Below explains nothing — literally and without a hint of hyperbole. You arrive on an island, and everything that you achieve is the result of experimentation, luck and your ability to draw some logical conclusions about the world and your ability to manipulate the items within it.

In this guide, we’ll teach you the basics — from how to think about the game to the mechanics you’ll use — and explore some of the survival techniques we’ve discovered. We’re here to help you through the most confusing part of your journey, so that you, and all the adventurers who follow, can make it a little deeper into the mystery. And then, at the end of this guide, we’ll tie all of it together and show you how they work as a whole.

Table of contents

The basics

What’s the point? What am I doing? Help?

The life and death cycle

The Lantern

Finding your corpse and Lantern

Let’s talk about mechanics

Health, hunger, cold and thirst

Crafting

Cooking and Campfires (or Bonfires)

Blue campfires and fast travel

Basic priorities: Light and food

Using your map

Persistent areas

Bringing it all together

Below’s pattern

The basics

Below is a game of incremental progress and discovery. Surviving is as much about figuring out the rules as it is about exploring and surviving. In this section, we’ll explain Below’s core concepts and how to exploit them.

What’s the point? What am I doing? Help?

The object of the game is right there in the title: to go below. (Treasure that, because it’s pretty much the last hint the game will give you.)

Your exploration will take you through rooms, shortcuts and locked doors as you delve into an island called The Isle and The Depths underneath it. As you go, you’ll collect items like food, materials, weapons, Floor Keys and armor. You’ll have to craft supplies while managing your limited inventory and collecting Gems from the monsters you meet along the way.

In short, your goal is to equip yourself for a journey, try not to die (much) and make the journey a little easier for the next adventurer who follows you along the way.

The life and death cycle

Every journey in Below starts at the beach. Somewhere between that beach and the bottom of The Isle, your adventurer will die. That’s not a shortcoming on your part. It’s just the way Below works.

Recovering the inventory of a fallen adventurer

Capybara Games via Polygon

When you die, a new adventurer will arrive on the starting beach. You’ve got two goals as you control this new adventurer: recover what you can from the corpse of your previous incarnation and then use what your predecessor(s) did to make it a little farther.

The Lantern

We’re putting this item up at the top because it’s arguably your most important tool. There is only one Lantern on The Isle, and you’ll always want it with you.

The Lantern runs on Gems — those glowing white things that drop when you kill red monsters. When you activate the Lantern and let it run passively, it produces light around you and helps you see. (The Depths are, unsurprisingly, dark.)

Certain doors are unlocked by the Lantern’s beam.

Capybara Games via Polygon

Holding down the Lantern button (LB on a controller) will turn it into a directional, high-powered beam. This beam unlocks certain doors (ones with a blue pattern inlaid in them) and can even burn away some enemies.

When your current adventurer dies — and they will die — the Lantern will stay with their corpse. Recovering it from your corpse should be one of the top priorities of your next adventurer.

Finding your corpse and Lantern

The location of your corpse and Lantern change, depending on your survival. You can find the location of your corpse and your Lantern at the top the map:

The location of your corpse is to the left of the floor number, with an arrow indicating its relative location — so a down arrow means that it’s below you. (You can see this in the gallery’s first image above.)

The location of your Lantern is to the right of the number.

Their locations differ, based on two scenarios:

If you die and loot the corpse of the adventurer that immediately preceded this life, you’ll find all of your inventory and your Lantern together on that corpse. (You can see that in the gallery’s first image above.)

If you die, fail to recover the corpse from your immediate predecessor and start again, the Lantern will spawn away from your immediate predecessor’s corpse. (You can see that in the gallery’s second image above.)

So recovering your corpse during your immediate next life isn’t just beneficial to recover your items. It also means you don’t have to go hunting for your Lantern, too.

Let’s talk about mechanics

It’s easy to get caught up in the intricacies of Below and lose sight of your goals. It definitely happened to us. What’s important here is knowing how to interact with and manage these mechanics in service of the larger goal of traveling deeper. That’s what this section is all about.

Health, hunger, cold and thirst

Below’s Health, Hunger, Cold and Thirst icons are at the upper left of the screen.

Capybara Games via Polygon

Surviving long enough to do any real exploring means managing the four meters displayed in the upper left corner of your HUD: Health (the big heart icon), Hunger (the stomach icon), Cold (the snowflake icon) and Thirst (the water droplet icon).

