This Dome Keeper Inspired Game Lets You Build An Army Of Dwarves To Defend Your Mine

Hookaria Games is bringing dwarf fortress defense to a new generation with Hold the Mine, a roguelike survival game deeply inspired by Dome Keeper but with a tactical autobattler twist. After nearly two years of development, the game was officially announced at Gamescom Awesome Indies and features hand-drawn frame-by-frame animation, strategic building placement, and hero synergies that create infinite replayability. A freshly updated demo is available now on Steam, showcasing 9 heroes, 35 buildings, and enough depth to keep players digging through multiple runs.

What Makes Hold The Mine Different From Dome Keeper

While Dome Keeper emphasized solo survival through frantic mining-and-defending loops, Hold the Mine adds tactical autobattler mechanics where freed heroes defend your mine automatically. You still dig for resources and build defensive structures, but instead of personally manning weapons during monster waves, you strategically position buildings and unleash heroes with unique abilities that synergize with your structures. This shift from active defense to tactical positioning creates deeper strategic layers while reducing frantic multitasking.

The expedition system replaces Dome Keeper’s open mining approach. Rather than continuously digging wherever you want, Hold the Mine gives you limited expeditions per day based on lantern resources. Each expedition lets you mine multiple connected blocks in succession, forcing difficult decisions about which areas to explore. Do you dig wide searching for hero cages and blueprints, or dive deep hunting valuable resources? Limited expeditions transform mining from continuous activity into precious opportunities requiring careful planning.

Hold the Mine also emphasizes synergies between buildings, relics, gems, and heroes in ways Dome Keeper didn’t. Your defensive strategy emerges from how these elements interact rather than simply upgrading individual components. A hero with fire abilities might synergize with buildings that spread burning effects. Relics that boost specific damage types pair with corresponding hero skills. This interconnected systems design rewards experimentation and adaptation across runs.

The Gorgeous Hand-Drawn Art Style

Hold the Mine distinguishes itself visually through fully hand-drawn and animated characters created frame by frame. This painstaking process gives the game a distinct personality that procedurally generated or asset-flip graphics cannot match. Each dwarf, hero, and monster moves with weight and character, making the underground world feel alive rather than coldly mechanical. The art style evokes classic 2D games from the late 90s and early 2000s when pixel art gave way to hand-drawn animation.

The vibrant universe filled with fellow dwarves creates atmosphere beyond pure mechanics. Unlike Dome Keeper’s lonely solitary survival on alien worlds, Hold the Mine places you within a dwarf civilization fighting to reclaim ancient mines from monster infestation. This narrative framing provides context for why you’re digging, who these heroes are, and what’s at stake beyond personal survival. The world feels inhabited rather than empty.

Hand-drawn animation also helps characters read clearly during chaotic combat. When multiple heroes fight simultaneous monster waves while buildings trigger various effects, visual clarity prevents confusion. Each character design uses distinct silhouettes, color palettes, and animation styles ensuring players can track what’s happening even during the most frantic battles. Good art isn’t just aesthetics – it’s functional design serving gameplay clarity.

Heroes With Meaningful Abilities

The full version promises over 12 heroes each with more than 35 abilities to unlock, creating staggering variety across runs. The current demo features 9 heroes showcasing diverse playstyles from melee warriors to ranged casters. Each hero starts with base abilities but gains new skills through runes found during mining expeditions and exotic fruits discovered in hidden areas. This progression system means heroes grow stronger throughout individual runs while also unlocking permanent upgrades across multiple playthroughs.

Heroes fight automatically once unleashed, using their abilities based on AI behavior patterns. Your job involves positioning them strategically and enhancing them with the right combinations of runes, fruits, and supporting buildings. A warrior hero might excel when placed near structures that heal or buff melee damage. A mage benefits from buildings that boost spell power or reduce cooldowns. Understanding each hero’s strengths and building your mine to amplify them becomes the core puzzle.

