. Using the mouse, make sure the ship’s tip faces the planet in order to drill through its surface as only the tip drills into a planet’s surface to mine resources.
In the beginning, when your ship hits the surface of the Home Planet, it bounces off it, but gravity pulls it back to the surface. When it bounces off, use the A and D keys to maneuver to the same area of the planet, or else it will bounce off to another area. Your goal is to reach the core, so you would want to drill deeper into the planet, and this is where the A and D keys help you. As you progress, your ship’s maneuverability will be much easier with some crucial upgrades. More on this later.
There are 13 celestial objects in “To the Core”, including the Sun, your first planet’s moon, blackhole, and a supernova. Each celestial object comprises three resources, which can be mined using your spaceship. Example: Your first planet, “Home” has iron, silicon, and aluminum, whereas Home’s moon has rock, coal, and sulfur. Each planet’s three layers of resources are in three different colors. Example: In “Home”, the Iron layer is white in color, silicon is yellow and aluminum is red in color.
Fuel plays a vital role in this game. Your ship consumes fuel at regular intervals, but this also depends on the planet. On the first planet, Home, your ship consumes fuel every second, whereas on planet “Glacies” fuel drains every 12 seconds. On Home’s Moon, your ship uses up fuel every 5 seconds.
Your ship’s fuel not only drains at regular intervals, it drains faster when you hit the planet’s surface. The harder the material on the planet’s surface, the more fuel you will lose. On the first planet, you will lose fuel at a slower rate when mining the iron layer but will lose much faster when drilling through the silicon layer. The harder the surface, the faster the fuel consumption. You can minimize higher fuel consumption by purchasing crucial skills, such as Fuel, Silicon Plating, and Drill Damage.
The fuel bar is located on the lower-left corner of the screen. You die when the bar is empty. You can start over your mining journey to collect more resources, go to the Shop to purchase skills, or sell your resources.
Resources accumulated from a planet can be used to buy skills that can help you improve your ship and its mining efficiency.
You can sell resources to obtain in-game money, which can then be used to purchase certain important skills, such as drill damage, thrusters, and gravity lock. In the shop menu, go to the “Resources” tab and press the green “sell” button below each resource to trade them for some in-game cash. Make sure you move the sell percentage slider toward the left if you want to sell only a small percentage of the resource and save the rest for the future.
In To the Core game, you also get buffs if you collect a certain amount of resources. In the resources tab, you can view buffs under each resource name. Keep mining resources such as iron, silicon, aluminum, rock, etc., and fill the gauge to obtain buffs, such as an increase in drops, and sell price.
Upgrades/Skill Tree
In To the Core, skills can be purchased using resources and/or cash. Go to the Shop, under “Skill Tree”, you will see the following five skills in the beginning:
Fuel: Increases fuel and tank size. As you progress, you will need more fuel, especially when you want to break the planet’s core.
Silicon Plating (Armor): Each time your ship hits the surface, it takes more damage, which leads to faster consumption of fuel. This particular skill will reduce the damage to your ship, which will lead to a slower reduction in fuel consumption.
Ore Extraction: Increases the drop rate of resources from the planet’s blocky surface.
Drill Damage: Increases damage done while mining resources. Breaking rocks to collect resources will be easier and faster. This, combined with Silicon Plating and its linked skills will lessen the damage taken and lower the consumption of fuel while mining through the harder resources closer to the planet’s core.
Vision Upgrade: In the beginning, you can only view the sun, Home, and its moon. As you upgrade this skill, you will be able to see more planets on the map.
As you upgrade these 5 skills, additional skills branch out of them. Maxing out a skill unlocks several powerful skills that are tied to it. Example: Drill Damage unlocks several more powerful upgrades, such as Gravity Lock and Thrusters.
Gravity Lock and Thruster Helps Better Movement
Both gravity lock and thrusters will make it way easy for you to maneuver your ship while mining for resources.
These skills are tied to Drill Damage and you will have to purchase them using in-game cash. You can obtain cash by selling iron, silicon, and other resources in the “Resources” tab of the Shop menu.
Once you purchase gravity lock, press the Shift button while mining and your ship will turn grey in color, indicating that this skill has been activated.
You will notice that your ship no longer bounces off the surface. Breaking blocks becomes smoother as there are no knockbacks when the ship hits the surface.
Thrusters allow you to fly your ship up and down using the W and S keys. Purchasing this skill will be of great help if you want your ship to maneuver upwards in case you reach deeper layers inside the planet, closer to the core, but want to move to a different area to collect more resources.
How to Break the Core
The white part on the center of the planet is its core. It’s the hardest part of the planet and unless your ship has better defenses, high fuel capacity, and drill damage, it will be destroyed even if it just hits the core.
To break the core, focus on these skills right from the beginning:
1. Silicon Plating and skills that are tied to it, such as regeneration and aluminum foil. The Silicon Plating skill nullifies block damage, Aluminum Foil increases defenses and Regeneration helps you recover a percentage of resource health as fuel, so every time you hit a block, you will get back some fuel.
2. Drill Damage and skills linked to it, such as Silicon and Aluminum Plated drills, also help you drill deeper and inflict more damage to the core.
3. Increasing fuel and purchasing all skills tied to it will ensure you lose less amount of fuel when it hits the core. In this game, your ship’s fuel is its HP and it drains faster when your ship hits a block. Fuel goes to zero instantly when you hit the core for the first time, destroying your ship. More fuel in combination with better shielding (silicon plating, aluminum foil, regen, and other skills) and higher drill damage prepare you to break the core without taking high damage. You will notice that the core gets smaller in size when you hit it. Keep upgrading these skills and try to max them out to destroy the core of the first planet.
Crafting
As you progress, you will unlock better skills that are linked to the three main skills – Drill Damage, Fuel, and Silicon Plating. Some of them will be materials that need to be crafted in order to use them. To craft, combine two or more resources to obtain a particular product that will assist you in your mining adventure.
You will unlock crafting once you purchase the gunpowder skill. A new menu will appear beside the resources tab. Once you destroy the first planet’s core, you can start with Home’s moon, mine sulfur, and coal, and then use them to craft gunpowder. The gunpowder unlocks more powerful materials, such as grenades, which can be deployed by pressing the space button while mining.
That’s it for now and we will update this To The Core game guide when we find something new. Post your questions and tips, if any, in our comment box and we will try our best to answer them.