Health is the larger, heart-shaped meter and it works like you expect. A couple of things can drain it it:

If your Hunger, Cold or Thirst meters drain completely, your Health will start to drain. If it drains completely, you’ll die.

will start to drain. If it drains completely, you’ll die. If you get hit by a monster, your health goes down and a small portion of your health gauge may turn red. You can quickly slap a Bandage (String + Sludge + Blood Moss) on to prevent that red portion from draining. If you miss that chance, you can replenish your health with a Bandage+ (Leather + Sludge + Blood Moss) and certain types of cooked food and Elixirs.

Hunger is the leftmost, stomach-shaped icon below the heart. Your Hunger gauge will drain over time. You can refill your hunger gauge with food from the first tab of your inventory. Raw food will fill it a (frustratingly) small amount, while one of the cooked recipes (which are water plus meat and/or vegetables) will fill it much more.

Cold is a little more confusing, but only because it rarely comes up. Some floors are cold, and you’ll slowly start to freeze. In those areas, you’ll have to keep an eye on the snowflake-shaped Cold icon. If you like light a brazier and stand by it, you’ll get warm and refill the snowflake meter. Or, if you’re lucky, you might find a hat or coat that will slow the drain.

Thirst works a lot like Hunger, but it’s even easier to manage. All water on (and around) The Isle is potable, so you just have to stand in a puddle and take a sip. If you’re on a floor without standing water, you can drink water from a bottle in your inventory. Certain cooked foods and Elixirs will also refill your thirst meter.

Crafting

While you’re exploring, you’re going to find a lot of stuff. There are Embers, String, Sticks and Blood Moss and lots more. Basically anything that isn’t food shows up on the second tab of your inventory menu. These items aren’t actually useful on their own (and quickly fill up your limited inventory space), so you have to craft them into something else.

This is the recipe to craft a Torch (Stick + String + Ember). We have made countless Torches.

Capybara Games via Polygon

When you select an item in your inventory, it’ll show up along the left side in a vertical grid. Any items you can combine with it will remain white (on the right), while ones that you can’t use are gray. This makes the trial and error of learning new crafting recipes a bit easier.

Once you’ve selected three items — every recipe requires three items — you’ll see an icon of what you’ll create at the bottom left. You won’t see its name until you craft it and select it in your inventory.

Not every crafting recipe makes a finished product. Some items like Embers, String and Sticks combine with themselves to make better crafting materials (three Embers make Phosphor, while three Sticks make a Bundle). These items are more resource intensive, but they produce more or better quality items.

Cooking and Campfires (or Bonfires)

At its most basic, a Campfire (or Bonfire, since we’ve never seen an official name) is where you go to cook food. This is mostly what you’ll use them for, but there’s more going on.

The first thing to know about Campfires is that they’re not permanent (by default). At a certain point after you light them, they’ll burn out and you won’t be able to use them again. Keep this in mind while exploring. It might not always make sense to light every Campfire you discover. (Choosing not to light a Campfire is a good way to keep a place to rest available later.)

Sitting at an early Campfire. You can see our only option is to cook and craft.

Capybara Games via Polygon

When you sit down at a lit bonfire, you’ll have up to four possible options. The top option, the cauldron, is how you cook food (more on food below).

At the bottom of the menu is Sleep. It only becomes available when you unlock the Pocket in the area between Floors 2 and 3. Sleeping at a Campfire will take you to your Pocket where you have a permanent Campfire, some water and (limited) storage.

Blue campfires and fast travel

The option to the left of the Campfire wheel turns the current campfire into a fast travel location at a cost of 25 Gems. The Campfire will turn blue and remain lit, even if you walk away or die — until you use it for fast travel, at which point it’ll no longer be blue.

At the next Campfire you visit (either with this adventurer or a subsequent one), the option to the right of the wheel will be available to you. This option warps you to the blue Campfire.

This fast travel mechanic is a great way to skip over areas and find the corpse of a previous adventurer. You just have to remember to periodically turn Campfires into fast travel points (and ideally die near a blue Campfire).

Note that if you fast travel to a blue Campfire, you can’t pay 25 Gems and make it blue again immediately. It’s locked until you die and return again.

Basic priorities: Light and food

You have two basic priorities while exploring Below — light and food. These are the fundamentals of surviving The Depths.

Sometimes light is more important than food — while looking for those annoyingly deadly traps, say — and sometimes food is more important than light — on floors with limited plant and animal life. Regardless of the order, you should always be thinking about light and food. Once you have those under control, you can think about what to do next.

Using a Torch to navigate.

