Dome Keeper is a roguelike survival mining game developed by Bippinbits. Released in 2022, Dome Keeper reminds us that our obsessive need to dig in straight lines will be the death of us.

We play as miner sent in our protective dome to exploit alien worlds for valuable resources. Basically the bad guys in Avatar but it's okay because it's us doing it.

Gameplay consists of digging up resources, defending your dome from waves of attackers and dying because you got too greedy YET AGAIN and now you're not going to get back in time to defend.

The Good

The arcade vibes hit strong on this one and remind me of many nights as a wee little Zehnpai playing dig dug on my Atari 2600. The goal of the game often takes a back seat to me seeing if I can dig out the entire screen before I die. Just put on a movie and bang on rocks for a few hours.

I also enjoyed that losing was always my fault. It wasn't RNG, bad game design, bullshit encounters or anything like that. I enjoy the feeling of being in absolute control of my destiny and constantly fucking it up.

The Bad

There isn't much to complain about given how simple of a game it is. I'd say the lack of depth is about it. There isn't any great strategy, no complex decisions, no evolving gameplay. It feels more like a demo.

Always nice when the worst thing about a game is that there isn't more of it.

The Ugly

There's a pretty clear tier list when it comes to domes and gadgets. About half the unlockables are pert near useless or rendered redundant by better alternatives. Fortunately you have pretty good control over what you get and even then you don't need any of it to win, so it's mostly a quality of life thing.

Final Thoughts

It was fun for about a day or two. Then I ran out of stuff to do and put it down, never to think about again. Which is fine, not every indie roguelike needs to have thousands of hours of replay value. I enjoyed my time with no bitter aftertaste, making it a great gaming palate cleanser.

Interesting Game Facts

Bippinbits takes part in game jams. Game jams are where developers compete to create a game from scratch in under a few days. Which explains a lot honestly. They must have realized they had something with Dome Keeper and put more into it but you can definitely see where the root of this one is.

Thank you for reading! I'd love to hear about your thoughts and experiences!

My other reviews on patient gaming

Is it worth the price and guessing would give long battery life on deck also?

Chat, I hate to break this to you, but someone needs to say it. You don’t know shit about gadgets. After watching all of his runs and speed running a few other VODs from other streamers, everything NL has said about gadgets rings true. Despite that fact, NL keeps giving in to the pressure.

Part I: “He’s so…useless.”

We need to talk about Drillbert. Yes he’s adorable… for the 5 seconds we get to see him. Drillbert sucks. This is indisputable. I can hear you saying, “But fully upgraded Drillbert goes hard!”

Okay. Auto-turn is 3 upgrades up the tree. Drilliam is 4 upgrades up the tree. A useful Drillbert ends up costing more than he produces by the end of a typical run. He’s a complete waste unless you’re playing Prestige on a Large map. Even then, you barely break even. On top of that, the iron and water you spend on Drillbert could have gone to a one-tap drill and — much more importantly — several shield upgrades. 2 cobalt is more valuable than Drillbert. Sad, but true.

Part II: Beam me up, Ryan Gary

Everyone keeps telling him the lift is super pog. I’ve seen the same on a few copy/pasted beginner’s guides floating around, and suspect that’s where the hype comes from. But the lift is slooooooow. The real value comes from how cheap it is. The only useful upgrade is carrier movement speed, which is a mere 4 iron and 2 water. With its ability to suspend resources, you can deposit them on it while traversing the mines, leave them hanging, and then quickly zip back and forth to shuttle them home. It’s actually more useful if you don’t upgrade it beyond that. Adding orbs just locks more resources that you can’t grab on your way up, and faster orbs are still incredibly slow.

However, it doesn’t compare to the teleporter. It’s not even close. A fully upgraded teleporter only costs 14 iron and 13 water, at which point it makes a lift completely obsolete. It collects resources way faster. It can be dragged along with no slowdown while mining. It can get you instantly in and out of the mines, maximizing drilling windows. The teleporter is the best gadget in the game. <Insert change my mind meme here>

Part III: Finders keepers

Let’s move on to the probe. At first I thought it was an amazing get. But once again NL was right about something chat still won’t let him prove. The probe doesn’t matter if you have blast mining. (EDIT: …unless you get the teleporter first. Then, the probe is much better because you can get multiple recharges per wave.) Blast mining is cracked. It clears enough space to give you the same info, and saves the time it takes to get there. (Edit: It also ignores terrain density, saving on increasingly expensive max drill upgrades. It can save over 500 taps against the densest substrate at the deepest level using a 40-iron drill upgrade.) Fully upgraded blast mines are cheap as hell, too. It only takes four upgrades to max them out. Full disclosure: I didn’t see if he played Dome Keeper today, but so far I’ve seen chat bully him out of keeping blast mines every time he finds them.

