How to build, survive, create, and own in GlyphGalaxy.
Last updated: 12 July 2026
GlyphGalaxy is an open-source multiplayer voxel sandbox — build, survive, farm, fight, and create on the first continent, Radiantia. Claim a home, pick a name, and design your own items, all in-game.
Read Getting Started and Controls first, then jump to whatever you want to do. The full game is free and needs no wallet or crypto. Anything marked ⛓ optional is an advanced, opt-in on-chain feature for power users; everything else works in solo/offline play.
The in-game basic guide covers the essentials to get you moving. This is the full reference — bookmark it.
GlyphGalaxy runs in your web browser (a native client is on the long-term roadmap). You play through a client that connects to a game server for multiplayer.
To play (local dev build):
http://localhost:5180 — use localhost, not 127.0.0.1 (the dev server binds IPv6).ws://localhost:8080. If no server is running, you drop into offline solo play automatically — the whole single-player game still works.Esc to release the mouse.First five minutes:
F4 to switch to Survival when you want the full loop (gathering, hunger, danger, mobs that fight back).E, the crafting menu with K, and your wallet with B.Mobile (touch) and gamepad input are supported in addition to keyboard + mouse.
↑ Back to topF4 to cycle modes:
| Mode | Fly | Take damage | Can edit | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Creative | Yes (double-tap Space) | No | Yes | Infinite blocks, no vitals. Great for building. |
| Survival | No | Yes | Yes | Hunger, health, hazards, counted inventory. The "real game." |
| Spectator | Always (noclip) | No | No | Fly through walls to explore; can't change the world. |
Defaults below. The Menu key (M, or Esc) opens the hub,
and every tile there shows its own live key — so once you know one key you can find
all of them without leaving the game. H opens this same reference
in-game, always showing your bindings.
Changed keys (2026-11). The digit row went back to the hotbar:
1–9 now always pick a slot, where before only
5,7,8,9 did. Spells moved to
T F G V, a cluster you can reach without letting go of WASD. M
opens the Menu and mute moved to F7. Q drops the
held item (Shift+Q for the stack) and emote moved to Y.
Your own remaps were kept.
All of the above are remappable in Settings → Controls & input — including the movement keys — except Esc and the 1–9 hotbar row, which are fixed.
Two schemes ship; gestures is the default — switch in Settings → Controls & input.
Gestures (default): the right half of the screen is the control surface. Tap to place, press and hold to mine (keep holding while you pan — the crosshair keeps digging), and push the movement stick to its edge to sprint. A release between roughly a fifth and two-fifths of a second (220–400 ms) does nothing on purpose, so a hesitant touch never acts.
Classic buttons: on-screen ⛏ mine, ▣ place and
» sprint, plus long-press the right side to pick a block.
Both schemes: drag the left side to move and the right side to look;
⤒ jump, hold ⤓ to sneak; 🎒 opens your
36-slot backpack in Survival (where tool repair lives), not the creative palette;
💬 chat only when Compact HUD is off (Settings → Controls & input;
otherwise chat lives behind ☰), and 🔮 — which appears in
Survival once you have a spell slotted — hold, slide,
release to cast a spell. Tap a hotbar slot to switch blocks — the ‹ ›
chevrons do the same on wide screens but are hidden on phones. ☰
top-right opens the menu.
Using a keyboard or mouse on a touch device? An iPad with a Magic Keyboard is a touch device whose owner may never touch the screen, and the on-screen buttons only answer to touch. Turn on Settings → Controls & input → “Touch buttons respond to mouse + keyboard” and they also answer a click, and Enter/Space when focused. Off by default, because it opens a second input path onto live controls.
Controllers work too. Left stick moves, right stick looks;
A jump, B sneak, X emote, Y inventory,
L3 sprint, R3 pick block, RT mine, LT place,
d-pad picks a hotbar slot, START opens the menu hub and BACK the map.
Hold LB for the spell ring and RB for the action ring (where Quick chat lives).
In a panel, A confirms, B goes back and the d-pad moves the highlight.
The in-game 🎮 Controller help tab shows your live button map, including any rebinds.
F6 to cycle it locally (online, the world shares one synchronized sky).GlyphGalaxy has a story you can follow — or ignore entirely. Nothing here gates free play; the world is yours whether or not you read a word of it.
The premise. Long ago, a single perfect light — the Prime Radiance — did not build the world but inscribed it, writing every mountain and star as a word of light. Then a word unwrote itself: the Radiance shattered into eight crystals, and one world tore into many drifting realms. Now the twin moons are dimming, the nights run long, and the restless dead walk again — the Second Dimming. But what you make, you inscribe, and the darkness cannot erase it. Making is resistance; every build is a small act of defiance.
The full campaign is playable now — an eight-chapter quest to recover the eight crystals and turn back the Dimming. Talk to Elder Maren at the Crystal Altar to begin; a tracker guides each step, and your progress is yours forever (it never resets). Along the way:
Seasonal events. When the Dimming presses back, the altar comes under siege in a scheduled Dimming Nights defense — hold the ring through a long night, and dawn rewards the defenders. The world re-dims each season, so the story replays for newcomers and late arrivals while your personal progress and honors stand.
None of this gates free play — the whole world is yours whether or not you follow a word of it. A one-time three-screen intro on the start screen sets the scene for new players; you can re-read all of it any time in the in-game Lore tab.
↑ Back to topPlace blocks with right-click, break with left-click. Open the Inventory (E) to see every placeable block as a textured preview and pick what to hold — hover any block for its name and description (the hotbar shows the same tooltip). The full catalog also travels with you in-game under Help → Blocks.
There are 106 placeable block types — 58 regular blocks plus 48 shaped variants — and a handful of world-only blocks you'll meet but can't place:
Stock blocks are free and off-chain. What you build can be turned into an on-chain NFT — see Glyphs.
In Survival mode you have three vitals (shown above the hotbar):
Hazards: falling more than ~3 blocks hurts (water and ladders cancel fall damage), lava burns fast, and drowning / starvation chip away at health.
Food restores hunger (right-click to eat held food): apple, bread, glow berry, plus cooked meats (beef, chicken, pork, mutton, fish) once you smelt the raw drops. Eating at full hunger does nothing, so don't waste food.
Potions are the one thing that restores health instantly — everything else (food-fed regen, cure spells) heals over time, which is no help mid-fight. Brew them at a table from a glass bottle (3 glass → 3 bottles) plus slime and a reagent; the bottle comes back empty when you drink, so the glass is a one-time cost.
| Potion | Recipe | Restores |
|---|---|---|
| Health potion | bottle + 1 slime + 1 holy essence | 6 health, instantly |
| Greater health potion | bottle + 2 slime + 3 holy essence | 12 health, instantly |
| Mana potion | bottle + 1 slime + 1 glow berry | 10 MP |
| Greater mana potion | bottle + 2 slime + 1 radiant gem | 25 MP |
Mana regenerates slowly and pauses for 3 seconds after every cast, so a mana potion buys back real time — roughly 5–12 seconds online (the server refills ~2 MP/sec), or 10–25 seconds offline. In arena duels healing is capped by the arena itself — one consumable per ~3 seconds, at most 6 health each, and duels opened with no consumables refuse them outright.
↑ Back to topCrafting (K): opens a recipe list. Standing near a crafting table unlocks the full recipe set; otherwise you can hand-craft the basics (planks, sticks, a table). Right-click a placed crafting table for the full set.
Tools come in four tiers — each faster and more durable than the last, and each able to harvest more:
| Tier | Durability | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Wood | 60 | can't mine iron ore |
| Stone | 132 | |
| Iron | 251 | needed to mine Radiance Crystal ore |
| Radiant | 1024 | top tier (the "diamond" of GlyphGalaxy), fastest, harvests everything |
Tool types: pickaxe (stone/ore), axe (wood), shovel (dirt/sand/gravel), sword (combat), hoe (farming). Mining the wrong material with bare hands or a too-weak tool is slow or yields nothing — match the tool to the block.
Smelting (furnace): right-click a placed furnace to open it. Load an input + fuel (coal, planks, etc.) to smelt ores into ingots, raw meat into cooked food, and Radiance Crystal → Radiant Gem (the material for top-tier radiant tools).
A crafted tool used to be disposable — when its durability ran out, it broke and you made another. Now a patch kit (1 slime + 1 iron ingot, at a table) restores 50% of a tool's maximum durability. Open your backpack and drag the kit onto the worn tool (or click-pick it up and click the tool). The kit is spent; the tool keeps its slot.
This is the only repair path for ordinary crafted tools. The glyph anvil is a different station — it services evolving on-chain gear (§16), not your iron pickaxe. Infused arms ignore patch kits too: they run on charges, and only essence refills those.
Drag-apply is the general rule: dragging one item onto another in the backpack uses it on that item when the pair makes sense — patch kit onto a tool, matching essence onto an infused staff or blade. Anything else just moves or swaps stacks as usual.
Several mob drops used to pile up with nothing to spend them on. All of these are now real recipes:
Slime in particular is now the base of every potion, so it never stops being worth picking up.
↑ Back to topPress C for the Character panel — one surface for everything you wear and cast, organized into four tabs:
T F G V; click a slot to open the Spellbook) and your evolving NFT gear (managed in My Items).Y-key emote., (comma) anywhere to jump straight to this tab.Your gear is visible. Equipped armor renders on your avatar (tier-colored: leather brown, iron grey, radiant cyan), your shield sits on the left arm, and your held tool appears in hand — in third-person (F5) and to every other player in the realm. Spell casts glow with per-element effects (fire embers, ice shards, branching lightning, rising holy motes…).
Armor reduces damage exactly as before — the panel and avatar visuals change nothing about combat math.
↑ Back to topEssences are the raw material of every magical thing. There are seven — fire, ice, lightning, earth, holy, water, wind — and you get them two ways.
As drops. Many creatures carry one, but it's a coin flip — roughly half of them drop nothing. Skeletons roll lightning and wind, spiders fire, zombies holy, frostwolves ice, drowned water, burrowers earth, and even the humble bass yields water essence. The exception is the ice dragon, which drops a guaranteed 1–2 ice essence on top of its ice shards — far and away the most reliable source in the game.
By crafting. Every essence has a recipe; all need a table except ice, which you can make anywhere:
| Essence | Recipe | Table? |
|---|---|---|
| ❄ Ice | 2 ice shards → 2 | no — hand-craftable |
| 🔥 Fire | 3 coal | yes |
| ⚡ Lightning | 1 copper ingot + 1 coal | yes |
| 🪨 Earth | 4 cobblestone + 1 iron ingot | yes |
| ✨ Holy | 1 glowstone + 1 gold ingot | yes |
| 💧 Water | 2 raw fish + 1 glass | yes |
| 🌪 Wind | 3 feathers + 1 tall grass | yes |
Scrolls teach spells, and are mostly paper + essence: 1 essence by hand for a tier-1 spell, 2 + an iron ingot for tier-2, 3 + a radiant gem for tier-3. (Two families break the pattern — shield also wants leather, and the void scrolls bind a radiant gem at every tier.) A scroll is permanent knowledge, never consumed by casting. Equip up to four in the Spellbook (X) — the Character panel shows your loadout and links there — and cast with T F G V.
Each distinct scroll in your backpack also raises your maximum MP by 4, from a base of 20 up to a cap of 100. (Scrolls left in a chest still count as learned for the Spellbook, but they don't grow the pool — carry them.)
Mana (MP) pays for casts, and pauses for 3 seconds after each one. It refills at about 1 MP/second offline (mages ~2); online the server refills it at ~2/second, so magic recovers roughly twice as fast in multiplayer.
Once you own the scrolls you want, essences keep dropping with nothing to buy — so they go into weapons. Forge them at a crafting table; there are 49 in all, one per element per material tier.
Staffs (21 — wooden, iron, radiant × 7 elements) channel your spellbook. Hold one and left-click casts an equipped attack spell instead of swinging — it prefers one matching the staff's own element, and otherwise uses the first attack spell you have slotted. When the staff's element matches the spell it casts, that spell costs less MP and hits harder:
| Staff | Recipe | Charges | Matching-element bonus |
|---|---|---|---|
| Wooden | 2 sticks + 2 essence | 20 | −10% MP, +5% damage |
| Iron | 2 sticks + 1 iron ingot + 3 essence | 30 | −20% MP, +10% damage |
| Radiant | 2 sticks + 1 radiant gem + 4 essence | 40 | −25% MP, +15% damage |
A staff never swings. If you have no attack spell equipped, left-click does nothing but remind you to slot one — keep a melee weapon on another hotbar slot.
Infused blades (28 — wooden, stone, iron, radiant × 7 elements) are re-forged from a sword you already own: matching sword + essence + 1 slime. They swing for their tier's normal damage and land a signature effect on hit:
| Element | On-hit effect |
|---|---|
| 🔥 Fire ("ember") | burns over time |
| ❄ Ice ("frost") | chills — up to −30% movement |
| ⚡ Lightning ("storm") | a brief hard stun |
| 🪨 Earth ("terra") | roots — up to −60% movement |
| 💧 Water ("tide") | soaks — the target hits ~20% weaker |
| 🌪 Wind ("gale") | staggers — slows and unbalances |
| ✨ Holy ("hallow") | sears with radiant light — burns hot but brief |
Effects grow stronger with the blade's material tier; a wooden ember blade singes, a radiant one really burns.
Elemental affinity (online only). Against a creature weak to the blade's element, a charged hit does double damage — holy shines brightest here, since zombies and skeletons are weak to it. The multiplier is scored by the server, so it applies in multiplayer only; in the offline sandbox an infused blade hits for its plain tier damage.
Every infused arm holds charges — 20–40 on staffs, 30–60 on blades, more with better material. A staff spends one per cast; a blade spends one per proc.
An arm at zero charges never breaks. A staff still casts (without its bonus) and a blade still swings for full base damage (without its effect). To refill, drag a matching essence onto the arm in your backpack: +10 charges each. The wrong element won't apply.
That recharge is the point: essences stop being clutter and become ammunition you spend forever.
↑ Back to topFive crops: wheat, corn, pumpkin, tomato, beans. Crops uproot if you remove the farmland beneath them. Tall grass can be foraged for starter seeds.
Bone meal hurries a crop along. Grind 1 bone into 3 bone meal by hand, then right-click a growing crop to push it forward one growth stage instantly — handy when you need one more pumpkin for a stew and don't want to wait out the clock. It does nothing on a crop that's already ripe. Bones come from skeletons (about two in three drop one), chest loot, and the occasional fishing snag — and since one bone makes three meal, a couple of skeletons will push a whole row along.
Growth is server-owned, so bone meal works the same for everyone online — no client can rush a field on its own.
↑ Back to topThere are 30 species. Online, mobs are simulated by the server (everyone sees the same creatures in the same place); offline they're simulated locally.
Passive (wander, flee when hit): chicken, pig, sheep, cow, fish.
Tameable companions — feed them meat to tame; a tamed pet follows you: bear, dog, wolf, cat.
Hostile (spawn at night on the surface, or any time in dungeons): zombie, skeleton, blob (hops and splits in two when killed), and the rare, powerful ice dragon. Hostiles chase and attack you; they burn off at dawn unless deep underground.
Combat & drops: hit a creature with left-click. Your damage comes from your equipped weapon — a leveled evolving weapon hits hardest. Slain creatures drop loot that falls to the ground for you to collect:
Drops are rolls, not certainties — a given kill may yield nothing. But nothing on this list is junk any more: bone grinds into bone meal, rotten flesh and slime tan into leather, and slime is the base of every potion (§6) and every infused blade. Pick it all up.
Reading a creature's colour: a glowing creature is showing its state. A quick red flash means it just took a hit. A steady coloured glow is a status effect, matching the spell or hazard that caused it:
The same colours appear on you when something afflicts you, so watch for them in a fight. (The ice dragon's eyes and crest always shimmer — that's the dragon, not a status.)
