Core Keeper 1.3 Riders of the Underground Update Guide: How to Get the Saddle, Ride the Orex, Reach the Moss Biome, and Whether You Need a New World

Riders of the Underground is live. Core Keeper's 1.3 update — the first of the three major updates on Pugstorm's Road to the Maw roadmap — rolled out today across PC, PlayStation 4/5, Xbox Series X|S, Switch and Switch 2, and it changes how you move through the underground more than any patch since fishing arrived. Rideable mounts, a new sub-biome hidden inside the Forgotten Ruins, a grapple-style Hookshot, a full Mage and Summoner rework, three new pets, and a small mountain of new armor, rings and necklaces, all for the same $19.99 base price.

I spent the morning logging into an old world, pushing past my explored borders to find Moss, and getting thrown off my first Orex more times than I would like to admit. This guide covers everything that actually matters on day one: how the Saddle works, why your existing world will not grow Moss on its own, what the Hookshot does and does not replace, and the server-side checklist that prevents the single most common patch-day failure.

If you are coming to Core Keeper fresh off another survival sandbox — say, our Valheim 1.0 launch guide or the RuneScape Dragonwilds 1.0 launch guide — the short version is this: Core Keeper is a 1-8 player top-down mining sandbox where you wake up next to a mysterious ancient Core, dig outward through seven biomes, fight giant Titans, and slowly unravel why you are down here. 1.3 does not change that loop. It makes moving through it dramatically faster and gives casters their first serious identity rework.

Do You Need a New World for Core Keeper 1.3? (No — You Need an Expedition)

Let's kill the biggest day-one question first, because every Core Keeper content update trips this wire.

You do not need a new world and you do not need a new character. Your save loads straight into 1.3, your base is intact, and all new content — mounts, pets, gear — is obtainable in an existing world.

The catch is the Moss sub-biome. New sub-biomes only generate in chunks your world has never generated before. If your server has been running for months and your group has already carved the Forgotten Ruins into Swiss cheese, Moss will not quietly sprout inside territory you have already walked. It exists out past the edge of your explored map.

The same rule applies to Caveling settlements and any new enemy placements: they live in ungenerated chunks. A brand-new world obviously gets everything immediately, and honestly, starting fresh in 1.3 is a genuinely good time — being able to ride your first billu around instead of walking is a quality-of-life jump that hits hardest in the early game.

Rideable Mounts: How to Get and Use the Saddle

The headline feature. From 1.3, every type of cattle in Core Keeper is rideable — billus, dodos, octopus babies, the works — thanks to a single new item: the Saddle.

Here is the loop:

1. Craft or loot a Saddle. It uses the new leather-and-crafting chain added with the update; early reports put it at a mid-tier crafting station, so if you are already past the Forgotten Ruins in progression, you can make one the moment you log in.
2. Approach the animal you want with the Saddle in hand and place it on the cattle. There is no taming minigame for regular livestock — if you have the animal, you can ride it.
3. Ride. Mounts dramatically outpace on-foot travel speed, which is the real point: late-game bases are often thousands of tiles from the frontier, and 1.3 finally makes that distance feel survivable.
4. Manage it through the new mount UI. Each mount gets its own panel where you can rename it and set its behavior: stay in place, roam freely, or follow you around when you are not riding.
5. Remove the Saddle to return the animal to being ordinary cattle. Nothing is lost — the Saddle comes back off cleanly.

Every cattle species can carry the Saddle, and the community is already arguing about which one is best. My take after a day of riding: for pure expedition work, whatever has the best speed and health pool available to you early — the exact stats vary by species — and for base life, the funniest one. This is a game about naming a giant snail and making it yours.

The Orex: A Raptor You Can Ride

The Moss sub-biome does not just bring scenery — it brings a brand-new species of cattle, and it is the star of the update's art.

The Orex looks like everything Core Keeper has taught you to fear: front-facing eyes, sharp teeth, powerful jaws, a raptor silhouette. It has the build of a predator. It is not one. Orexes eat critters, they are typically placid around players, and because they count as cattle, you can put a Saddle on one and ride it.

That last part matters more than it sounds. The Orex is fast, sturdy, and — in my completely biased opinion after a day with one — the best all-around mount in the game right now. It handles Forgotten Ruins terrain beautifully, it will not panic and bolt the way skittish livestock does, and it looks absolutely incredible charging past a wall of glowing mushrooms.

Since they only spawn in the Moss sub-biome, and Moss only spawns in fresh chunks, finding an Orex and finding Moss is the same expedition. Bring spare Saddles: you will want one for the Orex and one for whatever you rode out there in the first place.

The Moss Sub-Biome: A Safe Harbor in the Ruins

Moss appears in the darker, more humid corners of the Forgotten Ruins — patches of genuinely lush greenery dotted through the stone. Pugstorm's framing is accurate: it is a respite biome. There are no natural predators in Moss, the atmosphere is cozy rather than threatening, and it makes a natural rest-stop and waystation region for expedition routes.

Two things to keep in mind:

• Peaceful does not mean empty. The odd Caveling still wanders in from the surrounding ruins. You are not safe, just safer — keep a weapon hot.
• It is a farming and ranching opportunity. The lush terrain, the calm environment, and a new species of placid livestock in the same region is a pretty obvious invitation to build an outpost there. Moss-to-Forgotten-Ruins ranch lines are going to be the new standard for food production on long-run servers.

The Hookshot: Bridging the Small Gaps

The Hookshot is the other traversal toy, and it slots in exactly where you would expect: it is a new off-hand item that pulls you across pits, provided there is a valid surface on the far side to hook onto.

