Kindling teaches itself through Maren’s notes, so nothing here is required reading. But if you would rather not learn the hard way, start here.
Updated for 0.7.0 Beta. See patch notes and public download availability.
A campfire holds up to 1,800 seconds (30 minutes) of base fuel. What you put in matters:
A full day/night cycle now lasts 800 seconds (13 minutes 20 seconds). Winter has roughly 462 seconds of night. Planks provide 45 seconds of base fuel each; bear fat gives 270. Rain, cooking and world difficulty change how long your stock actually lasts.
A Stone Hearth holds 2,700 seconds and a Copper Brazier 3,600, so the fire you can afford to leave burning while you are away is a fire you have upgraded. One bundle of Kindling is worth 30 seconds as fuel, but that is not what it is for — see below.
Blocks refuse tools below their tier outright — no chipping away at rock with your fists.
Ages unlock as you prove you can work the material: crafting a wooden pickaxe opens the Stone Age; casting your first copper ingot opens the Copper Age; working bronze opens the Bronze Age. Iron and Steel continue the progression. A recipe appears only when you have reached its age and gathered every required material at least once. Discoveries stay visible after you spend those materials, and a notification in the bottom right announces new recipes. You still need their full quantities to craft.
The kiln fires masonry, glass and ceramic casts. Metal goes into a smelter: build one with six mud brick and four rock, then place a Casting Table (two mud brick and two rock) directly beside it. Both are Stone Age stations.
Load ore or remelt ingots in the smelter. Set a suitable cast on the table, open the tap, watch the pour and wait for it to cool. An ingot takes one molten unit, a blade head two, and a pick or axe head three. Assemble finished tools from heads, handles and cordage at a workbench. Steel needs refractory casts; molten metal and cast wear save with the world.
The campfire is where every run starts, but it is not where it ends. The Stone Hearth (six rock and a Warchief's iron) widens the safe circle to 14 blocks, holds 2,700 seconds of fuel, and cooks for half the cost. The Copper Brazier pushes that to 18 blocks and 3,600 seconds. Both recipes want Warchief iron — the seventh nights are how you earn a better fire.
Storms roll in on their own schedule. Under rain the light drops, the fog closes in, and any fire standing under open sky loses fuel five times faster than it burns. A fire with a roof over it — any solid block overhead — is safe. Wood Wall and Wood Roof pieces are cheap Wood Age recipes for exactly this.
This is the one fire rule worth memorising. A new firelay needs three kindling bundles, six sticks and a flint spark. A fire that has already gone out, whether the rain killed it or it simply ran dry while you were off mining, is cold ash: feeding it logs only stocks it for later. Only Kindling (two sticks, worked into dry tinder) makes cold ash catch again. Carry a bundle before you go anywhere for long.
Kindling has seasons now, and the clock in the corner names the one you are in. A year is thirty-six days, nine to a season, and it starts in late summer — so the first thing any world does is turn toward autumn.
The calendar is fixed, but the cold is not. A slow weather channel drifts across the whole year, so the first frost and the thaw fall on different days in every world. You can read the trend about three days out — long enough to make a decision, not long enough to be safe. Maren marks both when they come.
Craft a flint hoe (2 sticks + 1 flint) and you can break ground. The loop is four verbs:
Aim at any bed and a line under the crosshair tells you the crop, how far along it is, roughly how many days to ripe, whether the season suits it, the tilth, how damp it is, and — if it is on a channel run — whether the water is actually reaching it. Nothing about farming is hidden from you.
There are seven crops, and every season except winter has something you can put in the ground.
Sowing outside a window does not waste the seed — it lies in the ground and comes up at the first dawn of its next legal window. What it costs you is the bed and the season. Frozen ground refuses the sowing outright and tells you why.
Barley, oat and wheat seed come off wild grass all year, so your first crop never depends on the calendar. The other four are bonus drops from tall grass in their own half of the year — turnip in spring and summer, beans and pumpkin in summer, rye in autumn. You only ever need to find one: every harvest gives a seed back.
The window tells you when you may sow. What season it actually is tells you what the sowing is worth. Every crop has one season it runs at full speed in:
This matters more than it first looks, because a crop that takes eleven days spends most of its life in the season after the one it started in. A pumpkin sown in early summer crawls through the summer at 45% and then races once autumn arrives. The probe says which of the three you are in, so you never have to work it out.
This is the part that ties the farm to the rest of the game. Ground is not infinite: a freshly broken bed carries one harvest in it, and every ripe crop you cut spends a point of tilth. You buy it back like this:
So a year of dead fires is a smaller field next year, and it stays smaller until you pay it back. Note that straw only comes from cereals, and a field never quite produces enough to feed its own ground — that gap is on purpose, and oats (three straw a cell, and they grow on tilth 0) are how you climb out of a bad year. Rye does the same job in autumn.
There is one other way. Beans put a point of tilth back when you harvest them instead of taking one out. A bean year is slower than a compost heap and the food is worth less than a pumpkin — but it costs no fire at all, which makes rotating beans through a bed the way to farm without keeping a hearth lit all winter.
Rain is the only thing that waters a bed on its own, and summer is the driest season in the year — which is exactly when turnips, beans and pumpkins are in the ground. How much a dry spell costs you depends on the crop: barley barely notices, but a pumpkin at full thirst crawls. Irrigation is how you stop being at the sky's mercy.
