Core Keeper: Where to find tin ore to upgrade your arsenal

Core Keeper tin ore is a step up from copper, and you’ll need to reach a new biome to find it.

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Core Keeper tin ore is an important step toward crafting weapons and tools stronger than copper, including your first ranged weapon, the slingshot, and more durable bronze armor. If you’ve started exploring the starting biome in Core Keeper, you’ve discovered plenty of copper deposits, and using a smelter, workbench, and anvil, you’ve been able to craft some decent weapons, armor, and tools. But if you’re looking to upgrade your Core Keeper arsenal with tin, you’re going to have to do some major tunneling into an entirely new biome to find it.

Tin weapons and tools might not sound like a major upgrade, but I recommend at least having a tin sword before you take on Core Keeper’s first boss, Glurch the Abominous Mass. Spike traps also become available once you’ve started tin crafting, which can be useful against the game’s second boss, Ghorm the Devourer.

While you may have found a small amount of tin ore somewhere in the starting biome, probably in a wooden crate or two, you’ll need a lot more before you can really start crafting tin weapons and gear. Here’s where you’ll find it:

Where to find tin

Core Keeper tin ore: Where to find it

Tin ore appears ina new biome, The Clay Caves. Since Core Keeper’s maps are procedurally generated, there aren’t any precise directions I can give you, so just pick a direction from your starting point (the Dirt Biome) and start tunneling outward. If you reach a wall that your copper pickaxe can’t break, turn around and head back to the Core, then pick another direction.

Make sure you have the following with you on your search for the Clay Caves:

You’ll know you’ve found The Clay Caves when an announcement message appears on your screen, and you’ll also hear a change in the soundtrack.On your minimap the biome is shown in a peach color, indicating that you’re tunneling through clay instead of dirt. Here’s a picture of my map shortly after I found The Clay Caves, to give you an idea of how far out I had to go.

You can see the Core, the tunneling I did to the east, and a chasm I had to cross using bridge pieces. Again,you may not find it in the same direction I didbut the distance to reach it (I very roughly estimate it is about 150 blocks) will hopefully be about the same.

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Once you’ve found The Clay Caves, tin ore deposits work a lot like copper deposits do in the Dirt Biome: you’ll be able to see the metallic glint in the darkness when you’re close enough. When you spot a glint, tunnel toward it. Tin ore will look like shiny silver and gray nuggets in the clay.

You’ll be picking up a lot of clay and other new materials while you tunnel, which is why it’s good to have some empty inventory slots. Clay is tougher to dig through than dirt, so having extra copper pickaxes on hand is useful so you don’t need to backtrack to the Core for repairs when one wears out.

How to use tin ore

Tin workbenches

Put tin ore in your smelter to make tin bars. One lump of ore makes one bar. Here’s what you can use tin bars for:

Crafting benches:

Tin weapons/traps

Weapons/shields/traps:

Tin tools

Tools/backpacks:

Bronze armor

Forbronze armor, combine tin bars with copper bars and fiber:

Chris started playing PC games in the 1980s, started writing about them in the early 2000s, and (finally) started getting paid to write about them in the late 2000s. Following a few years as a regular freelancer, PC Gamer hired him in 2014, probably so he’d stop emailing them asking for more work. Chris has a love-hate relationship with survival games and an unhealthy fascination with the inner lives of NPCs. He’s also a fan of offbeat simulation games, mods, and ignoring storylines in RPGs so he can make up his own.

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