If you ever lobby against Blast Mining, you forfeit the right to complain about psycho mines. Pure and simple.

Part IV: Snoozers or losers?

Yes, the condenser is boring. However, water is a scarce resource, and a required one if you want to survive. Shield upgrades need water. Overcharging needs water. Every gadget needs water.

Yes, the converter is boring. But it’s useful. We’ve only seen it on smaller maps playing Relic Hunt, but it has still covered the difference on timely upgrades here and there. On larger maps where you can end a full day empty-handed, 5 iron is a big get. So far people advocate for the aforementioned gadgets over the converter, but I can see chat coming around on this one in the right situations. I’m not saying it’s top tier. Far from it. But it has its utility.

Part V: Pikachu face

I’d like to close this out with one thing everyone agrees on. The stun laser goes hard. Thankfully, he jumped for it and prevented the chance for anyone to misguide him early on. But that’s really the danger in all of this. When chat keeps whining for the same “things that are fun to see” versus “things that are fun to play” we risk Dome Keeper going the way of Backseat Hero. The man’s been playing roguelikes and roguelites for longer than some chatters have been alive. Put some faith in his experience and let him learn the game at his own pace.

EDIT: Just finished today’s run. He cut it very close a few times, but watching him relaxing and enjoying the game and absolutely destroying his goals was extremely satisfying.

Specifically prestige mode. For context I'm not much of a gamer, I've mostly played minecraft and RPGs and have recently been playing dome keeper, 20 minutes til dawn, and blasphemous.
I feel like Dome Keeper is super hard for some reason compared to other games. My highest score is 500, and I've only ever broken 300 one other time. My goal is 1k, which seems doable, but it always feels just out of reach. I know some people are insane at this game, but do most people find it challenging?

I went at it like 10 times(brutal, small map), but i can't get past wave 20 or so. I feel like I'm not getting enough resources to upgrade. I did figure out to mine sideways every 2 row to discover everything, but i can't get deep enough fast enough. I did upgrade the drill first! But then my defenses are lacking.

Hi Guys,

I have been SUPER addicted to Dome Keeper and it runs fantastic on the Deck. The gameplay loop is addicting and it is my second go-to next to Vampire Survivors.

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED!

Have a very Happy New Year!

[OC]

I finished all 4 size relic hunts, and I can't seem to find whats next but also credits did not roll...

Am I missing something obvious?

Of course we all bought too many games that we will not play thru it all. I bought about 20 games, but the one single game I can't stop playing is Dome Keeper. It is a great inventory resource rogue lite game.

Dome Keeper

It seems like a time and resource management game.

You have to break blocks between rounds of wave defence. And then spend the resources upgrading the base or yourself. Goal is to find a thing buried and then survive.

As someone who has been playing Dome Keeper nonstop since I watched NL play it, and who has loved both playing it and watching it, I was very excited to read Jack_Joke's strategy guide to prestige, as I believe that it is a difficult mode to wrap your head around and a lot of fun. However, as I read through the post, it was very clear that, while some of the suggestions in the post were helpful, others were misleading or straight up wrong, and I think that some of the suggestions would make someone NOT want to play prestige mode, as they suggest that there is only one style of play that is viable in dome keeper in order to obtain a high score. I want to make this post to both clarify those misconceptions, as I personally want as many people to continue to enjoy prestige mode in dome keeper for as long as possible, and also to share my personal prestige mode advice for people who may want it to push their scores higher. I do think that the guide was well formatted.

You might be wondering what my credentials are that I can make the above statement. I'm currently 7th on the Prestige mode leaderboard with a score of 60,198 I've had a few runs in the 20k range, and another run in the 40k range as well with a fair variety of gadgets (with one exception being that I had probe in a majority of them).

Correcting advice from the original post + adding my own two cents:

From second layer on: Mine every 4th row. Even though this leaves the possibility of missing the row in the middle, it is worth it for the time gain of getting all of the iron as fast as possible. I cannot stress this enough: NO VERTICAL MINING and NO PSYCHO MINING. It may seem preferable to go around the hard substrate. But it makes for longer ways, the chance for missing an iron motherload goes up and most importantly, you lose orientation real quick. The upside of mining just left to right every fourth row (and of course the resources you find) is improved orientation and manoeuvrability, which is crucial in the prestige mid game.

