Moonlight Peaks wears its interface lightly. Where a lot of farm sims bury the screen under hotbars, meters and pop-ups, this one keeps things spare on purpose — the better to show off that purple moonlight. Here’s how to read the screen, the controls observed across demo and launch-week footage, and why reaching for a controller might be the best call.
A deliberately minimal HUD
The heads-up display is about as clean as cozy sims get. In the corners you’ll find:
- Energy (stamina) — top-left, your bar for the night’s work.
- Mana — appears alongside energy once you’ve repaired your wand and started casting.
- The clock — top-right, tracking the night from 6 PM to 6 AM.
That’s essentially it. As one previewer put it, “less is more” here — the sparse UI lets you actually appreciate the environment art. Two things worth knowing: there’s no minimap (you open the full map to navigate, and it helpfully shows where everyone is), and the clock flashes in the small hours to warn you it’s nearly sunrise. Miss your coffin and you’ll pass out, so treat that flashing clock as your last call.
The tool wheel, not a hotbar
Instead of a row of tools glued to the bottom of the screen, Moonlight Peaks uses a radial tool wheel. Bring it up (with E on keyboard, or the equivalent bumper on a pad), and pick the tool you need — shovel, watering can, axe, pickaxe, wand and so on. It pops up only when you want it, which is the whole reason the HUD can stay so clean. For what each tool actually does and how upgrades work, see the tools & upgrades guide.
One movement quirk tied to tools: holding a tool (the shovel especially) slows your walk speed noticeably. It’s a deliberate choice, but it means you’ll want to stow your tools — or shapeshift into your faster cat form — when you’re just travelling. On the flip side, the watering can lets you walk and water at the same time, no per-tile stop, which is one of the nicer feel details.
Decorate mode & building
Decorating is its own mode, viewed top-down, and it’s more of a proper toolkit than most sims offer. Once you switch into decorate mode you can:
- Adjust the brush size with Q (smaller) and E (larger) when laying paths or flooring.
- Rotate most objects, and stack small clutter items on top of compatible furniture.
- Place, pick up and move anything freely via your vampire telekinesis — objects levitate as you drag them.
- Put items into inventory and swap between decorate and floor/wall modes with the on-screen prompts.
Because you pick an item’s colour when you craft it, decorate mode is mostly about placement, not painting. The full workflow — and what you can build — is in decorating your homestead.
Menus, storage & collections
A few interface conveniences make day-to-day play smoother:
- Universal storage. Your house has a shared storage that crafting stations (kegs, workbench, kitchen, furnace) pull from automatically — so you rarely fight with inventory management. Details in the money guide.
- Context prompts. The game shows the relevant button on-screen for the action you’re near — confirm, place, interact, “mark all as seen” and so on — so you’re rarely guessing.
- Collection books. Your finds (soul blobs, critters, spells) live in tidy in-game books you can flip through; see soul blobs & vampsters.
- Radial menus show up beyond the tool wheel too, keeping selections quick on a controller.
Controller-first — and Steam Deck friendly
If there’s one setup recommendation to take away, it’s this: grab a controller if you have one. Multiple early players independently said the game was clearly built with controller support “at the forefront,” describing it as fluid and intuitive from the earliest demos. In menus you’ll see bumper prompts (LB/RB) for switching tabs, a sign of that gamepad-first design. It’s also comfortable on Steam Deck. Keyboard and mouse work perfectly well — the top-down decorating in particular is snappy with a mouse — but the game feels like it was born on a pad.
Keybind quick reference
⚠️ These are the defaults observed in captured builds and may be rebindable; treat them as a guide, not gospel, until we finish a full launch-build keybind pass.
| Action | Keyboard (observed) |
|---|---|
| Open tool wheel | E |
| Use tool / primary action | Left-click |
| Interact / talk / pick up | X |
| Confirm / place / “mark all as seen” | F |
| Decrease brush size (decorate) | Q |
| Increase brush size (decorate) | E |
| Open map | Map key / menu |
| Cancel / close menu | Esc |
For controller, the same actions map to face buttons and bumpers; exact bindings vary by layout.
The short version
Moonlight Peaks keeps the screen calm — a two-bar HUD, a corner clock, a radial tool wheel, and a top-down decorate mode — and leans on context prompts so you’re rarely hunting for a control. Play it on a controller if you can, open the map instead of expecting a minimap, and watch that clock flash. From here, see tools & upgrades, decorating your homestead, and the 30 tips from early players.
