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Start here

Start here: Brand new to Mantlenaut? Follow these numbered steps, with the exact keys and buttons, to move, mine, craft your first tools and build your first shelter.
Glossary: What every Mantlenaut word means in plain English: Codex, Strata Gauge, Workbench, Forge, Beacon, Gate, Vector Drive, Starforge, Belt, Legend, Lair and more.
Getting started: How to start in Mantlenaut: dig turf, knap a flint pickaxe, build a Workbench and a Furnace, smelt copper and tin, forge better tools and record everything in the Codex.
Controls: Every control in Mantlenaut for keyboard and mouse and for an Xbox controller: moving, mining, placing, the inventory, the Codex, the camera and more.

The planet

Going deep: How to dig to the core of a Mantlenaut planet: read the Strata Gauge, forge cooling and pressure suits, place beacons, and reach Stellarite and the Nova Alloy.

Creatures

Animals and fishing: Which Mantlenaut creatures hunt you and which run away, what animals drop, how to cook food on a campfire, and how to fish.

Legends and bosses

The Kraken: How to reach the Kraken in Mantlenaut: where it sleeps in the Hadal Rift, what to bring, and how to hit its eyes, break its grip and escape the whirlpool.
The Rider: The Rider is the louse that steers the Kraken and leaps into a new host when it dies. How to catch it between bodies and what it leaves behind.
The Mantle Wurm: The Mantle Wurm is a forty-metre basalt worm that swims through the hot sands and ash wastes. How it breaks the surface, and where to hit its maw.
Marrowking: Marrowking is a walking whale skeleton on Mantlenaut's sea floor. How to find its spine, why its bones keep coming back, and how to survive its worm cloud.
The Lanternfall: The Lanternfall is a hill-sized anglerfish in Mantlenaut's deep sea. Why carrying a light draws it in, how to blind it, and what its lure is worth.
The Long Choir: The Long Choir is a sixty-metre glowing spiral of many bodies on Mantlenaut's deep sea floor. How its stingers reel you in, and how cutting it apart works.
Mimic: Mimic wears the shape of a fish, a whale or even your own pet on Mantlenaut's reefs. How to spot the one that never looks away, and how to strike it twice.
The Unending: The Unending is a giant jellyfish that cannot die, found on Mantlenaut's reefs at night. How to find the real one among the decoys before it grows back.
The Brine Warden: The Brine Warden lives in a lake of heavy brine on Mantlenaut's deep sea floor. Why you float on the brine, how it drags you under, and how to break its grip.
The Snapping Choir: The Snapping Choir is a pack of seven blind giant shrimp that hunt by sound on Mantlenaut's reefs. How their snaps smash blocks, and how to creep past them.
Glasswake: Glasswake is a monster of living water in Mantlenaut's open sea. Why your blows pass through it, how Kraken ink helps, and how to trap it.
Azurith: Azurith is a crystal eel that swims through solid rock and floods your tunnels behind it. How to line a tunnel so it cannot pass, and when to strike.
Goldgut: Goldgut is the giant ore-eating worm of Mantlenaut's deep mines. How it hears you dig, how to bait it with gold, where to hit it, and what its stomach holds.
The Salt Pan King: The Salt Pan King is a house-sized crab that wakes under Mantlenaut's desert when rain falls. Where it lives, how its claws work, and where to strike.
The Underwood: The Underwood is a forest that is one fungus. Cut down too many trees and it wakes. How to survive its growing trunks and dig down to its heart.
The Stormherd: The Stormherd is a horned beast of storm cloud on Mantlenaut's high peaks. How to read its lightning warning, and how a metal rod turns its bolts back on it.
The Marching Keep: The Marching Keep is a castle of linked giant ants that marches across Mantlenaut's meadows and jungle by night. How to breach its walls and reach its queen.
Brainless: Brainless is a slime mould that comes for your crops by night or in the rain. How it finds the shortest path to your food, and how walls and salt stop it.
The Shepherd of Spores: The Shepherd of Spores is a tall jungle fungus that takes your animals and pets. How its spore towers spread, how fire burns them, and how to cure your herd.
The Hitchhiker: The Hitchhiker is a walking seed head on jungle worlds that flings burrs which follow you home. How to wash them off and strike its pods.
The Sculptor: The Sculptor is a stone golem with a furnace belly that seals you in liquid stone on volcanic worlds. How to break out and strike its cracked belly.
The Etcher: The Etcher is a house-sized acid snail on the acid world Phaton. How its acid eats your walls and suit, and how limestone and lye stop it in its tracks.
Gravewell: Gravewell is a ball of crushed matter with its own gravity, ringed with boulders on the dead grey moons. How its pull works and how to beat it.
The Thousand Eyes: The Thousand Eyes is a field of glowing crystal eyes under alien ice and glass dunes. How its gaze works and how to blind it before its heart rises.
Glassback: Glassback is a black whale with a molten belly that swims the lava seas of volcanic worlds. How it breaches, beaches and cools to glass, and how to dodge it.
Yesterday: Yesterday is a figure of living quicksilver on alien ocean shores that cannot be touched, but copies your moves ten seconds later. How to plan for it.
Pulse: Pulse is a wraith of lightning that exists only when a pulsar's beam sweeps over it. How to strike on the beat, and why the beat quickens as it weakens.
The Tun: The Tun is a ship-sized eight-legged water bear that walks alien worlds and airless moons. How it armours up when hurt, and how rain or a lake makes it soft.
The Homemaker: The Homemaker is a lit house on the deep sea floor, built from your own favourite block. How the door slams, which walls are flesh, and how to tear them out.
The Gate Warden: The Gate Warden is a thirty-metre obsidian guardian in the harder strange universes. How its gauntlets and halo attack, and where its eye is weak.
The Hollow King: The Hollow King is a fifty-metre skeleton on a bone throne in the harshest strange universes. How to break its crown shards and reach the palace.
The Cosmic Entropy Leviathan: The Cosmic Entropy Leviathan is a forty-five-metre void-dragon that drifts over strange worlds at tier eight and up. How to open its core.
All the legends: A list of every legend in Mantlenaut, where each one lives, and which page tells you how to find and fight it, from the Kraken to the Cosmic Entropy Leviathan.
Lairs and comebacks: How often Mantlenaut's legends and lesser monsters come, why a legend's lair brings it every time, and how long you wait after a legend is slain.
How legend fights work: How every legend fight in Mantlenaut works: warning rings and lanes, two stages at two thirds and a third of health, and the trophies left behind.
Lesser monsters: A guide to Mantlenaut's lesser monsters, from rust lampreys and echo eels to ballwisps, firehawks and bower thieves, and where each one lairs.