In prestige mode, the most important thing is to get your Econ up as quickly as possible. In base prestige mode you get increasing returns to scale from adding prestige. This means that the more prestige you send back, the higher your return from any individual prestige. That means that the best mining path is the one that gets you resources the fastest always. For some people, they are going to get disoriented, and so the efficiency loss from mining easy sub straits is going to outweigh the potential benefit, but for others, they can keep track of there they have been and so just mining easy sub straits will be most efficient. I have seen both styles work, and I myself am a psycho miner who always prioritizes easy over orderly, but any mining style can work as long as you are getting to new areas.

Upgrades:

Early game:

This one is more subjective than the rest, but I go for the first 3 econ upgrades (drill speed first, then carrying capacity), then for the laser upgrades whenever the waves feel hard, and after the first 2 laser upgrades the repellant wither upgrades. This is kind of the same with the sword and shield, just their respective upgrades. I usually leave the water heavy upgrades (e.g. stun laser or lift or overcharge) for when I have good defense and econ

I agree that this is mostly subjective. However, you really want to buy your combat upgrades a little bit ahead of the curve if possible. Every cobalt saved is really vital, and so waiting until you take a beatdown in a wave to buy combat upgrades can lead to you spending too much on healing and not enough on multiplier. I also just want to add that getting carry capacity 2 early after getting the basic econ upgrades has been a huge game changer in my efficiency.

It's also worth adding on that proceeding to the midgame and late game, the goal is to get to that point where you are mining and transporting resources back effectively. Because you have the option to get a lift in every run, the lift provides a large source of efficiency if you are carrying resources back (unless you have a teleporter, in which case it isn't necessary), so you can start to play around the lift/teleporter in the mid/lategame in order to bring back lots of resources. There is definitely not an exact science to this, but playing around those helpers and supplementing that with carrying resources back yourself by the mid/late game you can carry back anywhere from 15-30+ resources per wave with enough upgrades + either lift or teleporter in a wave until the map is dry.

When you hit this point in the run where you are at your peak economic point, THAT is when you want to start investing heavily into prestige (aka when you are mostly full build), since this gives you the most ability to take advantage of that increasing returns to scale: Early prestige that you take is less impactful than late prestige that you take. Doing this correctly can get you to insane multipliers (33x27 is what I ended my PB at, which I had for quite some time, and I think that 33x30 is about optimal, but you start to run out of resources since the map is limited). Ideally by the end of the take you have the 12 cost speed + carry upgrades, and either the 30 cost or 40 cost drill upgrade. I don't think the 16 cost upgrades are worth it, but I could be wrong about that.

Gadgets:

Simple Tier List:

A: Teleporter Best Gadget in the game by far. Needs like 3-4 Upgrades to really get going, but I don't think you can really get over 10k in Prestige without it. Also saves you from buying the jetpack and carrying capacity upgrades in the mid game.

This is a crazy statement that should immediately disqualify this guide. Teleporter is good but I got a 38k run with probe, condenser, lift, stun laser, and I only had a single cobalt tree. I think that you can get 20k with a variety of builds, (sword, laser, shield, and repellent. Not with tree though tree is a bit too bad sorry tree) and you shouldn't feel like you have to play with one specific relic to get a high score. In fact, you should play with what you feel like playing with, as you might discover a way of playing that fits your style!

My personal tier list:

SS: Probe

It allows you to accelerate your early game so hard and makes the midgame and lategame super easy. With teleporter you can skip auto-recharge with long range probe, but with lift long range teleporter does what you want it to. I think that you can get to 20k and beyond without probe, but hitting scores far above 20k would be pretty difficult unless there exists some other combo like drillbert + blast mining that can accomplish mining the map at similar efficiency, which I haven't seen evidence of.

A: Stun Laser, Teleporter, Lift, Condenser

Stun Laser helps you with the early game and is actually a monster in the late game when fully upgrades, and can be guaranteed on every run. Teleporter and lift do similar things, and I'm not convinced teleporter is that much more efficient since with lift + one way teleporter you lose a little bit of time walking back to base, but you gain another relic. Condenser gives you SO much water that I think it's worth it to get prestige high. I do think I probably overrate this a bit, but auto overcharge is really nice and the water generation really does matter a lot in terms of allowing you get to higher prestige.

B: Drillbert, Blast Mining

Both of these are very efficient early and fall off hard in the late game. I'm convinced that there is a way to make them work and get a high scoring run, I just haven't been able to do it yet. Drillbert does a ton of work when upgrades, while blast mining doesn't need many upgrades to be great. I might shred both if they are my second relic depending on how late I get them.

