- Colony building sim Mountaincore is now free to play and open source - 23 April 2025
A complicated history for this one, with the developer Rocket Jump Technology no longer existing as a business. The previous iteration of the game named King under the Mountain went open source back in January 2024, and now what was to be the big revamp is also open source. Read the full article here: https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2025/04/colony-building-sim-mountaincore-is-now-free-to-play-and-open-source/
- Mountaincore is now free to play and open source! - 22 April 2025
Mountaincore is now free to play on Steam, and also open-sourced under the permissive MIT license at Github! Two years ago, we were working with a publisher who were on-board to fund and market what became Mountaincore, but unfortunately they decided not to go ahead with publishing the game (as was their right per the terms of the contract). That left Rocket Jump Technology in a bad position - we'd not been allowed to say what we were doing for the past year or what we were working on, so then when the publisher pulled out our only real option was to market the game ourselves over an extremely short period (we didn't have much money in the bank to continue otherwise) and hope that the Early Access launch was successful enough to fund further development of the game. It was not. This wasn't surprising as its next to impossible to get noticed as an unknown indie game studio unless your ga…
- King under the Mountain released as open-source, Mountaincore dev on hold - 12 January 2024
2023 was a tumultuous year for Mountaincore - we were made to keep the community in the dark by a publisher which ultimately backed out, scrambled to release the game according to the plan that had been put in place, and ultimately it suffered as a commercial failure. The Mountaincore launch was way below what was required to keep even a single dev employed working on the game, so eventually all staff were laid off and it was forced to revert to being a free-time hobby project. This hasn't really worked out and the game hasn't seen any updates since that launch period, and I deeply apologise for that. In addition, the company (Rocket Jump Technology) has had to be declared insolvent as the small amount of revenue from Mountaincore was not enough to cover even the small debts the company owed (themselves just a tiny fraction of the publisher-funded development budget). This means that Ro…
- Mountaincore Dev Update 3 (June 2023) - 2 July 2023
Hi everyone, sorry for a slightly delayed update this month. In fact that’s the main theme of this month’s update unfortunately – the necessity of returning to full-time work has hit me much, much harder than I thought it would, probably also due to the fact I now have a fairly long commute after working from home for 3.5 years. So progress has been much slower than I was hoping for, but now I’m settled in my new day job I should be able to fit in development time for Mountaincore here and there. June was spent pretty much entirely still responding to crashes, bugs and feedback suggestions, primarily via the Discord server. The good news though is I think it’s about time to switch gears from focusing fully on improvements to what is already in the game, and change over to focusing on adding new content. I was hoping that the first point of the roadmap would be done to release alongside…
- Early Access 1.2.5 - 12 June 2023
- Adjusted chances of creating items from mining (stone is less likely, ore is more likely) and made this moddable - Deconstruction of furniture can now be cancelled - Skeletons will now eventually disappear - Made hops quicker to grow - Reduced the chance of fire from jobs that can cause fires - Barrels now need 2x staves and hoops to craft - Fire now lasts longer between state transitions (more time to extinguish it) - Fix for a crash when a creature has no schedule - Ignoring save file location when under Microsoft OneDrive as this causes many saves to fail. - If affected, you will need to move your save files out of OneDrive to a different location (see preferences.properties file for your new location) if you want to continue using them. - Fix for a crash when a cooking job ingredient hauling has been cancelled - Fix for a crash when attempting to dump a stack of items that are par…
- Early Access 1.2.4 - 1 June 2023
- Fix for liquid hauling jobs not working i.e. filling of water barrel - Improvement to furniture that collects items such as kitchen worktop
- Early Access 1.2.3 - 31 May 2023
- Settlers will now hold on to their waterskins for a lot longer - Fix for walls and bridges not being built - Attempted fix for trading chests getting stuck and no longer collecting coins - Hauling items to stockpiles will now default the job to the priority of the target stockpile (room or furniture) - Note that this does not affect the priority of jobs already created
- Early Access 1.2.2 (MacOS Fix) - 29 May 2023
- Reduced toughness of the undead (though they're still very hard to kill - bring hammers) - Made collection of ammo while in military more important than other goals (i.e. standing on guard) - Dwarves will no longer fight each other to the death because of a stray arrow hitting a friend in the back - Idling is no longer interrupted by low needs to ensure dwarves get themselves unstuck from under furniture - Fix for a crash when attempting to attack but no opponent is selected - Fix for a crash when a military squad member has been completely obliterated from the world - Fix for a crash when spawning a particle effect for an item and the target material can not be found - Fix for a crash that can happen when requesting items to a construction - Fix for a crash when closing the game multiple times(!) - Fix for a crash due to missing code in an AI action to refill waterskins - Fix for the…
- Early Access 1.2.2 - 29 May 2023
