First up, here's your controls:
Left arrow key or A moves left
Right arrow key or D moves right
Up arrow key or W jumps
Down arrow key or S ducks

You want to do this:
Go get the cheese then bring it to the hole.

If you knew that already: congratulations, you've played the game at least once! If you didn't, then you should go play at least once since for the most part everything about controlling your mouse is pretty obvious. What I'll be going over here is the more advanced stuff and the little quirks in how you move.

Air Jumping

Wow, look at that hole! It's too big to jump across normally, right? Good thing you can defy gravity and jump in mid-air! All you have to do is run off the ledge and jump in the air.



Anytime you've touched a surface, you'll be able to jump once even if you're in the air. You'll have to touch a surface again before you can make another jump, you'll know when you can jump again once your mouse enters it's running animation. But watch out, sometimes the running animation might not be playing even though you can jump again. For example: when you duck while jumping. Also touching cheese can make the running animation play even if you can't jump.

Wall Jumping
This is the most important skill you'll need to learn. It's tricky at first, but once you get it down it'll be second nature.
Anytime you touch a surface your jump is reset, this applies to walls too.
When you jump against a wall, you'll see your running animation start to play. What you want to do is jump away from the wall then move back to touch it again. Your running animation should start again and you'll have another jump. Keep repeating this to gain more height and scale the wall.
Once again, look for the running animation when practicing the wall jump to get a feel for the timing. After a bit of practice you'll be able to execute the wall jump as soon as you touch the wall.


Walljuming isn't always so simple however. Different kinds of surfaces have different amounts of friction and bounce which will change the timing of your walljump or even make it outright impossible.
From left to right:
Normal ground: Friction 0.3 Bounce 0.2
Most surfaces will have these settings and are what you can expect to walljump against most of the time.
Chocolate: Friction 20 Bounce 0.2
Chocolate has so much friction that you'll stick to the wall just by jumping against it. It's faster to walljump like you usually would on chocolate, but you can also just run against it and mash the jump button to climb up it. It'll slow you down while running across it too, so it's better to hop along chocolate floors.
Ice: Friction 0 Bounce 0.2
You can't walljump on ice since there's no friction. However, if the ice is slightly slanted you can sometimes scale up the slant the same way you would do a walljump. You'll keep your momentum sliding on ice, so it makes a great ramp for sliding into a long jump.
Trampoline: Friction 0 Bounce 1.2
By default you can't walljump on a trampoline since it has no friction, but sometimes the map settings will give it some. If this is the case then you can still walljump up a trampoline wall, although it's a little trickier since you'll be bounced back. Just let trampoline bounce move you away from the wall rather than doing it yourself and it should be pretty simple to wrap your head around.

Keep in mind: any surface could have any friction, bounce, or appearance as defined by the map settings. The numbers listed above are just the default values. You might encounter wood ground that behaves like ice or even chocolate that bounces you like a trampoline. Most of the time things should look like what they are, but sometimes you'll just have to jump on a surface to find out.

Your physics will also be altered a little bit while you're carrying cheese. You'll have a little bit more weight in your momentum making it a little harder to turn in mid-air, so you'll need to adjust your walljump timing appropriately.

Most stuff floats in water, even you! You'll be constantly floating upwards in water, so hold down to sink. The longer you hold down, the faster you'll sink, so be careful not to overdo it and fall off the bottom of the level!

Cheese is unfortunately made of some super dense material which will make you sink like a rock. You won't be able to jump even an inch while in the water with cheese, so make sure you don't dive in when there isn't a floor to catch you at the bottom. You'll be at the mercy of the shaman at this point unless there's a ramp leading out of the water or a trampoline.

If there is a trampoline, you can hold down while falling on it to give yourself enough momentum to gain height with each bounce. If you're already standing flat on the trampoline, then you're out of luck.

Touching water resets your jump just like touching a wall or floor does. It's kind of tricky but you can sort of walljump off water while carrying cheese.