Ships and space

Ships and fighters: Mantlenaut has 50 fighters to fly. Learn how a fighter finds its mothership, the on-screen marker and radar, and the Return to Ship autopilot.
The fleet: Every ship class in Mantlenaut with its crew size and what it is for, from the Wayfarer Skiff to the 2,400 m Humanity's Reach carrier, plus the land vehicles.
Sailing and submarines: How sea ships float, flood and sink, how sails, paddles and engines drive them, and how the Deepwater Nautilus submarine dives, surfaces and survives the deep.
Airships and rockets: How the Zephyr airship floats and steers, how rockets climb through the sky to orbit, and how cruising speed, the Slipstream Drive and the Vector Drive work in space.
Shipwright and parts: How to build a ship to your own measure in the Shipwright, the limits on length, beam, engines, guns and bunks, and the ship stations and upgrades that make her better.
All fifty fighters: Every one of the 50 fighters in Mantlenaut, with its family, role, free or Store status, the seven stats, its gun and what it is best at, in one table.
Dogfighting: How a fight locks you in at a slow speed, how guns, missiles and flares work, how the boost-out escape and the hangar shield work, and how damage ends a fighter.
The galaxy: How the galaxy is laid out in sectors of stars round home's star, the common and rare star kinds, the wonders such as black holes and pulsars, and worlds adrift with no star.
Planets and habitability: The kinds of planet you can visit, the new worlds such as the Crystal Forest and Glowworld, how habitability is scored for air, warmth and water, and how terraforming changes a world.
Stations and trade: The five kinds of space station, how prices move with supply and demand, the bounty board, trade runs, rock fields to mine and the wrecks you can strip.
Gate and Vector Drive: How the Vector Drive jumps a starship 15 light years at a time, what a jump costs in fuel, and how the Space Gate's rings carry you to other universes with jump sickness.
The multiverse: The endless map of universes, the ten difficulty tiers from Cozy Blanket to Absolutely Not, how each universe's rules change its stars and worlds, and how names are given.
Space pirates: Pirates hunt starships at sea, in the sky and in orbit. Learn the three kinds, when they come, how to beat them and what plunder and bounties they bring.

