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Building pieces and shapes
Any material can be built into most shapes. This page lists every shape, the styles it comes in, and how you get the piece in your hand.
How building works
Most pieces are one block of a material, set down in a shape. Stone, wood, brick, glass and the rest keep their own look, so a stair of oak and a stair of stone are the same shape in two materials. The shape wheel (hold Q) picks the shape and the Build tab in the inventory lists what you can make. Right click places the piece you are holding; R turns it, F turns it upside down where that makes sense, and the styles of a shape are picked with the rotate key as you place it.
A piece faces you when you set it down, so a stair climbs the way you were looking. Shapes with a front (stairs, doors, fences, pillars, windows, slabs and hull plates) turn in quarter steps. Blocks, ladders, hatches and lamps look the same from every side.
The main shapes
| Piece | What it is | Styles |
|---|---|---|
| Block | A full cube of any material. | None |
| Slab | A half block, or thinner or thicker pieces. Flip it to put it on a ceiling. | 6: Slab, Quarter slab, Carpet, Vertical slab, Panel, Three-quarter slab |
| Stair | A step that rises toward the way you face. | 6: Stair, two outer corners (right and left), two inner corners (right and left), Roof ridge |
| Wedge | A ramp or a roof slope. It comes in plain pieces, halves and thirds of a longer slope, and inner and outer corners. | Plain wedge and its slope pieces (chosen by the style key) |
| Pillar | A post that stands the same from every side. | 6: Pillar, Column, Thick pillar, Ceiling beam, Arch, Pilaster |
| Fence | A post that joins the blocks and fences next to it. | 4: Fence, Wall, Railing, Picket fence |
| Door | Two blocks high. Open or shut, with a handle. | 2: Door, Glass door |
| Window | A pane in a frame. | 8: plain, then seven stained glass colours: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, violet, rose |
| Ladder | A climbable ladder. | None |
| Hatch | A trapdoor in a floor or ceiling. | None |
| Lamp | A light that burns on fuel and needs no power. | None |
| Pipe | A tube that runs along one axis. It turns with the face you place it against. | Three axes |
| Cable | A thin wire that carries power between machines. | 16 colours: Bare, Red, Orange, Yellow, Lime, Green, Teal, Blue, Navy, Purple, Pink, Brown, White, Grey, Black, Peach |
| Hull plate | A thin plate for ships and bases: a floor or ceiling, or a wall on one side. Two can make a corner. | Floor, ceiling, wall and corner |
Getting the pieces
The styled pieces are recipes in the recipe book. Each one takes four units of any building material with a hardness above zero, and you make it at your hands, with no bench needed. A plain Wedge, Ladder or Hatch is made the same way. Every style you have put down is then remembered in the Codex collection, so you can see which shapes you have tried.
A Lamp is made from one unit of any material and one unit of fuel, with no bench. The Cable is laid from metal ingots held in hand: one ingot makes a length, and breaking a length gives the ingot back.
Cables and pipes
A cable joins the cables beside it when they are the same colour, or when either one is bare metal. Two cables of different colours next to each other stay apart, so you can run two separate circuits side by side. Cables lie flat on the ground, turn up walls and never hang in the air. Where three or more meet, a junction box appears. A cable carries power only when its metal conducts electricity: copper and aluminium carry the most, iron less, and wood or stone do not join at all. The machines that use power are on the Machines and power page.
Pipes carry liquids. A pipe joins along its axis, and a junction makes it easy to branch a water line off a well.
Tips
- Use slabs for floors that sit half a block high, carpets for a rug look on a stone floor, and panels to thin a wall.
- The roof ridge stair gives a peaked top along a roof.
- A fence post with rails only joins the sides that meet another fence or a whole block, so a lone fence stays a plain post.
- Stained windows let light through in colour, and they count as walls when a room is closed in.
- Copy whole walls at once with the blueprint tool.
For copying and mirroring shapes at scale, see building tools and undo and blueprints and symmetry. For the furniture and paints that make a house a home, see homes and furniture.
← Back to the wiki · Last updated 25 October 2026. Mantlenaut is in alpha, so things change.