There is no sanity bar on your screen. The game hides the number on purpose, and the community hasn't extracted thresholds — you read your own madness the way you read weather, by what starts happening around you. What is confirmed, from demo play and previews, is what pushes the number down, what pulls it back, and the shapes the lies take.
What drains sanity
- Taking damage. Pain and dread ride together.
- Isolation. Being away from the crew drains you directly — the mechanical reason the buddy rule exists.
- Darkness. Extended time without a light source. Light is survival gear here, not mood.
- The Bandurria. A daemon bird whose presence passively drains everyone nearby. Shoot it from distance or leave.
- Madness shrines. Uncleansed shrines radiate the same drain.
What restores it
- Glowing mushrooms, foraged wild — a partial restore you eat.
- The ox-wagon. Staying near it slows the drain; it's the expedition's campfire.
- Regrouping. Proximity to teammates counters the isolation drain.
- Saint Dymphna. Her blessing dispels active madness effects — the only hard cure.
The five confirmed hallucination types
- False crewmates.A teammate's model becomes a monster, or a monster wears a teammate — you can watch "a friend" attack you while the real one stands elsewhere shouting.
- Poisoned comms. The proximity voice chat distorts — directions garble, and callouts stop being trustworthy exactly when you need them.
- Disguised terrain.The demo's canonical example: a spike pit rendered as a statue holding treasure. If loot looks convenient, ask someone else to look at it.
- Transformed equipment. Players have watched the gun in their own hands turn into a wooden stick. It still shoots — your eyes are lying, not the trigger.
- Phantom threats. Enemies and dangers that only you can see, soaking your ammo and your nerve.
The June demo patch added two more effects to the rotation, and ACE Team treats the hallucination pool as expandable — expect launch to bring lies this page hasn't met yet.
Crew protocol
Because every effect is per-player, the counter is always the same: cross-verification. Call out what you see and let the crew vote. A simple protocol survives most of it: nobody touches unexpected treasure without a second pair of eyes; anyone acting strange gets asked a question a doppelganger can't answer; and when someone says "my gun is a stick," the answer is "it isn't, keep shooting." Solo players lose exactly this instrument — which is the real difficulty setting of a solo run.
One more layer of the same theme: the dead lie too. A fallen explorer can come back as a hostile Y'm-bhi, so a body on the ground is both a rescue mission and a countdown.
Where to next
Which of those things are real, and what they take to kill.
Ammonia Salts, the crucifix and the rest of the counters.
Dymphna is the hard counter to madness effects.
Staying quiet is half of staying sane.
Short answers to everything else.
If the co-op horror loop is what you're after.
Sanity questions
How do I know my sanity is low in The Mound?
There's no visible meter. You know by symptoms: comms start distorting, equipment looks wrong, teammates look wrong, and things appear that others can't see. When in doubt, ask your crew what they see.
How do you cure madness in The Mound?
Eat the Luz del Sur mushroom — the one forageable whose described effect is reducing your feeling of isolation — return to the ox-wagon, and regroup with teammates. The hard counter is Saint Dymphna's blessing, which dispels active madness effects outright.
Can hallucinations damage you?
The dangers hallucinations hide are real — a spike pit disguised as a statue still has spikes. The hallucinated threats themselves waste ammo and position rather than dealing direct damage.