Speaking of trampolines, you can get a little bit of extra bounce out of one by jumping at the peak of your bounce. Sometimes you'll need to do this to gain any height at all.
Hitting a trampoline or other bouncy surface will launch you the direction opposite of it's angle, so you can also use trampolines to bounce yourself across wide gaps.

There's one more kind of surface you'll most commonly encounter: lava. Really lava isn't all that special, it's just a trampoline with a lot more bounce. Enough bounce to send you flying into the sky and right past the kill-plane in almost an instant. If you want to avoid being launched into orbit you can jump just after touching the lava which will cancel your vertical momentum.


Corner jumping is an advanced technique that makes use of the very slight amount of bounce normal surfaces have to give you a little extra speed. You might have noticed that your mouse will bounce just a little after landing from a high fall. Corner jumping is pretty much doing that but hitting the corner or slanted edge of a surface so you get the bounce to apply to your horizontal momentum.
You can corner jump without a long fall as well. Normally this gap is too far to make it across, even with a mid-air jump. If you jump just before the ledge and land on the corner, you'll get just enough horizontal momentum to clear the gap.

Regardless of if you're playing good or bad, your turn for shaman will come up eventually. You'll know your time is coming when your score is the highest in the room at the end of the round, not counting the current shaman. You're going to mess up big time the first chance you get at shaman, but don't feel too bad about it since other shaman will ruin everything on purpose so your accidental failure might be a welcome change of pace.

Before that happens though, you're going to want some practice. Type /room [name] to create an empty room for you to practice in without having to wait your turn or suffer being stoned for being stupid.


The controls for shaman actions are:
B to add a red nail to the object to summon
C to add or reposition a yellow nail on the object to summon
V to add or reposition a green nail on the object to summon
N and J to add or reposition a rotating nail on the object to summon
Space to set make the object summon as a ghost object
0-9 on the number bar to quick-select an object to summon
Z and X, or Mousewheel to rotate the object to be summoned


You can start summoning objects by either clicking on one from menu on the bottom right or press a number on the number row to quick-select an object.
Use the mouse cursor to place the object so that the center of it is within the blue circle around your shaman. You cannot move while the object is summoning (unless you unlocked a certain upgrade on your skill totem) but you can slide or otherwise fall away from where the object was being summoned without cancelling the summon.

Nails
The primary use of the shaman is to summon objects in order to construct a safe path through the level. To do this you'll need to use nails to connect objects together, or else they'll just fall apart.

The most powerful nail you have in your arsenal is the red B nail. The red nail is completely immobile, it'll hold an object in mid-air and can't be moved by anything. The nail however will still allow the object to rotate around, as seen with the longer board in the picture. You can only put a red nail on a board and only in the center of the board.


The yellow C nail is what you'll be using primarily for connecting objects. They can be added to anything and can be placed in three different locations by pressing the C button multiple times. The yellow nail doesn't allow the object to rotate, but it isn't perfectly rigid as they may still wobble with weight. Yellow and green nails can also be used to attach a balloon to a mouse.


The green V nail is free rotating and can be placed in three different locations just like the yellow nail. You can use to make a catapult or a swinging door like in the above example.


The rotating nail on N and J is the same as the green nail, but it automatically rotates itself in the direction the arrow around it points. There's lots of nifty (thought not always useful) things you can do with the rotating nails. For example: on the right image you can see how connecting two boards in the middle with a rotating nail makes a quick elevator!



Ghost Objects

Pressing space will the set the object as a ghost. This will allow mice to walk through the object, but it'll still be solid to other objects and the world. Ghost objects are useful for building support structure without blocking any mice. Pay attention! Changing the nail for what you're about to summon will set it back to solid again! Make sure you press Space AFTER you've chosen the right nail!

For example: in the above image we use a ghost plank as support. This will allow any mice who were on the right side of the structure to still get back to the cheese and hole. If we had built only a solid plank leading to the cheese then anyone to the right of the plank would have been trapped.


Some maps contain "cloud" grounds that behave like ghost objects but are part of the world. Mice can go through them but your summoned objects can't. Above you see how a cloud block in the map is giving support to an anvil and stopping a balloon from floating away.

