Welcome to Tranquility Base

You're joining the crew of a lunar station, along with everyone else connected to the same server. There's no single objective — you explore, you keep the lights on, you help (or mess with) your crewmates, and you figure the rest out together. This guide walks you through everything you need to get started.

Jump to a section: Connecting · Moving and interacting · Your first few minutes · Your inventory · Things you'll find on the station · Getting around · Mining · Talking to your crew · If you die · Quick reference

Connecting

Open the game and choose Connect from the main menu. You'll need two things:

Hit connect, and you're in.

Moving and interacting

Here's everything your hands need to know. Don't worry about memorizing it — the important ones (move, interact, use item) will be muscle memory within a couple of minutes.

Key What it does
W A S D or arrow keys Walk
Shift Sprint
E Interact with whatever's nearby — open a door, flip a switch, pick something up
R Use whatever's in your hand on whatever's nearby — swipe a keycard, use a wrench
F Pick up an item lying on the floor
G Grab a portable object (an ore container, a gas tank) to tow it behind you — press again to let go
Q Drop the item you're currently holding
1–8 Switch which hotbar item you're holding — press the already-selected number again to go bare-handed
Tab Open your backpack
` (the key above Tab) Open chat
Esc Pause / back out of whatever's open

A couple of things worth knowing up front: you can't move while chat, a menu, or a popup message is open, and E/R/F/Q don't do anything until you close whatever's on screen.

Your first few minutes

The moment you join, two things happen automatically:

  1. You're assigned a role. Every crew member is randomly given one of eight roles — Medical, Engineering, Agriculture, Logistics, Physics, Astronomy, Mining, or Soldier — and a message tells you which one you got. Your name and character now show up in that role's color to everyone else.
  2. You're handed a keycard. It matches your role (Medical → blue, Engineering → red, Agriculture → green, Logistics → yellow, Physics → purple, Astronomy → white, Mining → orange, Soldier → black) and it's already sitting in your hotbar or your equipment slot, ready to go. That keycard is your ticket through any door or console of the same color — more on that below.

Some roles start with extra gear on top of the keycard. Engineering gets a wrench and an atmospheric scanner — everything you need to get a dead generator running again and check whether a room's actually breathable before you commit to it.

From here, just walk around. Press E on anything that looks interactive — most doors, switches, and machines will respond, and if a message pops up telling you why something didn't work, that's usually your best clue about what to do next (a locked door will straight-up tell you which color keycard it wants).

Your inventory

One handy shortcut: pressing R works even with an empty hand, as long as you have a keycard equipped. That means you don't have to keep your keycard selected on your hotbar just to swipe it on doors — clip it into your equipment slot and forget about it. It also means going bare-handed (tap your selected hotbar number again) is a fast way to swipe that keycard even while your hand's full of something else — no need to drop what you're holding or hunt for a free slot first.

Here's what you might find lying around:

Item What it's for
Keycard Opens (and locks) doors and consoles that match its color. Press R on the door/console while holding or wearing it.
Wrench Fixes machinery that's broken down — press R on a dead generator to get it running again.
Medkit First aid. You can carry a few at once.
PDA A personal data assistant — clips into its own equipment slot.
Atmospheric Scanner Press R with it selected to read the air right where you're standing — pressure, temperature, and the oxygen/nitrogen/CO2 breakdown. No power needed; just carry it. In a sealed suit it also reports the air inside your suit.
Space Suit Clips into its own equipment slot. On its own it does nothing special — put a Space Helmet on too and the two seal into a closed loop you breathe from instead of the room. That's what keeps you alive outside.
Space Helmet Seals to a worn Space Suit. No suit, no effect.
Suit CO2 Scrubber Goes in the suit's scrubber equipment slot. While your suit's sealed it pulls the CO2 you breathe out back out of the loop — and slowly clogs as it does. When it's spent, drag a fresh one into the slot (the old one drops into your hands) — a clogged one can be recharged at a scrubber regenerator. No scrubber in the slot at all = CO2 with nowhere to go.
Suit O2 Tank Goes in the suit's tank equipment slot and feeds oxygen into the loop while sealed, emptying as it goes. Swap in a full one when it runs low.
Mining Drill Left-click the ground with it selected to set it down on the lunar surface — see Mining below.
Ore Container A portable, towable storage bin. Left-click the ground with it selected to place it.
Gas Tank A portable pressure vessel. Left-click the ground to set it down; tow it with G like an ore container. Press E for its valve panel — see Gas tanks below. It arrives empty.
Battery Powers a mining drill, or gets recharged at a battery charger.
Raw Ore What a mining drill produces. Refining isn't in yet, so for now it's just something to collect.

Placeable items like the Mining Drill, Ore Container, and Gas Tank work the same way: select the item, then left-click an empty spot on the ground to set it down. If there's nothing interactive under your cursor and you're holding something placeable, that's what a left-click does.

Things you'll find on the station

About power: some devices need a generator running to do anything at all. If a console's screen is dark or an alarm won't sound, the network it's on has probably lost power somewhere — track down the generator and get it running again.

About air: rooms hold their own breathable air, and it doesn't just stay put — it spreads out to fill connected rooms, and it'll rush straight out through any gap to the outside. A door left open to the lunar surface, or a hole torn in the hull, both vent a room's air out into space over time, and the bigger the gap (or the more of them there are), the faster it goes. If you're standing somewhere the pressure's dropped too low, you'll get a warning in chat — that's your cue to seal the leak or get somewhere sealed. An O2 generator can refill a room that's lost its air, but not if it's still leaking out faster than the generator can keep up.

