The dark is not scenery
Light is what stops things spawning on you.
Darkness is not a visual effect in this game. It is the spawn condition. Creatures appear in unlit cells, and a lit room stays empty — permanently, for as long as it stays lit.
This is the highest-value thing on this site and it is currently taught by being killed.
You will need
- Torches — 4 Wood + 1 Coal makes four, by hand
Steps
- Light the room you are working in, not just the corridor you walked down. A pocket of dark behind you is a spawner.
- Place torches as you dig, not after. The cost of a torch is four wood; the cost of not placing one is whatever was standing behind you.
- Watch the corners. Light falls off with distance, and a torch that reaches the middle of a room may leave the far corner dark enough to spawn in.
- Before you leave a base, walk it once looking for unlit cells. Anything that spawns while you are away is there when you come back.
When it works
You come back to a room you lit and it is still empty. That is the whole mechanic: light is not a deterrent, it is a prevention.
When it does not
You turned the lighting off to look at a contraption and things started spawning. They did not, and this is worth being precise about: K cycles whether lighting is drawn. It used to also turn off what your torches were buying, which was a real bug and was fixed in v0.6.1. Turning the display off is now safe.
Things spawn in a room that looks lit to you. Look at the *floor and ceiling corners*, not the middle. Light is a field with falloff, not a radius switch, and the dim edge of a torch's reach can still be dark enough.
A drone, a pedestal or a worn lantern seems not to count. It counts. Object lights are registered the same way cell lights are — that was the other half of the v0.6.1 fix. Before that the spawner judged darkness by a field containing every lamp that is a cell and none that is an object.
The surface fills up at night. It is meant to. Some creatures spawn on the surface after dark specifically; the creature index says which in the "Found" column.
You lit everything and still got hit underground. Light stops things spawning. It does not stop something that spawned elsewhere from walking to you.
Next
Making fire — which is a different problem from light, and harder than it looks.