Welcome to Tranquility Base

You're joining the crew of a space 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 · 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:

• Server address — ask whoever invited you for this (it's an IP or hostname, plus a port — 7777 if they don't say otherwise).
• Your name — click the name field (or press Tab to jump to it) and type over the placeholder. This is how everyone else will see you, so make it count.

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.

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 seven roles — Medical, Engineering, Agriculture, Logistics, Physics, Astronomy, 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 → 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.

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

• Your hotbar sits at the bottom of the screen and is always visible. Press a number key (1–8) or click a slot to pick which item is "in your hand."
• Press Tab to open your backpack — extra storage, plus a couple of dedicated equipment slots (currently a keycard slot and a slot for a PDA).
• Drag and drop items between your hotbar, backpack, and equipment slots with the mouse.
• F picks up whatever item is on the floor near you; Q drops whatever you're currently holding; walking up to a dropped item and pressing E picks it up too.
• If you're handed an item that matches an empty equipment slot (like a keycard), it goes straight into that slot for you — no need to dig through your backpack for it.

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.

Here's what you might find lying around:

Things you'll find on the station

• Doors. Press E to open or close one. If it's locked, it'll tell you which color keycard you need — hold or equip a matching one and press R on the door to unlock it (do it again to lock it back up). Wrong color? You'll hear about it.
• Consoles. Press E to check on one — it'll tell you if it's powered up or dark. Swiping any keycard on a working console (R) reports back that your clearance was accepted.
• Generators. These power everything nearby. Press E to switch one on or off — but be careful, since turning one off cuts power to every door, console, and alarm relying on it. If you find one that's broken down rather than just switched off, a wrench (R) will fix it.
• Fire alarms. Press E to sound the alarm — every alarm light on the station lights up and blares in a loop until someone turns it off. Only the alarm switch that's currently going off can be silenced — from itself — so you can't shut it up from a different panel across the station. It also needs power to work at all.
• Alarm lights. These flash and blare on their own whenever an alarm is sounding, as long as they've got power — the noise actually comes from these, not the switch, so you'll hear it get louder as you approach one and fade as you walk away. A light that loses power goes dark and silent even if the alarm is still going off elsewhere.
• Wires. Purely decorative — they visually connect generators to the things they're powering, so you can follow a line and get a sense of what's hooked up to what.

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.

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.

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:

A couple of commands (/kill <name>, /setrole, /save, /edit) 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.

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:

• You float straight through walls, silently — the living can't see or hear you at all.
• You can see the whole of your current floor at once, but still nothing on other floors.
• Pressing E on an object doesn't interact with it normally anymore — instead, if that object supports it, you get a menu of sabotage options (a generator might offer "Force Shutdown," for example). There's a short cooldown between uses, so you can't spam it.
• Whatever you sabotage, nobody gets an announcement about it — the living just discover the effect (a dead generator, a jammed door) on their own.

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

Quick reference

Controls

Your role's keycard color

For server admins: you also have access to /setrole, /save, /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). Run /help in-game for the exact syntax.