Capybara Games via Polygon

Light comes from a couple sources.

First, there’s the Lantern. It will cast light whenever it’s activated and has Gems to burn. As a bonus, using the Lantern to light your way also reveals traps with a red outline.

If you haven’t recovered the Lantern yet or you’re out of (or low on) Gems, then Torches (Stick + String + Ember) are a good fallback plan. (You can reliably harvest String from those annoying tripwires with a jumping slash — which is running + attack.) If you want to get fancy, make yourself some Torches+ (Stick + Weave [String + String + String] + Phosphor [Ember + Ember + Ember]). They’re a lot more resource intensive, but they last much longer.

Managing your Hunger with food is a little more complicated. Like we said above, you can eat some foods raw to take the edge off, but it’s not a great longterm solution. (Two notes: Mushrooms don’t refill your Hunger gauge, and eating raw Innards will make you violently ill.)

While you can craft at any time, you can only cook food at a lit Campfire. Choose the top icon at the Campfire to start cooking. Every recipe starts with a bottle of water. From there, you add three ingredients to make a Broth, Soup or Stew. If you add a Mushroom, you’ll get an Elixir instead. The various colors of Elixir depend on the color of the mushroom, and they have differing effects, but they all refill your Hunger gauge.

Using your map

Below (re)generates some (but not all) of the world whenever you arrive on the beach. These procedural parts of a floor tend to be the connecting rooms between fixed points like exits and shortcuts. There are commonalities that persist, and we’ll describe those in the next section. Before you worry about that, it’s important to understand how Below builds its world and how you can find our way around it.

Consulting the map on Floor 3.

Capybara Games via Polygon

Your map is basically just a set of nodes and connections, and it feels … less than helpful at first glance. When you pull up your map, you’ll see where you are and where you’ve been represented as a series of lines and nodes. Each node represents a room and each line represents a door.

The node you’re currently in with have a blinking cursor on it. You’ll also see lines branching off of your current node. Those represent the exits. (You won’t see an indicator for elevators or shortcuts, though.) From that, you’ll be able to figure out the rough shape of the room you’re standing in. So, if you see a line heading to the left on your map, there will be an exit somewhere about midway up on the left side of the room.

A room’s exits (and, by extension, entrances) correspond to the cardinal and intercardinal directions — north, south, east and west and all of the combinations in between. This means that, regardless of what combination of paths and cliffs that make up a room, a quick glance at your map will tell you where to look for doors.

We like to enter a room, immediately check our map and then talk to ourselves like we’re playing a text adventure. “Exits are north and southwest,” we’ll, just so we know where we’re supposed to go. And then we’ll apologize to our dog, who is confused.

There’s also a generally north-to-south progression among the rooms on a given floor. You tend to enter a floor from the north and find an exit to the next floor down in the south. (Remember, you’re going below.) This isn’t exact (and it doesn’t account for shortcuts and hidden rooms), but it’s a good guide if you’re just trying to orient yourself.

Persistent areas

Most, but not all, of the world is (re)generated every time a new adventurer arrives. Importantly, there are some persistent locations — fixed points on the map every time.

The blue-hued room that leads from Floor 2 to 3 is always the same, for example. There’s always a staircase. Halfway down, there’s always a bonfire. There’s always Blood Moss on the stairs below the bonfire.

This is generally true of every floor. The entrance and exit of a floor (along with the transition rooms between floors) are fixed points that won’t change. It’s the other rooms and the layout of their doors — the lines between the nodes — that are different. You won’t always know exactly how to get somewhere, but you’ll eventually learn that you can orient yourself.

Bringing it all together

Now that you have an understanding of Below’s basic mechanics and rules, it’s time to talk about bringing them together. This is how we’ve come to think about playing this game.

Below’s pattern

Most video games have a loop of some sort — like a grind to level up so you can take on tougher enemies. Below’s loop is hard to spot both because the game is so tight-lipped about itself and because there will be long periods where it doesn’t feel like you’re making progress.

The most important thing we may say here is this: Progress is relative to your situation. If you’ve just arrived on the beach and there’s a corpse with a ton of items somewhere down below, define progress in that moment as finding your corpse. If you’re unprepared for a long journey, define progress as farming for Gems and Morsels to prepare you for a long strip. If you’re well stocked with food and items, feel free to define progress as exploring further down below.

Regardless, hidden in your frustration, you’ll (hopefully) discover that there’s a pattern to what you’re doing. Here’s what we’ve learned: