Four keepers, and the name is the first confusion
The game calls them keepers. Searches call them characters or classes. There are 4 in total: two in the base game and two behind The Lost Keepers DLC.
| Keeper | Source | Mining tool | Movement |
|---|---|---|---|
| Engineer | Base game | Drill, one tile at a time | Instant acceleration, instant stop |
| Assessor | Base game | Bouncing gravity spheres | Floaty, gradual acceleration |
| Infiltrator | Lost Keepers DLC | Explosive kunai, unlimited range | Gravity-bound, rope and wall-slides |
| Beastmaster | Lost Keepers DLC | Two of four tentacles | Needs surfaces to latch onto |
Every keeper has their own soundtrack, which is the clearest signal that they were designed as different games rather than skins.
What a keeper changes
A keeper sets your starting tool and how you move underground, and that bias lasts the whole run. Put simply: your dome decides how you fight at night, your keeper decides how productive your days are. That is why keeper choice matters more than any single gadget — it is a multiplier on every dive you make.
Engineer — the baseline everything else is measured against
The Engineer’s drill works a single tile until it is destroyed, and the tile can be hit every 0.35 seconds. Tiles have health that varies with biome and rock hardness, so 0.35 seconds is a rate, not a kill time — dense rock takes more hits at the same rhythm.
Movement is the simplest in the game: fast acceleration to top speed, fast stop. No momentum to plan around.
Carrying is where the depth hides. Objects slow him down using a formula rather than a flat penalty:
- carry size = N × (N + 1) / 2, where N is the number of items
- carry slowdown = 0.01 × speedLossPerCarry × carry size
That is triangular growth, not linear. One item costs a little, three items cost six units, six items cost 21. When the slowdown passes 1.0 the Engineer simply stops. There is also a hard leash: a resource chain longer than 6 blocks breaks, so anything further than 6 blocks away gets dropped.
Practical consequence: the Engineer should make short trips with small loads, not long trains. Players who build a 7-item chain lose the far end without noticing.
Assessor — bounce mining and bundled cargo
The Assessor mines with spheres: launch one and it travels in a straight line, ricochets perpendicular off the first tile it hits, and bounces until its lifetime expires. That makes mining a geometry problem — the best shots hit multiple tiles per launch.
Compression mining is available as a backup. It works like the Engineer’s drill but is slower and less efficient, and importantly, shooting spheres does not count as movement, so you can fire while compression-mining.
Movement is floaty: gradual acceleration to top speed, gradual stop that depends on current speed. You cannot stop on a tile edge the way the Engineer can.
Carrying is the Assessor’s real advantage. Small resources can be bundled into one unit and steered in any direction, or left stationary with the Bundle Guidance upgrade. That turns hauling from repeated trips into one trip.
Infiltrator — the DLC keeper that cannot fly
The Infiltrator breaks the pattern: they are affected by gravity and cannot move freely on both axes. To compensate, they get jumps, wall-slides and a rope, and none of those actions interrupt mining — so movement and digging happen at the same time.
Mining is throwable explosive kunai, thrown by holding the button. Each kunai breaks exactly one block, but they ignore gravity, have unlimited range, and break dense rock easily even early. The trade is fire rate: it is slow.
A purchasable upgrade adds an explosive shuriken, thrown by double-tapping. It explodes in a 3×3 area after a short delay, ignores rock density entirely, and replenishes over time. That 3×3 is the best answer to Dense Iron maps, where the base kunai’s one-block limit becomes painful.
Beastmaster — carry capacity as a mechanic
The Beastmaster mines with 2 of her 4 mechanical tentacles, slamming claws into the block. Mining speed increases the longer you keep hitting the same block, then decays quickly when you stop. Sustained digging is rewarded, so she wants long uninterrupted sessions on one tile.
Movement requires nearby tiles to latch onto. She cannot cross open space the way the Engineer and Assessor can, which makes wide caverns a routing problem rather than a shortcut.
Carrying is the design statement: she is not slowed by load, but can hold only 3 objects at a time — gadgets and supplements included — and that cap cannot be upgraded. Her workaround is catgoblins: hold the button to break a hole in a mine wall, and the minions carry resources back to the dome for her.
Best class by situation (and what “class” means here)
There is no single best keeper, but the trade-offs are concrete.
- Learning the game: Engineer. The 0.35-second drill rhythm and instant stop make every other mechanic readable.
- Dense Iron and early hard rock: Infiltrator. Kunai ignore density, and the shuriken clears 3×3 regardless of it.
- Hauling-heavy maps: Assessor (bundles) or Beastmaster (3 items, no slowdown, catgoblins).
- Defective Weapon assignment: the wiki recommends the Artillery dome for its health, and pairs well with Beastmaster because minions keep resources flowing while you defend.
- Projectile Hell: Assessor. Bounce mining lets you keep working while repositioning less.
One caveat that applies to all four: keeper choice changes mining, movement and carry — not dome defence. Domes are a separate selection, and the domes database covers those 4 plus how the pairing changes a run.
22 suits, all cosmetic
Suits, also called skins, change appearance only. There are 22 total, unlocked three ways:
- DLC packs — the Engineer Gear Pack and The Lost Keepers both include suits
- Achievements — for example the Engineer’s second suit requires surviving the Final Wave without the Relic activating in Relic Hunt
- Seasonal events — the Skeleton Suit was tied to a Halloween cave window running October 25 to November 13
Two suits are bought with badges from Guild Assignments rather than earned directly, which is the only place suit hunting intersects with mode progression.
Related guides
- Dome Keeper Guild Assignments Guide — all 25 assignments and the badge economy
- Dome Keeper Domes and Keepers Database — all 8 domes and keepers in a filterable table
- Dome Keeper Gadgets Database — all 26 gadgets with slots and effects
- Dome Keeper Prestige Guide — the 4 variants and how score is calculated
- Dome Keeper Hub — all guides for this game