Finding heroes trapped in cages during mining adds exploration incentives beyond pure resource gathering. Rescuing a powerful hero can turn desperate situations around, providing the firepower needed to survive upcoming monster waves. But reaching distant cages requires spending precious expeditions and resources on paths that don’t immediately yield materials. Balancing hero rescue against resource collection creates meaningful choices every day.

Building Synergies And Strategic Depth

Hold the Mine features over 75 buildings in the complete version, each offering unique effects and abilities that interact in complex ways. Buildings aren’t simply stat boosts but game-changing mechanics that fundamentally alter how your defense operates. Some buildings periodically transform enemies into harmless sheep. Others launch tornadoes dealing damage and applying knockback. Polymorph effects, area denial zones, healing fountains, and damage amplifiers create tactical possibilities limited only by creativity and resource availability.

Buildings must be constructed on ruins discovered during mining, adding spatial puzzle elements to defense planning. Ruins appear in fixed locations within procedurally generated mine layouts, forcing adaptation to each run’s unique geography. Maybe you find the perfect building blueprint but no nearby ruin to place it. Or perhaps ruins cluster in one area, allowing concentrated defenses but leaving other approaches vulnerable. Working within spatial constraints prevents optimal strategies from working identically every run.

Resource management determines which buildings you can afford. Every structure requires specific materials mined from different block types scattered throughout mines. Iron, gold, crystals, and rarer materials each serve distinct purposes. Spending resources on buildings means less available for hero upgrades or emergency repairs. Conservative building strategies preserve resources but provide weaker defenses. Aggressive construction creates powerful synergies but leaves no safety margin for mistakes.

The Day And Night Survival Loop

Each run in Hold the Mine cycles between day and night phases creating rhythm similar to Plants vs Zombies or They Are Billions. During daylight, you conduct mining expeditions gathering resources, rescuing heroes, finding blueprints, discovering relics, and constructing buildings. When night falls, monster waves assault your mine’s door attempting to destroy it. Survive enough nights and you win the run. Let monsters breach your defenses and you start over.

The current demo challenges players to survive until day 11, though only the first seven days are available during playtesting. This gives enough runway to experience the core loop while leaving players wanting more. Early nights feature manageable monster numbers allowing you to establish basic defenses. Later waves intensify dramatically, requiring optimized building placement, powerful heroes, and strategic use of battle abilities to survive.

Battle abilities add active elements to otherwise automatic combat. These powerful effects create deadly fields around your mine entrance, temporarily shifting combat momentum when properly timed. With limited uses per battle, abilities function as emergency buttons for desperate situations or strategic amplifiers for aggressive pushes. Knowing when to trigger abilities versus saving them for worse waves creates moment-to-moment tension even during autobattler combat.

Blocks Relics And Gems

The full version features over 20 different block types each yielding different resources and bonuses. Beyond basic iron and gold, specialized blocks contain rare materials needed for advanced buildings or hero upgrades. Some blocks hide relics providing permanent passive bonuses for your current run. Others conceal gems that augment specific systems. Exploring thoroughly rewards curious players while focused mining paths suit those prioritizing efficiency over completion.

Relics and gems create build diversity across runs. A relic boosting fire damage makes fire-focused heroes and buildings significantly stronger, encouraging you to lean into that strategy. Gems that increase mining efficiency let you gather more resources with fewer expeditions, enabling faster building construction. Random drops mean you can’t plan builds before runs start – you must adapt strategies to whatever relics and gems you discover.

This randomization combined with procedural mine generation ensures no two runs play identically. The mine layout changes. Available resources shift locations. Hero cages appear in different areas. Relics and gems vary. Building blueprints spawn randomly. This constant variation forces players to think creatively rather than following memorized optimal paths. Mastery comes from adaptation rather than repetition.

Goblinz Publishing Partnership

Goblinz Publishing, known for indie hits like Legend of Keepers and Robothorium, handles Hold the Mine’s publishing duties alongside Gamirror Games. The partnership provides Hookaria Games with marketing support, promotional visibility, and distribution assistance that solo indie developers struggle securing independently. Goblinz’s announcement at Gamescom Awesome Indies gave Hold the Mine industry exposure that might otherwise take years to achieve organically.

