Controls and tips
How to play
You arrive with a letter and no instructions. This page is the shortest route to being useful. The full guide is much longer.
The basics.
Open the menu with M, go to Inventory and read the letter. It tells you where you are and what the first journey is. Then walk to the village and talk to people, because most of them want something.
The complete guide, with every control, every place and every system, is in the guide.
Controls
- W A S D
- Walk. Shift to sprint, Space to jump or swim up.
- Mouse
- Turns the camera. The wheel moves it closer and further.
- Left click
- Swing what you hold. Right click raises a shield if you carry one.
- E
- The one hand: talk, chop, mine, mount a horse, pick things up.
- X, 1 to 9
- Next tool, or pick one directly.
- F
- Light or douse your torch.
- M
- The menu: inventory, journal, land, forge, shop, blueprints.
- J
- The map. It shows where you have been.
- G, then B
- Show the land grid, then buy the parcel you are standing on.
- Tab
- Build mode. Q builds the piece you have chosen.
- Enter
- Chat. A line starting with / is a command, such as /spawn, /home or /help.
- O
- Stuck in the scenery? This squeezes you free.
Your first hour.
- Press E near anyone to talk. Most of them want something.
- Face a tree and press E with an axe in hand. Stone comes from boulders, with a pickaxe.
- Watch your pack. There is a weight limit, and it is not generous. Sell what you do not need to the Merchant.
- Get indoors before dark, or carry a torch and light it with F.
- Your journal, under the menu, keeps what you have been told. It records what you learned, not what to do about it.
Staying alive.
You have a hundred points of health, and it mends on its own, slowly. Eating mends it about three times faster for a while. Falls hurt past roughly a two-storey drop. Water is safe, and you swim automatically.
Night is the dangerous part of the day, and the Gloom is the dangerous part of the map. If you die you wake at the village, or at your own home if you have made one, and you keep what you were carrying, except Memories.
Land and building.
The world is divided into parcels thirty-two metres square. Press G to see the grid, and B to buy the one you are standing on. Owning a parcel means you decide who builds on it. Each parcel carries a limited amount of building, so if you want more room, buy the one next door.
Other players.
You see what everyone else is carrying and doing, and the chat says whenever somebody joins or leaves. Players cannot hurt each other, so a health bar under a name tells you how a companion is faring against what you are both fighting.