On the surface, Mudborne is a cute pixel game about exploring a desolate series of maps to explore for resources that allow you to breed all kinds of cute new frog friends, but there’s something ominous about just how empty the ponds are when you first arrive.
As you explore each area of the game, breed new frogs, harvest or cultivate all kinds of new mushrooms, and replenish the life that’s been lost from the ecosystem, you’ll uncover a mystery about the Pondmother and just what happened with this mass hibernation event. Here’s what you need to know about Mudborne.
Where Is Your House?
While you begin your adventure in Mudborne in the Spawning Pool area, you’ll be staying with Hopert, the carpenter frog who trades for all kinds of tools, assorted kinds of frog furniture, and all the various blueprints you’ll find as you enter locked buildings throughout the game. He’s got a bed for you in the Carpenter’s Workshop, which you’ll find in the dream world as well.
That said, you’ll see in your mushroom catalog that some spores require changing the temperature and/or moisture levels in your house. While some spores do grow in the Carpenter’s Shop in the dream world, the house in question is in the Gateway Nexus.
Early into exploring that orange area between waking and dreaming worlds, you’ll find a lodge just east of the portal from the Carpenter’s Workshop, and that’s your frog’s house, conveniently located right by a few portals around the world. Feel free to relocate from the Spawning Pool once you’ve unlocked the house.
Can You Fast-Travel?
Early in Mudborne, you’ve got a whole lot of walking to do – the map is big, and it’s only going to keep expanding in scope as you unlock new maps, find the right frogs for the Reflection Pools in the area, and continue to explore. Before long, you’ll want a way to move back and forth quickly.
That’s where the Gateway Nexus comes in. When you first unlock the portal atop the Carpenter’s Workshop on the Spawning Pool map, there’s not much going on in there except for inactive alternate portals and that empty house we mentioned. By activating other portals around the different maps, you’ll create a series of easy-to-use shortcuts through the Gateway Nexus to allow for fast travel.
If you’re in a hurry to get back to the last place you spawn – be that in a bed or from one of the Reflection Pools – you can hold the R button to reset your frog after a few seconds. They’ll immediately wake up in the last place they entered the waking or dreaming world.
Will Mudborne Be On Console Or Have Multiplayer?
At the time of launch, there are currently no plans to port Mudborne onto consoles. It’s available through Steam and comes native with Steam Deck support, and it’s available in a variety of languages to best portray the story. It’s also available through itch.io if you’re not a Steam user, though this doesn’t come with native handheld support.
In terms of playing with others, you’ll have a variety of frog friends to make around the various maps in the game, and they’ll be your socializing for the duration of the story. While it would definitely be fun to get to run around the pond with our friends as adorable frog pals together, there are also no plans for local or online co-op implication.
Who Are The Other Frogs?
Each area of the map in Mudborne will be overseen by a lone frog when you arrive, and as you explore these areas and work through their chapters in the Compendium, you’ll come to rely on these guys quite a lot. They wake up at 5AM, and they’ll go to sleep at 9PM.
Hopert is the first you’ll meet in the Spawning Pool. He’s a carpenter by trade, so he’s your source for woodworking, tools, and any machine blueprints you find around the pond. You’ll also meet Dendro in the Spawning Pool, but he moves to the Central Junction before long, so go talk to him about history there if you have any questions about what to do next.
You’ll find three maps off the Central Junction as well. In the Kindergarten, speak with Ribbert the mushroom frog to trade for anything related to botany, like compost recipes and mushroom furniture. Up north in Climate Control, you’ll meet Annura after you thaw her out, and from there, she’ll sell you all kinds of weather control gear and frog furniture in exchange for flowers. Finally, Kroaka is an engineer that lives over in the Residential District, and he’ll have a bunch of new tools to trade.
Where Do You Get Salt?
If you’re investing the time into placing cultivators around the various maps to experiment and see which mushrooms you can grow in which environments (be mindful of the weather conditions and where you’ve placed the cultivator!), you’ll need a good amount of compost on hand. One of the most helpful recipes for projects of scale is Compact Compost, which remains in a cultivator for longer than any other recipe for compost before you’ll need to refill it.
One of the most critical components of the Compact Compost recipe is Salt, listed in the composter along with Waterproof Coating and Memory Gel as an option for the middle slot when making a compost recipe. While Waterproof Coating comes from using your net on lily pads and Memory Gel from jellyfish in the dream world, Salt can be a little trickier to find.
Trees planted in the water will be labeled as Saltgrove Trees, and chopping them down produces a variety of resources, not least of which is the Salt you need for composting. You’ll get Saltgrove Acorns, Twigs, and Logs from these as well.
How Do You Get To The Dream World?
Your first foray into the dream world in Mudborne will happen at the Central Pool in the Spawning Pool area, as the Compendium directs you here and teaches you how to breed specific frogs to unlock Reflection Pools. Any pool you unlock allows permanent access into the dream world, which is rife with its own resources, locations, and secrets.
It’s critical to note, though, that you’ll need to activate a Reflection Pool on every map to access that map’s variant of the dream world. Listed in your Atlas directly beneath the map of the waking world, you’ll need to enter the dream world on each map to explore. For example, the Reflection Pools in the Spawning Pool will only lead to the Distant Pools.
Why Won’t My Frog Eat The Algae?
You’ll find your first algae bloom in the southern part of the Spawning Pools map, blocking your path over to Dumeril’s Lab. When you inspect the algae, you’ll be told that to clear it out, you’ll need a frog with a big appetite, but placing a frog onto the algae like you do with heavier frogs to hold down pressure switches won’t do the trick here – you need some special equipment.
Once you get into the Kindergarten map and begin progressing the story over there, you’ll learn all about Filters, a tool that RIbbert sells in his shop. You’ll need to put that hungry frog into a Filter to convince it to eat up the path-blocking algae.
How Do Modifiers Work?
There’s plenty to learn about making different kinds of magic mud, even past the tutorial given in the Compendium! The basic gist is combining three mushroom powders into a paste to use to grow your tadpoles, which changes their A.N.O.U.R.E.S. traits by way of letting them grow in that special mud.
When you find mushrooms, they’ll have at least one modifier that they add when used in a magic mud recipe. Adding or subtracting trait values from a specific stat or two is the most straightforward modifier, allowing you to add however many slots of that kind of mushroom powder as you need to achieve the desired effect without any tinkering past the use of the mud.
But you’ll also see multiplication modifiers in the mix, which will need to be used in conjunction with a mushroom powder that naturally gives that stat change. For example, if you add a mushroom that adds one to the Amplitude stat, as well as a mushroom that has an Amplitude times two modifier, you’ll end up with a mud that adds two to the Amplitude stat of the resulting frog as well.
Finally, the suppress modifier can be a little trickier to use. If you’ve got something you don’t want to change, you can use a suppressant modifier to keep that statistic the same despite other changes.
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