The publisher’s experience with roguelike games and strategic titles makes them ideal partners for Hold the Mine’s niche genre blend. Goblinz understands audiences who enjoy deep systems, high replayability, and challenging difficulty curves. Their existing player communities interested in roguelikes and strategy games provide built-in audiences likely to appreciate Hold the Mine’s specific design philosophy.

Publisher support also enables better quality assurance testing and community feedback integration. The recently updated demo incorporating numerous quality-of-life improvements and fresh content demonstrates active iteration based on player response. Solo developers often struggle finding time for extensive testing and updates while also handling development, marketing, and community management. Publisher partnerships free developers to focus primarily on game creation.

Rock And Stone Community Response

The Hold the Mine community has embraced the Deep Rock Galactic rallying cry “Rock and Stone,” creating camaraderie among dwarf-game enthusiasts. This shared cultural language connects games featuring dwarves, mining, and cooperation even when gameplay differs significantly. Deep Rock Galactic players looking for single-player mining experiences naturally gravitate toward Hold the Mine despite different mechanics and genres.

Reddit and Steam community responses praise the demo’s polish and depth. Players who tested earlier playtests report visible improvements in the updated demo, noting smoother tutorials, cleaner menus, and better balance. The game’s promise shows clearly even in demo form, building anticipation for the full release featuring 12+ heroes with 35+ abilities each, 75+ buildings, 40+ relics and gems, and 20+ game modes with various difficulty levels and challenges.

Speedrunners have already begun optimizing demo completion times, creating community competitions around fastest clears. While Hold the Mine emphasizes strategy over speed, the roguelike structure naturally supports speedrunning through its defined win conditions and random generation. Communities forming around games before full release indicate healthy engagement and word-of-mouth growth essential for indie success.

No Release Date Yet But Demo Available

Hold the Mine currently has no announced release date beyond generic “TBA” listings. After nearly two years of development and a Gamescom announcement, the game presumably enters its final stretch, but Hookaria Games wisely avoids committing to specific timelines before certainty. Indie developers announcing dates prematurely then missing them damages credibility more than simply saying “when it’s ready.”

The substantial demo available now provides meaningful gameplay while full development continues. Players can experience the core loop, test multiple heroes, experiment with building synergies, and provide feedback influencing final design. Demos serve dual purposes – marketing tools generating wishlists while also functioning as public playtests revealing balance issues and bugs before full release.

Platform availability is confirmed for PC via Steam with no console announcements. The game’s complexity and UI design suit keyboard-mouse controls better than controller layouts, though Steam Deck support through Linux compatibility seems likely given the genre and control scheme. Whether Hookaria Games pursues console ports post-launch depends partly on PC sales success and available development resources for additional platform optimization.

Why Mining Defense Games Endure

The mining-defense genre pioneered by games like Dig Dug and modernized by Dome Keeper taps into primal satisfaction from excavation paired with survival pressure. Digging itself feels good – breaking blocks, gathering resources, expanding your underground territory. Adding defense elements creates urgency transforming peaceful mining into frantic preparation before inevitable attacks. This rhythm of calm exploration punctuated by intense combat provides natural pacing that purely action or purely peaceful games cannot achieve.

Resource management creates meaningful choices absent from pure action games. Every resource spent on buildings is unavailable for hero upgrades. Time spent mining deep leaves less for exploring wide. Expeditions used rescuing heroes can’t also gather materials. These trade-offs force prioritization and strategic thinking beyond simple mechanical execution. Players succeed through smart decisions as much as quick reflexes.

Roguelike structure adds long-term progression atop short-term runs. Permadeath means individual runs feel consequential – mistakes end attempts rather than allowing infinite retries from checkpoints. But meta-progression through unlocked heroes, buildings, and modes ensures death isn’t pure loss. Each failed run teaches lessons about synergies, resource management, and strategic positioning that inform future attempts. This combination of immediate stakes with long-term growth creates addictive loops keeping players returning.