Materials and crafting

How materials work: Everything in Mantlenaut is a material with real-style properties. Learn blocks versus pieces, what each property does and how unknown materials are analysed.
Ores: Every ore in Mantlenaut by layer and depth, from coal and copper to Pyrrhonite and Stellarite, with the tool tier each needs and what it smelts into.
Metals: A table of Mantlenaut metals with hardness, density, melting point, the tool tier needed to dig each one and where to find or smelt it, from copper to osmium.
Rare and exotic materials: The rock of each planetary layer plus Pyrrhonite, Stellarite, Voidsalt, Star-Iron, Voidglass, boss trophies and other rare Mantlenaut materials.
Smelting and fuel: Which ore smelts into which metal in Mantlenaut, how hot each needs, the yield, which fuels burn hot enough and how to build a furnace that holds.
Alloys and the Forge: Every Mantlenaut alloy recipe from bronze to Nova Alloy, how the Forge Bench blends your own mixes and how to forge the Coreforged alloy for Stellarite.
Tools and tiers: How Mantlenaut tools are built from a head, handle and binding, how the tool score sets the tier from Flint to Coreforged, and which tier mines which rock.
Crafting stations: Every Mantlenaut crafting station and its cost: Workbench, Furnace, Forge Bench, Gun and Rocket Benches, Lab Bench, Oven and Pot, plus the recipe book.
The eight ages: Every Mantlenaut world moves through eight ages, from Kindling to Nova. See what each age asks for, what it unlocks and which machines wait for it.
Research and the Lab Bench: What the Mantlenaut Lab Bench does: analyse unknown materials in three stages, run every reaction, make compounds and spend research points on upgrades.
Suits and armour: Forge cooling, pressure, dive, radiation and acid suits and armour sets in Mantlenaut, with shell ratings, set bonuses and the depth each suit survives.
Weapons and ammo: Craft swords, bows, crossbows and guns in Mantlenaut: part rules, gun stats, barrel grades, ammunition recipes, grenades and which bench makes each.
Rides and gadgets: Recipes for Mantlenaut bikes, carts, boats, hang gliders, jetpacks, drones, cameras, traps and the six-wheeled mining buggy and its four arm tiers.
Home and base crafting: Mix paint and stained glass from pigments, craft roofs, furniture and base turrets at a Workbench, and learn every building style of stairs, slabs and doors.

Survival and combat

Health and hunger: How health, hunger, thirst, stamina, breath, body temperature and radiation work in Mantlenaut, with the numbers, the food buffs and what hurts you.
Armour: Every piece of armour in Mantlenaut, how much each material protects, how sets and their bonuses work, and how shields and wear affect a blow.
Suits and gear: The five suits of Mantlenaut, what each one protects you from, how they are forged from shell, liner and fittings, and what each rating depends on.
Melee and blocking: How melee weapons hit in Mantlenaut, their damage, reach and speed, the dodge-roll, the guard, parries and critical blows, with the numbers.
Guns and bows: Every ranged weapon in Mantlenaut with its damage, range, fire rate, magazine and reload, the ammunition each one takes, and how guns are assembled and loaded.
Explosives and rockets: Grenades, land mines, hand rockets and fireworks in Mantlenaut, with their blast, fuse and harm, and how the Rocket Bench makes them and what the ship rockets are for.
Skills and levelling: The five skills of Mantlenaut, how to earn their experience, the xp needed for each of the 15 levels, and exactly what every level gives you.
Goals and research: The guided first hour, the daily and weekly goals, the 25 badges, the research tree at the Lab Bench and where research points come from in Mantlenaut.
Rides and gadgets: Every vehicle and gadget in Mantlenaut, built in stages from parts, with what each one takes, how to use it and the numbers that matter.
Difficulty levels: The six game modes of Mantlenaut, from the free Relaxed mode to the brutal Absolutely Not, with how hunger, thirst, damage and keeping your bag change in each.

