Getting started: your first hour

Step by step

Gather by hand. Bare hands only break soft things. Dig turf and gravel and pull leaves: they drop plant fibre, sticks and flint shards.
Make your first tools. Open the inventory (Tab), go to the Craft tab and knap a flint pickaxe or axe: a flint head, a wooden stick handle and fibre to bind them. No bench is needed.
Build your stations. Chop logs and quarry stone, then build a Workbench (16 units of wood). Near it, build a Furnace, a Forge Bench and later a Lab Bench. Use the Build tab or the shape wheel (hold Q).
Smelt and forge. Smelt ore with fuel in the furnace: malachite gives copper and cassiterite gives tin. Melt copper and tin together at the Forge (88 to 12 makes bronze) and forge better tools. Iron needs a hotter furnace, made with brick walls and charcoal.
Learn what you find. Analyse unknown materials at the Lab Bench and name the new ones. Everything you find is recorded in the Codex (press K).
Go deeper. See Going deep for suits, depth and the core.

Every new game is a new planet. Its seed (something like amber-4821) is in the address, so a reload brings you back to the same world. The pause menu (Esc) shows the seed and has a New world button.
Pick Relaxed, Normal or Hard. Builder mode lets you fly, break anything instantly and build with every material.
You can play alone, or with up to 32 friends: see Play together.

The Codex (K) explains every material, station, tool, suit and creature you meet.
Keep a pickaxe, an axe and some food with you before you go exploring.
New players cannot be attacked until they hold their first tool.

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