FAQs

When does Hold the Mine release?

No release date has been announced. The game shows TBA (to be announced) across all platforms and storefronts. After nearly two years of development and a Gamescom announcement, the game appears to be approaching completion, but Hookaria Games hasn’t committed to specific timelines. A substantial demo is available now on Steam for players who want to experience the game before full launch.

Is Hold the Mine similar to Dome Keeper?

Yes, Hold the Mine draws heavy inspiration from Dome Keeper’s mining-defense loop but adds tactical autobattler mechanics. Instead of personally defending during monster waves, you strategically position buildings and unleash heroes who fight automatically. The limited expedition system replaces continuous mining, and building-hero-relic synergies create deeper strategic layers than Dome Keeper’s more straightforward upgrade paths.

How many heroes are in the game?

The full version will feature over 12 heroes, each with more than 35 abilities to unlock. The current demo includes 9 heroes showcasing diverse playstyles. Heroes start with base abilities and gain new skills through runes found during mining and exotic fruits discovered in hidden areas, creating both within-run progression and meta-progression across multiple playthroughs.

What makes the art style special?

Hold the Mine features fully hand-drawn and animated characters created frame by frame rather than using sprites or 3D models. This painstaking animation process gives each dwarf, hero, and monster distinct personality and weight. The hand-drawn aesthetic evokes classic 2D games while providing visual clarity during chaotic combat sequences with multiple heroes and enemies fighting simultaneously.

Can I play the demo right now?

Yes, a free demo is available on Steam right now. Hookaria Games recently released a substantial update adding quality-of-life improvements and fresh content. The demo features 9 heroes, 35 buildings, 12 unique blocks, and challenges players to survive until day 11, though only the first seven days are currently available during playtesting.

Who publishes Hold the Mine?

Goblinz Publishing and Gamirror Games co-publish Hold the Mine. Goblinz Publishing, known for indie titles like Legend of Keepers and Robothorium, provides marketing support, promotional visibility, and distribution assistance. The game was officially announced at Gamescom Awesome Indies as part of Goblinz’s publishing lineup.

How long is each run?

Run length varies based on difficulty and player skill. The demo challenges survival until day 11, with each day consisting of mining phases and night defense. Experienced players who optimize strategies complete runs faster than newcomers learning systems. The full version promises 20+ game modes with various difficulty levels and challenges, suggesting significant variation in run duration.

Will there be console versions?

No console versions have been announced. The game is confirmed only for PC via Steam currently. The complexity and UI design favor keyboard-mouse controls, though Steam Deck compatibility seems likely given the genre. Whether console ports happen post-launch depends on PC sales success and available development resources for platform-specific optimization.

Conclusion

Hold the Mine represents the evolution of mining-defense games by taking Dome Keeper’s addictive core loop and adding tactical autobattler depth that rewards strategic thinking over frantic multitasking. Hookaria Games spent nearly two years crafting hand-drawn animations, designing hero abilities, and building synergy systems that create genuine replayability through emergent interactions rather than scripted content. The partnership with Goblinz Publishing provides marketing muscle and community support that solo indie developers struggle achieving independently, giving Hold the Mine visibility it deserves. With over 12 heroes each featuring 35+ abilities, 75+ buildings offering unique effects, 40+ relics and gems modifying strategies, and 20+ game modes providing varied challenges, the full release promises hundreds of hours of dwarf-fortress-defending entertainment. The demo available now showcases enough polish and depth to prove Hookaria Games understands what makes this genre compelling while adding enough innovation to justify existence alongside Dome Keeper rather than simply copying it. For fans of roguelike survival games who enjoy strategic depth, tower defense enthusiasts seeking fresh twists on familiar formulas, or anyone who simply loves dwarves digging deep underground while monsters assault from darkness, Hold the Mine delivers exactly the kind of mechanically rich indie experience that deserves celebration. Download the demo, wishlist the full game, and prepare to answer the call that echoes through every mine shaft across gaming history – Rock and Stone, brothers and sisters. Rock and Stone.