Elite mini-bosses: every so often a pack of hostiles is led by an elite — a roaming mini-boss you'll spot at a glance: ~20% larger, wrapped in a steady ember-gold glow, and (unlike normal mobs) carrying no nameplate. It hits harder, moves a little faster, and soaks about three times the punishment of an ordinary one — but it also drops triple loot, so a careful kill pays off. The gold is a permanent aura, not a status effect: it's there from the moment the elite appears, before you ever land a hit.
Anti-cheat: online, kills only "count" when the server's own creature simulation confirms them — so XP and loot can't be faked.
Scattered through the biomes are generated structures, each with interactive chests holding loot rolled from the world seed:
Dungeons are dangerous — hostile creatures spawn inside day or night, guarding better loot. Right-click a chest to open it; take and deposit items. Online, chest contents are server-authoritative and persist across restarts.
↑ Back to topEverything from here to PvP Arenas is an optional, opt-in layer for power users who want on-chain ownership. The full sandbox, the eight-chapter campaign, home plots, in-game names, and custom creations are all free and need no wallet or crypto — you grab them with Glyphbucks in-game. Take your creations on-chain here only if you want to; the game plays exactly the same without it.
Press B (or ☰ Menu → Account) to open your GlyphGalaxy Account. Sign in with a passcode to save your progress, Glyphbucks, and creations across devices — no crypto needed. Your on-chain RXD wallet lives inside that panel under Advanced: Radiant (RXD) wallet & recovery — open it only if you want the optional on-chain features below:
RXD is the on-chain currency. You only need a funded wallet for the optional ⛓ on-chain actions: minting, the marketplace, on-chain land deeds/names, evolving-item settlement, and RXD arena wagers. Most players never open the Advanced wallet at all — Glyphbucks covers home plots, names, items, and cosmetics in-game.
Glyphs are Radiant's on-chain tokens. In GlyphGalaxy:
Mint a build as an NFT:
[ at each of two corners to mark a region of what you built.] (or right-click a Glyph Anvil) to inscribe it — give it a name and choose a rarity: common, uncommon, rare, epic, legendary, mythic.Resource bundles: you can tokenize a stack of an in-game resource (ingots, planks, gems…) as a fungible FT bundle and trade the whole stack on the marketplace; buying one credits your in-game bag.
There are several Glyph item kinds you'll meet below: plain NFTs (builds), mutable NFTs (evolving items), containers (collections), land plots, and WAVE names.
↑ Back to topPress U to open the marketplace — a trustless, peer-to-peer exchange:
You can re-sell items you bought; the marketplace tracks where each token currently lives so it can be re-listed.
↑ Back to topPress P for the Genesis — Land & Identity panel.
Land plots: Radiantia is a grid of 16×16-block plots (4,096 addressable on the full continent). Claiming a plot:
Build access for friends (🔨): you can let chosen friends build on your land. Open Friends (J) and hit the 🔨 toggle on a friend's row to grant (or revoke) build access on every plot you own — the toggle appears once you own land.
WAVE names (your player identity): register a human-readable name (e.g. alice.rxd) using a commit-reveal flow that protects you from name-sniping:
Some weapons, armor, and pets are mutable Glyph NFTs that grow with you — they gain XP, levels, and durability through play and carry that progress on-chain.
How XP accrues:
What leveling up does:
{level, xp, durability} is its live on-chain state.The level/XP HUD (bottom-left) shows each equipped item's level, an XP bar, and a durability bar. Max level is 50, and stats scale with both level and rarity.
⛓ Putting it on-chain: each equipped item has a "⛓ Mint on-chain" button (then "⛓ Sync Lv N" afterward). Mint puts the item on the blockchain; Sync commits its accrued progress to the token in place — so your battle-worn, leveled item is permanently that item on-chain, and worth more than a fresh one when you trade it.
Online, XP accrual is server-authoritative (it can't be faked), and a broken weapon (0 durability) only deals chip damage until repaired.
