Portugues
To The Core
Saved games stay in this browser only.
About the game
To The Core is a digging game with a base-building heart. You are a tiny miner in a cave on the Earth's crust, and your goal is written in the title: get to the core. To do that you go down through the layers one at a time, and nothing happens on its own. You mine the rock, build what you need, and wait for your machines to do their work.
Everything is done with a small tool menu. Dig removes the earth in front of you, at the price of a crystal. A workshop is the basic building, and where you put it matters: workshops need space around them and cannot sit too close to each other. Springs go on diamonds and make crystals, which you need for digging and for upgrades. A weavery upgrades a workshop so that it produces gems. Drills, which you place surrounded by walls, slowly fill a meter at the top of the screen; when it is full you walk to the top of the cave and drop one layer deeper, and there is no way back. The teleport tool takes you to the middle of the map when you are far from home.
A friendly worm acts as your guide in the first minutes, with short messages that tell you what to build next, in the right order. After that you are on your own, and the game slowly asks for more planning: where to leave room, how many springs to keep, and when to let go of a layer for the next one.
Playing it here
To The Core was made for WASM-4, a fantasy console: an imaginary handheld with a 160 by 160 screen, four colours, a D-pad and two buttons, for which independent developers write new games. The first versions date from 2022, and the author has kept improving it since. This page runs version 4.1 in the official WASM-4 web runtime, and it is only about 24 KB. The game saves your progress on the WASM-4 disk, in this browser, and the Load Game entry in the title menu brings it back. The multiplayer mode of the original is not available here.
Controls
| Input | Action |
|---|---|
| Arrow keys | move; pick entries in the menus |
| Z (button 2) | open the tool selection |
| X (button 1) | choose a tool; use the chosen tool; close messages |
| Enter | WASM-4 menu (pause, reset, save and load the emulator state) |
On a phone or tablet, the WASM-4 runtime shows touch buttons on the screen.
Tips
Follow the worm. The first messages are a real tutorial. Do what they say in that order: mine ore for gems, build a first workshop, then springs and a weavery.
Give buildings room. If a workshop will not go down, it is probably too close to another one or to a wall.
Springs first. Crystals are what pay for digging and upgrades, so a few springs on diamonds early on make everything after them cheaper.
FAQ
Is there a way to continue later? Yes. The game saves on the WASM-4 disk in this browser, and Load Game in the title menu continues from there.
What is the Seed? The map is generated from a number, shown on the title screen. The same seed gives the same caves.
Credits and licence
To The Core was made by Gertkeno (Garrett Hale), who made the game and its art. It is free software under the GNU General Public License version 3 or later, and the source code of the version served here is hosted alongside the game. The cartridge was compiled from that source with one change, a line of tutorial text in which the original mentioned another game; the patch is hosted too. It runs in the official WASM-4 runtime (ISC licence). The licence texts are linked from this page.