Anvils, Drags, and Runes

Sometimes you're going to need some controlled weight in your constructions to prevent them from toppling over as the mice swarm onto them. Above you can see how I used anvils to support a bridge without using a red nail. Most often you'll want to use an anvil to keep a plank from rotating over a pit. You can also attach anvils to balloons to slow their descent or even get them to come back to earth, handy if you've accidentally blocked something with balloons.


The drag, or cannonball as people often call it, is basically an anvil that fires off like a cannon as soon as it's summoned. You can rotate it to launch in the direction the arrow is pointing, but it will never launch upward. Drags are useful for getting rid of your building mistakes by launching them off the map, or knocking moveable pieces of ground around. The daring can use them to launch themselves across pits without wasting any time building bridges.
But the most common application for the drag is murder. You can bowl large groups of hapless mice to their deaths with the drag, or use one to assassinate the other shaman in co-op and duel maps.


The rune is similar to the drag, but it's lighter and it never stops pushing. The rune will continue to fly in the direction it's head is facing, but take caution that it won't keep a perfect heading and will start to drift in other directions. Attaching a rune to an object will help keep it under control. Note that the rune is a ghost object by default. Pressing space will actually make it solid to mice.

The Spirit

The spirit is the white star looking thing near the top of the summon list. It creates a small blast where it was summoned that will push mice and objects away. The spirit is special as it can be summoned anywhere on the map, not just in your summoning range. It's very useful for giving mice a boost who can't walljump just yet, or for getting yourself somewhere without the rest of the mice being able to follow.

Hard Mode

Once you've saved 1,000 mice you'll unlock hard mode and a feather will appear on the interface for you to access the shaman menu where you can change the difficulty, change your shaman color, and edit your hard mode totem. In hard mode you lose the ability to use red nails and the spirit, meaning that you have to rely on balancing weight to keep your structures from falling apart. On the plus side, you'll get twice as much experience from saving mice in hard mode than you would in normal mode and you'll begin unlocking new hard mode titles!

The Totem

You might have had your red nails and spirit taken away, but you've gained a sweet new power as a tradeoff: the totem. The totem is a pre-built structure you can summon once per shaman turn. It's built of up to 20 objects including nails, and you're allowed to have one red nail as part of your totem. The special thing about the totem is that nails can be placed anywhere on it, not just in one of the three predefined locations when you normally summon an object. This means it's possible to create more complex structures that aren't normally possible by regular summoning.

A useful totem is one that provides you with helpful structures you can use in almost any situation or a complex one that isn't feasible to build piece by piece, but a good totem is an interesting one. Don't feel discouraged to show-off your craftsmanship or make something silly. Nobody will fault you for it, in fact you're more likely to get hate for a totem that is just a red nail!

Divine Mode

Once you've tallied 2,000 hard mode saves and at least 5,000 saves in general, you'll unlock divine mode. In divine mode you don't just lose the red nail but the yellow nail too, and you won't have your totem anymore. You also won't be able to summon the cloud you can unlock from the Spirit Guide shaman skill tree. You aren't totally gimped though: divine shaman can summon objects anywhere on the map.
The lack of any rigid nails makes divine mode a steep challenge. You'll need to use crates as wedges to keep your planks from collapsing, and mice will be more likely to knock over parts of your structure while you're building it. If you can stand through the challenges of divine mode you'll be rewarded with double the experience of hard mode and yet even more titles. You'll also get a sweet pair of wings!

Having trouble with your red nail planks rotating? Place a ghost crate first and then a red nail plank inside of it. It'll be completely immobile now! You can also put a small red nail ghost plank through any wobbling board to hold it in place.


It can be hard to start building without that red nail in hard mode. Using a design like this, you can use a small platform as a starting point you can build off of. The anvils will weigh it down and push against the sides of the boards squeezing it in place. The more weight in your anchor the better!


Sometimes it can be difficult to see what you're doing in the swarm. Type /watch [yourname] to highlight your mouse and make all the others transparent. This way you can see walls and surfaces that other mice are in front of, making it a little easier to walljump in some cases. Type /watch with no name to turn this off.