Creators can group their item NFTs into an on-chain collection (a Glyph container) — a named set (e.g. "Founders Drop") that links its member items together on-chain. Collections can be a fixed snapshot at mint or grown over time. Useful for drops, themed sets, and showing provenance in the marketplace.
↑ Back to topWager RXD on a 1-on-1 duel where the winner takes the pot — settled on-chain, with no one able to cheat or run off with the stakes.
How a match works:
Why it's safe: the escrow is 2-of-3, so the server can never take the money (it's only one signature of three) and can only help pay the rightful winner. If a match is abandoned, the two players can cooperatively refund themselves without the server.
Leaderboards: wins update a persistent Elo ranking (beating a higher-rated player is worth more than stomping a weaker one).
Season passes: a season pass is a Glyph FT you hold to unlock ranked play and seasonal rewards.
Status: the arena escrow, server-run duel, leaderboards, and passes are live; the in-client arena lobby UI is rolling out — until then, arenas are exercised through the dev tooling.
↩ Back to core gameplay. That's the end of the optional on-chain layer — everything below is part of the free game.
When you're connected to a server you're playing the same world as everyone else. To keep things fair, the server is the source of truth ("authoritative") for the things that matter:
You'll see other players move and build in real time, their gamertag above their head, and a live count of who's online. Chat to your realm or the whole galaxy; mute or report anyone from their name in chat. Your own inventory, position, and wallet keys stay on your device. If the server goes away, you seamlessly drop to offline solo play (local creature simulation, local item progress) and reconnect automatically when it returns.
↑ Back to topThe social layer is tied to your verified wallet address, so your friends list follows you across devices.
J and send a request by WAVE name or address, hit ➕ next to a named player in Who's Online, or click a name in chat. Requests are accept/decline and wait for you even if they arrived while you were offline.@ in chat to tag a friend; they get a highlighted line and a ping. Server-validated, so strangers can't ping you.Server-gated features — they appear in-game when the server has them enabled.
C, or , — comma, rebindable — jumps straight there) to spend points across three trees: ⚔️ Warfare (melee damage, faster swings, damage reduction, the Juggernaut capstone), 🏹 Hunting (bow damage, quicker draws, pet-XP bonuses, Apex Predator), and 🔮 Mysticism (bigger mana pool, faster regen, cheaper and harder-hitting spells, Archon). Deeper nodes need points already spent in that tree. The server owns your sheet — every buy is validated against your real level, so skills can't be spoofed — and they stack with your class perks. Respec is free, so experiment./invite name in chat) to group up, up to 4 players. Everyone standing near a party kill gets full XP credit — grouping is a bonus, never a split. The roster strip lives top-right (👑 = leader, who can kick); leave with the button or /party leave. Talk privately in the 🤝 chat channel or with a /p prefix. Parties last for the session; your friends list is the durable social graph.; (rebindable) to found a permanent guild: a name plus a 2–4 character [TAG] worn on every member's nameplate. Membership follows your verified address, so it survives sessions and devices. Ranks: leader → officer → member — officers invite online players by name, set the message of the day, and moderate; the leader promotes and demotes (leadership passes on if they leave). Guild chat lives in the 🏰 channel or behind a /g prefix.Server-gated — the 🎙 mic chip appears top-left when the server has voice enabled.
Talk to other players with your microphone. Your voice is peer-to-peer — it travels straight between players and never runs through our servers. Your mic is only ever requested the first time you switch voice on, and turning voice off releases it.
\, rebindable in Settings → Controls). On phones/tablets a 🎙 Hold to talk button appears.\); or switch to open mic (voice activation) under Settings → Audio.G → X so G could cleanly cycle game modes (it used to do both — a bug). Deliberate remaps were kept; rebind anything in Settings → Controls.\) — see Voice Chat. By default you can voice-chat with friends only; open it up or lock it down under Settings → 🎙 Voice chat.localhost:5180, not 127.0.0.1.alice.rxd).GlyphGalaxy is open source (MIT code, CC-BY-4.0 default art; items you create belong to you). This guide covers the live feature set — some experiences (e.g. the in-client arena lobby) are still rolling out. Have fun, and build something worth minting.