Dome Keeper

Dome Keeper is an action-mining game in which you pilot a mining rig to explore ancient ruins and the subterranean depths. As you gather resources, you must also contend with relentless waves of alien monsters; to survive, you need to establish a robust defense to protect your mining operations. As the game progresses, you will face increasingly formidable foes, requiring you to spend your collected resources on upgrading your defenses, as well as the power and speed of your drill, allowing for more efficient resource extraction. The game also offers various difficulty settings—as the difficulty increases, both the number of monsters in each wave and their individual attributes scale up, providing an even greater challenge.

Gameplay of Dome Keeper:

Dome Keeper is a tower defense game with roguelike elements. Players control a character managing a glass dome, which acts as their spacecraft. After the spacecraft crashes down onto an extraterrestrial landscape, the player must defend their dome from the native aliens intent on destroying it. The player character moves around using a jetpack, and can mine through the ground using a drill. The main resources that the player must acquire are iron, cobalt, and water, which can be mined for beneath the dome and spent on upgrades. A timer indicates the amount of time left before the next wave of enemies, and the character must return to the dome with as many resources as possible before the aliens arrive and begin damaging it. The main weapons the player uses to fight are a laser beam that rotates around the dome, or a sword-like appendage that can be extended to hit enemies. Both weapons can be improved to have greater damage or attack strength, while the character can also spend resources on themselves to increase their movement speed or drill power. The goal of the player in the default game mode "Relic Hunt" is to fight off the waves of enemies and continue mining for resources in-between, while digging deep enough to find an ancient relic used to eradicate the aliens.

Features of Dome Keeper:

Master the Mining Cycle: Navigate a deep, procedurally generated underworld to uncover ores, hidden treasures, and ancient artifacts.

Intense Tactical Combat: Defend against diverse alien lifeforms ranging from small, scurrying pests to gargantuan aerial beasts.

Deep Progression Tree: Unlock and decide on powerful upgrades for your dome’s weaponry, your character’s jetpack speed, and your mining drill’s efficiency.

Stunning Pixel Art Aesthetic: Immerse yourself in meticulously and skillfully crafted pixel art worlds filled with atmosphere and mystery.

Roguelike Replayability: Every run is unique. Experiment with different upgrade paths and strategies to see how long you can hold out against the invasion.

Dynamic Soundscapes: Experience a jet-age aesthetic through a hauntingly beautiful soundtrack that combines melodic and synthetic creations for total immersion.

Strategies of Dome Keeper:

Move Resources Without Carrying Them: Because of how the physics work in Dome Keeper, you can move extra resources without actually having to carry them, meaning they don’t slow you down in the process. This works best in situations where you have lots of long and straight horizontal shafts as well as the Lift gadget.When you’re carrying resources, they still have collision. This means that if you put stray resources in between your resources and the resources you’re carrying, you can drag the stray resources along. This works especially well if you fly at the same level as the stray resources.If you have a Lift, you can drag all your loot to it and have the orbs carry them up. Also, you can use the same trick to carry extra material up the Lift, especially if you keep the shaft of the Lift at one block wide throughout most of its length.

Use Repellent: Of the starting gadgets: Shield, Repellent, and Orchard, Repellent is by far the best. The Shield is decent, especially if you’re learning the basics of the game since it gives you a renewable buffer of health, but once you know how to play, Repellant outperforms the other gadgets, especially the underpowered Orchard.In addition to buying you precious time down in the mines, it has potent combat capabilities that can’t be beaten. The Debilitating Mist ability is powerful, giving you all the time you need to pick off your enemies, but the Wither ability, which you can unlock and use instead of the default combat ability makes some waves of attack trivial.Wither takes a percentage chunk of health out of every onscreen enemy, but it really shows its worth when you max it out, since not only does it take away a full half of their hit points, but also continuously damages them, usually killing weaker enemies outright. There’s even a hit stun on the damage, so enemies are slowed down like you have Debilitating Mist anyway.