The honest framing, straight from the patch materials: the Hookshot does not replace bridges. Wide chasms still need real bridging. What it does replace is the tedious two-tile gap that used to force a thirty-second detour or a throwaway platform. Small pits, broken walkways in the ruins, the kind of terrain that made expedition routes annoying — the Hookshot turns those into two-second crossings, and it looks great doing it.

Pair it with a mount and expedition pace completely changes: ride to the chasm, hook across, keep riding. The off-hand slot is the quiet genius of the design — you keep your weapon in hand the whole time, so it never feels like a gear swap tax.

Mage & Summoner: The First Real Rework

Magic has always been Core Keeper's awkward middle child — viable, occasionally fun, but never as coherent as melee or ranged. 1.3 is the biggest structural attention both caster trees have ever received:

• Talent rebalancing and restructuring across the Magic and Summoning skill trees.
• A new weapon type for Summoners, on top of the existing staff/scepter lineup.
• New staff weapons for Mages.
• Reworked summon spawning and persistence — how your summons appear, how many stay active, and how they behave has all changed.

Pugstorm has deliberately left the numbers for players to discover, and honestly that is the right call — day one theorycrafting is half the fun of a rework. My early read after an hour on the test bench: Summoner is the bigger winner. The persistence changes make minion builds feel like an army instead of a leaky bucket, and the new weapon type gives the tree an identity beyond "mage but worse."

Three New Pets (One Is a Secret)

Pets are back on the menu with three new additions:

• The Hoppet — a friend from the sea who keeps enemies at bay with ranged attacks that can apply the slippery effect. A kiting pet for backline players.
• Azeos Jr — a friend from the skies who fires projectile shards and can stun enemies. A pterosaur-sized personality in a small package.
• The third pet — Pugstorm is keeping it a surprise, promising only that we will love it as much as they do. The community has theories; the patch notes do not confirm any of them yet.

Each pet also has multiple color combinations to discover, which is exactly the kind of collection hook that keeps ranch-and-pet players logged in between major updates.

New Gear: Armor, Rings, Necklaces and More

The loot drop is substantial, and worth planning around if you are mid-progression:

Category	New in 1.3	Why It Matters
Armor pieces	10	Fills gaps across several biomes and builds, including caster-oriented sets
Rings	15	Major accessory-slot expansion for build optimization
Necklaces	15	Same — expect meaningful re-picking of trinket loadouts
Pouches	New additions	Inventory management QoL for expedition pack rats
Weapons	New staffs + Summoner weapon type	The first real casting identity update
Enemies	New types	Fresh combat encounters in ungenerated chunks

That is 40 new accessories alone. If your gear comparison habit was already bad, it is about to get worse — which is why the update also ships the quality-of-life fix for exactly that problem.

Quality of Life: The Changes You Will Feel Every Day

Riders of the Underground is a broad update rather than a deep one, and its QoL list is quietly the most valuable part:

• Customizable cursor and crosshair indicators — genuinely big for a top-down game where you are constantly aiming.
• Resizable paintbrush areas — base builders, your mass-flooring workflows just got faster.
• A new key bind to cycle loadouts — swap between expedition, combat and building kits on one key.
• Easier gear comparison — the 40 new accessories are far less painful to evaluate.
• Boats, mine carts and go-karts return to your inventory on death — no more swimming back to a sunk boat. This one should have shipped years ago and I am delighted it exists now.
• Go-kart handling improvements — handbrake, turning and inertia all reworked for smoother rides.

Server Owners: Do These Four Things Before Anyone Logs In

If you run a dedicated server, patch day is when Core Keeper's most common failure mode — version mismatch — bites hardest. The short checklist:

1. Back up your world save before updating anything. It is cheap, and it is the only real protection if a mod corrupts the save during the transition.
2. Update the server the same day the client patch goes live. Steam auto-update means your players will walk into a stale server within hours if you lag behind.
3. On Linux, delete a stale prefs.json in the dedicated server folder if the server reports an old version even after a successful update — it is a known false-report quirk.
4. Have players fully restart Steam, not just the game. A stale client process produces the mirror-image version error.

Mods are the other fault line: check your BepInEx and framework dependencies for 1.3 compatibility before letting the community loose on a production server. The same caution applied during the 1.0 cycles of other survival sandboxes — our Valheim 1.0 mod compatibility guide covers why this pattern repeats in every sandbox update.

Road to the Maw: What Comes After 1.3

Riders of the Underground is explicitly the first of three major updates on the Road to the Maw. Pugstorm has not detailed the second and third stops yet, but the naming and the tease point at a journey toward something called the Maw — and given how long Core Keeper's post-1.0 support has run, this is a roadmap with years of runway, not months.

That long tail is the real argument for starting (or restarting) Core Keeper now. The 6-million-player milestone, a Metacritic 86, and a support cadence that keeps shipping free content at this scale puts it in the same tier as the genre's best-supported sandboxes. If you want a second co-op game for the group after your Valheim server winds down, this is the one I would point you at — and 1.3 is the best entry point the game has ever had.

FAQ

Sources

• Riders of the Underground – Core Keeper's 1.3 Update is Coming September 21st — Pugstorm, official Steam announcement and full feature list.
• Core Keeper's Riders of the Underground Update Will Bring Rideable Mounts on September 21 — Console PC Gaming, feature-by-feature breakdown and Road to the Maw context.
• Core Keeper 1.3 Release Date: Riders of the Underground Lands September 21 — DoomHosting, server-side preparation checklist and world-generation notes.
• Core Keeper (Switch, Switch 2): all the updates — Perfectly Nintendo, complete console update tracking.
• Core Keeper on Steam — Steam store page, pricing, platform availability and Metacritic rating.