- Reduced toughness of the undead (though they're still very hard to kill - bring hammers) - Made collection of ammo while in military more important than other goals (i.e. standing on guard) - Dwarves will no longer fight each other to the death because of a stray arrow hitting a friend in the back - Idling is no longer interrupted by low needs to ensure dwarves get themselves unstuck from under furniture - Fix for a crash when attempting to attack but no opponent is selected - Fix for a crash when a military squad member has been completely obliterated from the world - Fix for a crash when spawning a particle effect for an item and the target material can not be found - Fix for a crash that can happen when requesting items to a construction - Fix for a crash when closing the game multiple times(!) - Fix for a crash due to missing code in an AI action to refill waterskins
- Mountaincore Dev Update 2 (May 2023) - 29 May 2023
Hi everyone! May was a particularly exciting month because… we launched into Early Access!! I’m very happy with the response from most people so far, lots and lots of you are enjoying it, many YouTube and Twitch streamers have picked up the game and almost all of those enjoyed it too, though unfortunately Mountaincore is sitting at “Mixed” on Steam due to hovering just under 70% positive reviews. If you’ve bought the game directly on Steam (and I believe previously purchasing King under the Mountain from Steam would count as well) and you’re enjoying it so far and eager to see what we can add to the game, please leave a positive review. There’s no greater impact on the sales (or not) of a game if someone gets to a store page with the difference between “Mixed” and “Positive” for the overall reviews. Sadly all the keys granted for the pre-Early Access don’t count to the review score, or…
- Early Access 1.2.1 - 27 May 2023
- Attempted fix for weapons sometimes going missing - Disabled exclusive full screen mode on Mac until we can fix the OS-level crash this is causing - Dwarves can no longer drink from the water barrel in a brewery to avoid blocking the production of wort - Note that this change will auto-deconstruct any existing brewery water barrels - Health and Safety inspectors have banned the dwarves from drinking beer directly from fermentation tanks
- Early Access 1.2.0 - 25 May 2023
- Updated underlying engine library to latest version - This fixes some small issues like being able to launch the browser on Mac - It also means we can have a splash screen! - Settlers can no longer die due to food poisoning (there is still a happiness malus) - Disabled beer tappers will no longer bring beer barrels to themselves - Farmers are now responsible for harvesting crops, rather than Haulers - Stonemasons are now responsible for placing pipes, rather than Haulers
- Early Access 1.1.37 - 24 May 2023
- Settlers will now collect a stack of seeds when farming again rather than one seed at once - Reduced happiness malus from going sober - Fix for duplication of bread and rations placed on a feasting hall table - Settlers will no longer use disabled beer tappers - One of the starting settlers is now a Carpenter/Woodcutter rather than Woodcutter/Carpenter
- Early Access 1.1.36 - 24 May 2023
- Settlers will now never interrupt a job to move food to the feasting hall - Fix for construction of flooring, walls and roofing not working correctly
- Early Access 1.1.35 - 24 May 2023
- Settlers should now collect items needed to work on jobs before waiting until all other work is completed - Made the main menu background image smaller to reduce memory usage - Fix for a crash when destroying a butchery station
- Early Access 1.1.34 - 23 May 2023
- Reduced repelling force due to many entities in one location to avoid issues in very busy locations - Fix for the game not working in a Turkish locale - Fix for when cauldrons get stuck in transit between kitchen and feasting hall - Fix for a crash due to sorting algorithms making use of a random element - Fix for a crash when removing a zone from a region that no longer exists - Fix for a crash when a doorway was constructed with no materials - Fix for a crash when laying power lines along the map edge - Hopeful fix for a crash due to misallocation of funds when trading - Increased minimum memory usage to 2GB (We want to know if this affects you negatively)
- Early Access 1.1.33 - 22 May 2023
- "Add tiles" button when a stockpile is selected will now correctly use that stockpile's (first if several) stockpile group - Adding a stockpile will now use the settings of a stockpile that is being extended rather than what was selected - Note that merging two existing stockpiles together will keep both of their settings - Fixes and improvements to butchery station - Transferring water to soup cauldrons is now the responsibility of a Chef (was a Hauler previously, which was incorrect) - The construction of a feasting hall cauldron (and hauling a cauldron of soup to it) now gets set to the priority of the kitchen it is coming from - Improved logging to avoid writing too much to disk - Improved crash handling to keep stack trace instead of it being lost sometimes
- Early Access 1.1.32 - 21 May 2023
- Added a label to export pallets to warn when a production limit has been reached - Updated French translation, with thanks to Crono Natsuga
- Early Access 1.1.31 - 19 May 2023
- Fishing now only has a chance to catch a fish (depending on skill level) rather than always being successful - Ore crushing is now performed by the stonemason rather than blacksmith - Corn and Hemp now grow a little faster - Exposed the colour codes for roofing view to modding - Fix for a crash when a liquid container no longer has a valid access zone
- Early Access 1.1.30 - 19 May 2023
- Corrected weapon rack tags - Prevented placement of rooms over irrigation channels - Removed state file for Asset Editor tool to prevent a crash
