Mountaincore

About this game

Latest news

• Press Coverage·23 Apr 2025

  Colony building sim Mountaincore is now free to play and open source

  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/
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• Announcements·22 Apr 2025Official

  Mountaincore is now free to play and open source!

  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 game is so incredible that it finds big success through word of mouth, which itself then leads to news sites picking it up, big streamers playing the game, etc. I'd say these make up about 0.01% of indie game releases, like Balatro or Vampire Survivors. Every developer wants to make the best game they can for people to enjoy it, but there's around 1000 games released on Steam every month so you have to be really special to stand out from that crowd. I was really happy with how Mountaincore was shaping up, but right from the start it was clear that it was a bit too ambitious a game for a single developer's hobby project. The publisher funding allowed others to come on board, as you can see in the game's credits (and they're all fantastic people). I think if we'd been able to sell a modest amount of units from the Early Access launch, Mountaincore would have been able to stay in full time development and maybe today be approaching a more polished and final release. Sadly it wasn't to be, the developer (Rocket Jump Technology) was liquidated and the two remaining staff had to quickly find ...
  Read full article on Community Announcements (Zsinj)

• Announcements·12 Jan 2024Official

  King under the Mountain released as open-source, Mountaincore dev on hold

  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 Rocket Jump Technology is no more, and with it, there's very little chance of Mountaincore continuing to receive focused development. That said, it is not entirely bad news. While the legal ownership of Mountaincore itself is still unclear due to the significant investment by the publisher, Rocket Jump Technology still owned all the rights to its preceding form, King under the Mountain, and this has now been made freely available as an (MIT-licensed) open-source project at https://github.com/rossturner/king-under-the-mountain The MIT license is extremely permissive, essentially allowing you to do whatever you like with the contents, including using it for commercial purposes. The hope is that perhaps people will choose to continue developing the game as a community project, or failing that perhaps it will be useful to other developers (aspiring or not) to build something out of into another game. Again I can only apologise for ending up in this situation, I didn't want this to happen as much as any of you. I've been working on King under the Mountain and Mountaincore since 2015, making ...
  Read full article on Community Announcements (master.corneo)

• Patch Notes·2 Jul 2023Official

  Mountaincore Dev Update 3 (June 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 this update, but sadly it isn’t ready quite yet. The first proper update will see metal alloys added, a use for all the different kinds of metal ores currently in the game (as there’s a few that were added by backer reward that don’t have an in-game use yet), and finally something to distinguish the different metals and other materials from each other. We’ll have some stats on materials such as hardness which will be used to determine how effective that material is when used to make an item, specifically weapons. For example, though they might look pretty, weapons made out of gold are not particularly effective as gold is a relatively soft metal that does not hold an edge very well. This is actually why alloys were invented in the first place – mixing some tin with copper produces bronze which is a much more effective material for weapons than copper alone, and this is why we have the historic period known as the Bronze Age. So look out for that update coming hopefully in the next couple of weeks. Apologies again for the lack of updates more recently compared to when we were able to s...
  Read full article on Community Announcements (Rocket Jump Technology)

• Patch Notes·12 Jun 2023Official

  Early Access 1.2.5

  - 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 partly allocated elsewhere
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