Crown Below

Crown Below is a pixel-art game about a dwarf hold digging its way down under a mountain. You never control a dwarf directly. You put a building down, point at a vein of copper, and they get on with it — mining, hauling the stone back up, hammering walls into place while you watch.

They also get tired. A dwarf who has been swinging a pickaxe too long will down tools and head for the tavern, sit there a while with a beer, and come back faster than he left. If you haven't built a tavern yet, or nobody's bought any beer, he keeps going and just gets slower. Most of the game is noticing things like that before they cost you an hour.

If you've played Kingdom Two Crowns, you'll probably see where the idea came from. I wanted that feeling of watching a settlement slowly grow, but underground and with dwarves.

What you actually do

• Put up houses so more dwarves turn up, and farms so there's something to feed them
• Dig a new floor, then widen the gallery sideways to reach whatever's buried out there
• Click a copper vein to send miners to it; right-click to pull them off again
• Dig up old plans that unlock better picks, bigger packs, a tavern worth sitting in
• Keep an eye on who's worn out

About the demo

Free, Windows, and still very much in progress. I'm still moving numbers around every week, so if something feels too slow or too generous, it probably is — tell me and it'll change.

Who made this

I'm Kaktora. I'm building Crown Below on my own and I'd never shipped anything before this one. Updates go up here as they happen.

Supporting the game

The demo is free and there's a pay-what-you-want box on the download if you feel like it. Honestly, a comment telling me where you got bored is worth more to me right now.

How to install

1. Download the Windows ZIP below.
2. Extract the whole thing into a folder.
3. Run CrownBelow.exe.

Keep the files together — including the .pck if there is one. The game won't start without it.

Feedback and bugs

What I most want to know: where did you stop understanding what was going on, and where did you get bored. Both are useful. Leave a comment below or come say hi on Discord.

For bugs, the version number and what you were doing at the time gets me most of the way there. A screenshot or a short clip helps more than a description. There's a #bug-reports channel on Discord.

Links

Discord  ·  Instagram  ·  X / Twitter

You can follow me here on itch if you want to hear when something new goes up.