The world

Layers: The five layers of a planet from crust to core, with their depths, temperatures, pressures and the rock and ores you will find in each.
Biomes: Every land and sea biome on the home planet, where it lies, what grows there, how warm it is and what the weather is like.
Ores by depth: Every ore and gem in the home planet's ground, the depth it is found at, the tool you need to break it and whether it sits in veins or pockets.
Digging: What you can dig, which tool breaks which material, how long each takes and what the ground gives back, from bare hands to the Coreforged pickaxe.
Seas: Water and lava on the home planet, how liquids flow, and the strange seas of oil, acid, mercury, slime, jelly, crystal and sky found on other worlds.
Regions: The four regions of a true-size home planet, each with its own climate, animals, dangers and bosses, and the pros and cons of dropping in on each.
Weather: The day and night clock, the weather of each land, rain, storms and snow, and the twelve-day year of seasons with droughts, frost and the Harvest Festival.
Ruins: The ruins, camps, monoliths, supply caches, buried chests and gem veins of the land, how often each appears, and the locked doors of the dead races.
Crypts: The crypt under the ground: its stair, traps, glyph puzzle, vault of chests and the Barrow Guardian boss with its pattern and its crest.
Lairs: How bosses and lesser evils have lairs on the home planet, how often they come out in the open, and the signs that mark each lair so you can find it again.
Finds: Buried chests and their dig-spot hints, crate finds, rare ore, recipe scrolls and treasure maps that lead to an X, plus how shared map pins work.
Planets: The kinds of planet you can land on, their gravity, air and temperature, and how terraforming machines make a hostile world livable and let you found a colony.

Creatures and farming

Land animals: Every land creature of the home planet: where it lives, when it is active, whether it hunts or runs, its health and what it drops.
Sea life and sky: The fish, eels and whales of the home planet's seas, the flying creatures of the skies, where each lives, how deep, and what it gives you.
Taming and pets: How to win over a wild animal with food, how many feeds each one needs, how pets follow, guard and level up, and how to saddle and ride them.
Livestock and husbandry: Keep cows, sheep, pigs, hens and goats: what each eats, what it gives and how often, how fondness raises the quality of its goods, and the feed trough.
Fishing guide: How to make a Fishing Rod, cast into the sea, fight a fish on the line, read its size, and which fish and treasures you can catch.
Fishing step by step: How to catch a fish in Mantlenaut: make a rod, cast it, wait for the bite, hook the fish and win the fight by keeping the line in the green.
Cooking and recipes: Every dish an Oven or Pot cooks: its ingredients, the buff it gives and how long it lasts, and how food fills you and how quality carries through.
Crops and farming: How to till, plant and tend crops, how long each takes to ripen, what it yields, which crops bear again, and how care sets Silver and Golden quality.
Seasons and trees: How the year of seasons, the daily forecast, the Harvest Festival, fruit trees and greenhouses change what your farm can grow and when.
Farm recipes and prices: The farm buildings you can make at a Workbench, what each costs and does, and what the farm's goods and dishes are worth in marks at the farm stand.
Loot and drops: What creatures drop when they are beaten, how long dropped items lie before they vanish, and what the supply crates and sunken treasure can hold, by tool tier.

People and trade

The Wayfarers: The Wayfarers live in villages on the home planet. Learn where villages stand, who lives in them, how their day runs and how to win a Wayfarer's friendship.
Trading: There is no money in Mantlenaut. Trade goods with village traders by barter, weighed in Wayfarer marks, and learn what each trader wants and how standing changes the price.
Stalls and markets: Set down a Market Stall, put goods on it at your own prices, and sell to other players in your world for Wayfarer marks. Learn how the fee, the till and the board work.
Jobs and quests: Take jobs from village elders and villagers: fetch, build, hunt, escort and discover. Learn the five kinds, what each pays, and how a village grows from the help you give.
Reputation: Reputation is how a village or an alien people thinks of you. See the tiers from Shunned to Honoured, what each unlocks, and what raises or lowers your standing.
Cities: Cities rise on the big regions of the home planet. Learn where they stand, the five levels from timber to glass towers, and how jobs and time help them grow.
Festivals: The year has five festivals, each on a fixed day of its season, with dances, a token hunt and prize blocks. Also learn the weekly community goal every player in a world shares.
Crews and the starport: Hire hands for your ship's four posts, and dock at a space station to trade commodities, take bounties and runs. Learn the wages, the posts and the station's market.
Pirates and rivals: Pirates sail the seas and the skies, and raiders and rival captains hunt starships in orbit. Learn who comes, when they come, how to beat them and what they carry.
Alien peoples: The other universes have alien peoples with their own bodies, tongues, cities and ways. Learn how they feel about you, what they want, how to deal with them and what they say.