You breathe that air, and you breathe it out as CO2 — one person barely makes a dent in a whole room, but a small sealed space with no scrubber running will slowly turn stale. If the CO2 where you're standing climbs to a dangerous level, chat will tell you the air's gone toxic. A working CO2 scrubber is the fix.

Going outside: put on a Space Suit and a Space Helmet and the two seal together — now you're breathing the suit's own supply instead of the room, and the vacuum warnings stop. The suit runs on two parts that each go in their own suit equipment slot and wear out: a Suit CO2 Scrubber that clogs as it cleans (swap in a fresh one before it saturates, or the suit air goes toxic) and a Suit O2 Tank that empties (swap in a full one). You change either the ordinary way — drag a fresh one from your inventory onto its slot; the used one lands back in your hands. Once the suit's sealed, a panel in the bottom-right corner shows what's in your suit air right now — oxygen, nitrogen and CO2, the loop pressure, and how much scrubber and O2 you have left; the CO2 line turns red as it builds toward dangerous, and either meter reads none in red if that slot's empty. Take the helmet off and the panel goes away — and whatever was in the suit vents into the air around you (handy: crack the helmet in a clean room to flush a CO2-fouled suit, then seal back up with fresh air). The suit also has a relief valve, so a failing scrubber won't over-pressurise it — but you'll bleed oxygen out along with the CO2, so it's still a problem to fix, not ignore. Engineering spawns with a full kit — the suit already on (but not sealed; the helmet starts in your inventory, so pop it on when you actually head outside). Anyone else needs one handed to them.

Gas tanks

A Gas Tank is a portable pressure vessel — a metal bottle you can carry gas around in. Select the item and left-click the ground to set one down; press G next to it to tow it behind you, exactly like an ore container, and G again to let go. (If G does nothing, close the valve panel first with E or Esc — it takes over the controls while it's open.)

Press E on a placed tank for its valve panel:

Open the valve and the panel updates as the tank fills or empties. A tank also has a relief valve that's always working: if the pressure ever climbs past its safe limit, it bleeds gas back out on its own until it's safe again, so you can't burst one by overfilling.

Out in vacuum there's nothing to fill from, and venting just dumps the tank's gas into space. A placed tank (and whatever's in it) doesn't survive a server restart yet.

Pipes. In building mode (/edit) you can lay pipe along the floor, the same way you place any other tile — it snaps together into runs and carries gas between its ends. Set a gas tank down on a pipe tile and its valve panel switches its outlet from "open air" to "pipe network": open the valve to pump the tank's gas into the pipe run, or to draw the run's gas back into the tank. That's the only way to move gas into a pipe network for now. Pipe risers carry a run straight up or down between floors.

Getting around

The station has multiple floors. Look for ladders: interact with a ladder going up to climb a floor, or one going down to descend (you can't go below the bottom floor). You can only ever see the floor you're currently on.

You'll also notice you can only see what's actually in front of you — anywhere you've explored but aren't currently looking at shows up dimmed, like a memory, and anywhere you've never been is hidden entirely. Other players and items on the floor only show up when they're genuinely in your line of sight right now.

The station sits on the lunar surface, and some floors have gaps in them where the structure doesn't fully enclose that level — step through one and you're out on the actual moon, dusty grey ground, small craters and all. It's real, walkable ground, not just scenery, and there's plenty of it: the whole station sits at the floor of one enormous crater, so you can walk a good long way out before the ground starts rising toward the crater's rim. That rim is the actual edge of where you can go — it's a wall of terrain too steep to climb, not an invisible barrier, and you'll see it coming as the ground darkens ahead of you, well before you're actually stopped — by the time it's gone pitch black, that's the edge.

Mining

Three items work together for gathering ore out on the lunar surface:

A battery that runs all the way down doesn't disappear — it just sits in the drill, empty. Swap it for a charged one from a battery charger, and bring the drained one back to refill.

There's no refining or use for ore yet, so for now mining is its own loop: keep a drill's battery charged, and tow a container back and forth to collect whatever it's produced.

Talking to your crew

Press ` (the backtick key, just above Tab) to open chat, type your message, and hit Enter to send it (or Esc to back out without sending).

Anything you type starting with / is a command instead of a message. Type /help any time to get the exact list of commands you're allowed to use — it's always accurate, even if this list drifts:

Command What it does
/help Lists the commands available to you
/kill Ends your own life and turns you into a ghost (see below)

A handful of commands (/kill <name>, /setrole, /save, /edit, /give, /filltank) are reserved for server admins — the people running the game. If you're not one, you won't be able to use them, and that's fine; you won't need them to play. Admins can read the full list in ADMIN_GUIDE.md.

If you die

Typing /kill (or getting killed by an admin) turns you into a ghost. It's not permanent in the sense of losing progress — there's no health bar or combat to worry about, dying is just something you or an admin chooses to do. As a ghost:

Other ghosts can see and hear you fine, by the way — you're only invisible to the living.

Quick reference

Controls

Key Action
WASD / arrows Move
Shift Sprint
E Interact
R Use held item
F Pick up item
G Grab/release a towable object
Q Drop item
1–8 Select hotbar slot
Left-drag Move / combine / swap a stack
Right-click Pick up half a stack; while holding one, drop a single item
Tab Backpack
` Chat
Esc Menu / back out

Your role's keycard color

Role Color
Medical Blue
Engineering Red
Agriculture Green
Logistics Yellow
Physics Purple
Astronomy White
Mining Orange
Soldier Black

For server admins: you also have access to /setrole, /save, /give, /filltank, /kill <name>, and /edit (a building mode — left-click places a tile from a palette, right-click removes one, and /save writes your changes to disk). F4 toggles an atmosphere overlay that tints the room around you by air temperature and pressure. Run /help in-game for the exact syntax, or see ADMIN_GUIDE.md for the full walkthrough.