Make Sure You Keep A Lift Or Teleporter: Mining down to the depths and bringing materials back up to empower your equipment is a core part of the Dome Keeper experience. With that in mind, it’s best to do so efficiently, unless you want to fall behind and end up underneath a pile of shattered dome pieces.So, it’s a good idea to pick either a Lift or Teleporter up whenever you can, and then keep them between (non-Prestige) runs, so you can continue to make use of them. They’re both extremely helpful, with the Lift being useful from the get-go and the Teleporter requiring some upgrades and then paying dividends later on.

The Minecraft Strip Mine Method: Minecraft and Dome Keeper have little in common save for one thing: the mining. Since they have that in common, you can borrow a technique from the former that will ensure that your resource gathering will be uniform and efficient.Simply dig a shaft straight down underneath your Dome and at every third block down, dig as far to the left and right as you can, harvesting what materials you can along the way. This is especially effective with the Lift, since you can drop stuff off at the main shaft, let the Orbs pick them up, and continue your work down the sides.

Player Comments of Dome Keeper:

I have been waiting for this to release ever since I found the PC version of this game. Safe to say, it lives up to the hype and performs very well on my pixel 11 pro! it seems a little barebones right now with the lost keepers DLC not currently being available so you only have 2 characters to choose from. Everything performs as expected and I've had a blast so far!

ITS ABOUT TIME! I bought this game on Steam a while ago and have clocked 20+ hours in it and its become my comfort game but I always felt it would be better on mobile. THANK GOD you guys made a proper native port! One thing I'd like to mention is some of the tutorial prompts still show "RB" for example when on touch controls. Thank you Bippinbits and Raw Fury for this gem.

good game but having issues with touch screen controls. it likes to stutter and respond all wonky at times. when moving in a single direction constantly. if say i wanna move left. i have to kinda wobble the virtual joystick so my char doesn't stop stutter while moving.

very good game I already own it on multiple platforms and having it on the go is even better, the port is butter smooth and the devs have done an excellent working.

I begged for times like this, this game on mobile or console, but we gor mobile next will be ps5 and Xbox and when that happens I'm buying it again and hopefully there's even more characters and maybe even multi-player.

FAQs of Dome Keeper:

Will there be multiplayer?

We'd love to add co-op, and we are sure we'll eventually have that in. It will be one of the bigger updates we'll do, as far as we can tell now.Local coop is easy to implement, online coop not so much. A big part of the work though will be in the design, balancing and UI changes. There are some big questions there, like does eating a fruit affect both players equally? If not, we need two HUD's now. Same for all the keeper upgrades, like jetpack.The coop I implemented and played with Anne, splits the controls of the laser: the first one to enter would move the laser, the second one would fire. That was a ton of fun, but also much 'weaker' than if you'd do it alone, because of all the inefficiencies. But it added a nice layer of communication+cooperation on that.There are other ideas for multiplayer, like having two domes but sharing a mine.

Is there a meta progression?

What you'll never see in Dome Keeper is the grind that makes you stronger by default, like each run adding 1% max health. What we have is you that you can unlock a lot of new content. That gives you more options to create 'build' in the loadout. Over time you can also unlock more things to choose in the loadout, and also new game modes.

How is the map generated? Is it random?

The map is generated randomly, with what we believe to be a balanced distribution of resources, and block hardness.

Is monster difficulty something that increases from time, depth, or wave count?

The difficulty of the wave is influenced by a few parameters. Right now it uses time and progress - what that exactly means we don't want to disclose, and it is changing a lot anyway. It's challenging to balance, but the intention is to allow both faster and slower playstyles, with both being an equal challenge.

Does improving the max hp make cobalt heal more?

Yes, it scales with max HP (but not 1:1, so double max HP is not double healing).

Are there plans to display monster health, either via health bars or sprite changes?

Definitely no health bars. For smaller monsters with little health, showing changes in a sprite feels a bit unnecessary. For larger monsters with a ton of health like the Driller, that is something we'd like to do, as long as we can find ways to implement that efficiently. Remaking every sprite with every health state is too time consuming.

Final words:

If you take responsibility for your defenses, you will be better positioned to fend off alien invasions. If you want to keep your enemies from bringing down your dome, you need to list them, rank them in order of priority, and eliminate them one by one. These adversaries could be in the air or on the ground, and their movement could be either slow or rapid, depending on the situation.