The head rule, which is the whole skill: a vessel pushes water eight cells, plus one more for every twenty litres in it — and that whole distance is multiplied by every level the run steps down. A full tank reaches twenty cells on the flat and forty if the channels drop two levels on the way. So site the vessel uphill of the field. Water never runs up a channel.
Each growing bed drinks two litres a day; ripe and fallow beds drink nothing. Plant more than the vessel can carry and the level falls, the reach shrinks, and the far end of the run browns off — in order, nearest served first, so you can see exactly where you overreached. Aim at a bed and the probe says watered or OUT OF REACH; aim at the vessel for its level. The fix is to break a single channel cell and shorten the run.
Ingredient quantities below come from the current game registry. Your character discovers these recipes gradually by gathering materials. Station and held-cast requirements still apply. Hand work is available with R; assembling a firelay happens on the ground.
Hunger drains as you move and work, faster when you are travelling. Raw meat is a nibble; the same meat cooked over your campfire is a meal. To cook, hold raw meat and right-click a lit fire — it costs five seconds of fuel.
Hold right-click until the eating animation finishes. Releasing early, switching items or opening a menu cancels without consuming food. A meal is only eaten if its full hunger value fits. At zero hunger you starve, and armour does not protect you from it.
Attack with left click; there is a swing cooldown, so spamming does nothing. Your damage comes from what you hold — a stone sword is +4, a copper sword +7.
Every accepted melee swing has a 0.65-second recovery, even if it misses. Your hand and held item return to their ready pose during recovery. Aim at the creature itself: hits follow its animated body, and walls block attacks. Mobs stay outside your body instead of running through you. Ground mobs can clear one-block ledges.
Night mobs retreat at dawn and disappear only once distant and out of view. The walking tree stays through daytime; dodge its travelling root wave to avoid being stunned.
Drag armour onto the inventory character preview or its matching equipment slot. Head, chest, legs and feet can be equipped separately; the fur set now includes all four pieces. Reductions combine multiplicatively. Falls beyond three blocks hurt on landing, regardless of armour; water and ladders interrupt a fall.
New 0.7.0 worlds have taller, continuous trees and stone roughly four to six blocks below the topsoil. Existing saves retain their terrain and forests. Hold attack with an axe to flex and fell a tree, wait for it to settle, then chop its fallen sections into log items. Axe hits leave marks on the bark where you aim; the cuts stay with the fallen tree. Prune a standing tree with E while holding shears for leaves and possible cuttings.
One log makes 16 sticks, four timber floors or two full timber walls. Wooden doors have a single hinged leaf. Chests store 14 stacks in a seven-by-two grid. Craft a timber bed at a Stone Age workbench with six wood planks, three wool and two cordage. Place it on two supported blocks and right-click at night to sleep. Nearby hostiles and raids prevent sleep; your fires still burn through the skipped night. Beds do not replace fire-based respawning.
Furniture sits directly on thin timber floors. Stacked walls inherit the wall below's orientation, and doors can face either edge of their block. Collected chest coins go straight into your purse, even when your pack is full.
Your own falling arrows can hurt you once they have left your body. Step aside or take cover when firing overhead. A shot that hits you can still be recovered.
Swimming is half walking speed, even while sprinting. Hold jump to swim up, tread water, or climb a reachable bank. A Wood Age raft costs six logs and eight sticks; an Iron Age boat costs 16 planks, four iron ingots and four sticks. Right-click water to launch, press E to board or dismount, W/S to paddle and A/D to steer. Right-click an empty craft to pack it away. Your survivor sits on the craft's bench and moves a wooden paddle with each stroke. Craft cast and receive sun shadows when shadows are enabled.
Hold left-click to draw your bow and release to fire. Arrows visibly arc through the air and stick into solid surfaces. Press E nearby to retrieve them; mining their support lets them fall. A full bag leaves the arrow where it is.
Food hangs from hooks above the cooking fire. Aim at the rack or food: right-click adds raw food, and E removes one item, cooked food first. Watch the timing so it does not burn. Equip shears and press E at a sheep for wool without harming it. Wolves that kill prey consume its meat and leave the remaining drops.
Dying drops your hotbar, backpack and equipped armour at the death site. The death screen shows coordinates. Return and press E at the piles; stack quantities and tool wear are preserved, including across saves. Coins and material discoveries stay with you.
At the Coinseer, look for the gold-and-red seal in his hand. Choose the amount to wager with the stake buttons, including Half and Max, then press Spin. The wheel shows a 50/50 coin wager: winning returns twice the stake, losing costs only that stake. Closing the screen does not reroll the outcome. The gilded-gem bargain is separate and shows 3% odds.
Sun shadows are on for new settings. In Display settings, choose Low, Balanced or High shadow quality independently of the graphics preset. Slower PCs can reduce shadow quality and render distance while retaining the new models. Shadows and bloom also have toggles.
Three instrumental pieces — Embers on the Water, The Far Shrine and A Camp Beneath the Stars — join the original music. Adjust their shared music volume in Settings.
From day three, a trader is drawn to a burning fire during daylight and leaves at dusk. He buys wool and mutton, sells coal, mud brick and hide — and he knew Maren. He will not say more about her until you have survived a seventh night.
At dusk on day six, Maren’s warning arrives. On the seventh night the drums come, and with them the Goblin Warchief: 120 health, 12 damage a hit, with a pack behind him. He returns every seventh night, stronger each week.
Lakes run up to four blocks deep. Underwater you sink slowly; hold jump to swim up. When your head goes under, a breath bar appears — about eight seconds of air, then five damage a second. To get out, surface first, then hold jump to mount the bank.