Building and bases

Building pieces: Every building piece in Mantlenaut: blocks, slabs, stairs, wedges, pillars, fences, doors, windows, pipes and cables, with their styles and how to make them.
Building tools: The build tools for placing many blocks at once: block, line, wall, box, circle and fill, with the limits of each, plus undo and redo.
Blueprints: How to copy a region of your build as a blueprint, paste it turned in quarter steps, see the materials it needs, and share it as text or a file.
Homes and furniture: How a closed room becomes a Cosy, Comfortable, Lovely or Grand home, the furniture and paints you can craft, and the items that make a room feel lived in.
The catalogue: What the catalogue of ready-made models holds, how many there are in each category, how models are placed as one item, and what some of the most used ones do.
Bases: How to claim a base with a Base Marker, what each of the five levels needs, who can build there, and the perks each level brings, from Camp to Stronghold.
Raids and defence: How raids and storms reach a base, what defends it (dart, gun and pulse turrets, spike traps, alarm bells), their ammunition, and how to mend storm damage.
Machines and power: How power networks work, every generator and machine with its power, what it costs to build, and how cables and batteries carry and store power.
Fluids and conveyors: How water and other liquids flow, how pumps raise them, and how conveyors, hoppers, harvesters and sorting chests move items between crates and machines.
Vehicles and rides: The mining buggy and its arm upgrades, plus the bike, rowboat, sailboat, hang glider, jetpack and grappling hook that change how you move about.

Game systems

Game modes: The four survival levels plus Relaxed and Builder in Mantlenaut: what each changes about food, damage, your bag and flying, and how to switch modes.
Saving and worlds: How Mantlenaut saves your world in your browser, when it saves itself, how seeds bring back a planet, and how to export, import, rename or delete a world.
Cloud saves: Sign in to keep Mantlenaut worlds and settings in the cloud, follow them between devices, settle a world played in two places, and why the age question.
Settings and graphics: The pause menu's settings in Mantlenaut: the Potato to Ultra graphics presets and what each changes, frame rate, resolution, upscaling, and the Game tab options.
Controls and access: Remap keys, tune an Xbox controller, set the sound mix and use the accessibility options for motion, flashes, colour-blind help and subtitles in Mantlenaut.
Inventory and belt: How the Mantlenaut inventory works: the pack, the eight-slot belt with saved layouts, the gear slots, moving and dropping items, starring and sorting, and the tabs.
The Codex: The Mantlenaut Codex records what you find: materials (discovered, identified, named), creatures, biomes and alloys, and how to analyse the unknown ones.
Map, jobs and goals: How the map fills in as you explore, how jobs and village calls work, and the daily and weekly goals and guided first hour that suggest what to do next.
Touch and phone: How touch play works in Mantlenaut: the thumb stick, the look finger, the buttons on the right, the belt, and the one-handed and left-handed layouts you can set.
Starforge how-to: How to make your own items in Starforge, the 3D builder in Mantlenaut: starting a design, adding shapes and kits, painting, the checks, and uploading.
Starforge parts and paints: The Starforge part types, the paint library, glowing and glass paints, and the limits on parts and paints that keep every design light enough to run.
Hosting and joining: Play Mantlenaut with friends: open your world with a join code or invite link, join a friend's world, remove players, and what the host's game must keep doing.
What is shared: What is shared in a Mantlenaut world: the land, the map, parties, chat and pings, gifts, trades, stalls, festivals and pets, and what stays your own.

Story and aliens

The Gatewrights: Meet the story's cast: Pell, Maester Oda-Thel, the Warden, Captain Brindle Aster and an emissary from the far side, and the Gatewrights who built the Gate.
The Gate and the Lens: Follow the story's first nine chapters step by step: fly to the Space Gate, mine ore, mend the Beacon with a Lens, pass the Warden and go through the Gate.
The endings: Choose what becomes of the Gate at the crossroads: leave it open, seal it or share it. Compare the three choices, what each gives you and how the story ends.
The Vael: The Vael are explorers whose ships drop out of nowhere beyond the sky. Learn their ten ship kinds, when they come, what angers them and how to deal with them.
Vael Station: Vael Station is an abandoned alien station hanging over the furthest world of a system. Learn how to find it, what its three rooms hold and how to explore it.
The Last Hive: The Last Hive is what survives of a shared insect mind, now six survivors in a refuge over Home. Meet them, take their jobs and learn what each mind wants.

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← Back to the wiki · Last updated 25 October 2026. Mantlenaut is in alpha, so things change.

The Mantlenaut wiki.