C: Resource Converter

The only reason to take this is iron duplication and maybe early converting water to iron, which isn't great because iron is really important early on in the run and really not important late into the run since getting enough to prestige with it becomes harder than with any other resource. In theory you could convert iron to cobalt, but the conversion rate is really awful for that. It is probably better than shredding, but maybe not if you get this late.

Multiplier:

Go hard for multiplier early: Every time you have some resources left over invest them. Most (if not all) of the early triangles should go into Multiplier. There is a limited amount of waves you can survive (I capped at 57 in my highscore) and you should focus on always steadily investing Resources in the Multiplier. In my run I had a 2325 Multiplier, in the end, which gave me more than 500 points per round, but even in the early rounds multiplier is important. You should steadily invest in the multiplier from wave 2-3 onwards. How much and what and when is more of an intuition than an exact science, I don't have it optimised either., but usually both sides of the product are kind of balanced (like 1012 or 7*5). If you only get 1 point each from the first 20 waves, you can pretty much gut the run and restart imo.

This is not good advice, for reasons I mentioned above. Your econ and combat are the most important things until you are near maxed out in both of them due to that increasing returns to scale, so while you can throw cobalt into multiplier (there isn't really an opportunity cost of doing so), you should not take any other prestige at all since all you are doing is delaying your Econ or making your combat worse, which costs you multiplier/healing later when it's better. For the first 10-20 or so waves I will have very little invested into prestige, and then eventually you look at your build and decide it's basically full and then start pumping prestige aggressively. Investing into early prestige also hurts your ability to defend. I actually think that you shouldn't even prioritize mining cobalt early at all since a)it could ruin your tree location. and b) the multiplier really doesn't matter at all until you get base prestige.

To be honest, this is a point that I think is most important to recognize in improving scores from 20k to higher scores. I was investing in early prestige for a long time, and the moment I stopped doing it my scores skyrocketed.

Some extra pieces of advice that I have that can also help your runs:

• The difference between a 40k run and a 60k run is a 1 cobalt tree vs a 2 cobalt tree. You should be very careful early on mining cobalt to try and connect as many of them as possible. Getting 2 cobalt on a tree early is huge, and can result in you getting a lot more multiplier and a lot more waves in the late game (I was able to beat wave 64). I don't believe it's worth resetting over tree RNG unless you are attempting a world record score.

• EDIT: One thing I forgot that is super important about tree placement: A tree needs a 3x3 block of empty space above it otherwise it will break something. This need only be only 2 blocks above if the third row is unminable blocks (aka the edge of the map). A placed tree will grow 1 or 2? roots per round, but it will eventually connect to other unmined blocks that are connected to what you place the tree on.

• At the beginning, the wave timer does not start until you mine 7 blocks or bring back a resource, so you can mine 6 blocks and bring back as heavy of a load as you want to without hurting your time.

• You can always get stun laser and lift in a run, and should play around that!

• There is a hidden pause button in the game (on the controller it's select). You can pause during a probe to see what blocks have resources hidden in them without having your timer tick down. You can also use this to skip relic animations, but that's less useful.

• The color of each biome you are mining in determines the hidden room that is there: Green = tree, red = zoom shroom, brown = one way tele, blue = two cobalt room.

• The difficulty of waves is tied to both progress in mining blocks, and relic progress. You get a difficulty spike from cashing in a relic, which is important to keep in mind for relics in the late game if you aren't at full power yet (I just learned this).

• Relics tend to be on the opposite side of the map of the relic above them, 15 blocks or so down. (unsure how accurate this is, but I've found this to be mostly true)

• The map does have a limit on the number of blocks that exist. I think that with a really conservative build, the highest multiplier you should go to is 35x30. You should probably go lower than 35 to save cobalt for healing on waves later on, and a water + iron multiplier of 30 is only possible if you skip a good amount of things in your build, so it's probably safer to go for 27 or so. That being said, if you are below 25x24 or so it's very safe that there should be enough resources on the map to leave unless you really went crazy with upgrading everything.

At the end of the day, Dome Keeper is a fresh new game that nobody really knows how to play fully optimally. Teleporter + probe is one combo that can lead to high scores, but I'm convinced that there are many other playstyles and combos that can do really well. The best way to do that is through playing on your own and by having fun with the game, keeping in mind that prestige can be delayed until you are pegging hard.

I missed this so I'm sure others did too, but Dome Keeper came out into 1.0 last month! Looks like a hyge update with tons of new content. Would love to see NL return to it Prayge

Lots of people say theres no much of real replay ability