How to Survive the Backrooms (and Can You Ever Leave?)

Everything below is in-universe: the survival rules of a fictional setting, as written in the fan-built Backrooms Database. The Backrooms aren’t real, and you can’t actually end up there (here’s where the story came from).

How do you survive the Backrooms?

Find almond water, get out of Level 0 before thirst or exhaustion gets you, manage your light, and join a group. Most early deaths involve no monster at all: on Level 0, people simply run out of water, food and strength. After that, the danger is entities and other people.

The rules, in order

1. Don’t drink the carpet. Level 0’s carpet is soaked in a strange fluid that’s unsafe to drink. Your water is almond water (more below).
2. Don’t wait to be found. You’re almost certainly alone on Level 0. It has no entities, but finding another wanderer there is thought to be impossible or close to it, so anyone you “see” is probably a hallucination.
3. Keep moving, and pick an exit. The halls loop (walk in a straight line and you can end up back at the start, in different rooms), so don’t try to map it. Walk far and long enough and the yellow rooms turn into Level 1’s parking garage.
4. If you find the Manila Room, rest there. It’s a room with a dim orange light and a manila pattern that people find soothing. Stay long enough and it has been reported to move you on to Level 1 or Level 2.
5. Get to Level 1 for power and people. It’s Class 1, safe and stable, with reliable electricity for lights and outlets, which is why so many groups live there. Supply crates appear and vanish with almond water, canned food and weapons.
6. Carry a flashlight, and know when to switch it off. Blackouts on Level 1 last minutes to days, and entities hunt in them. Light protects you from some entities and gives you away to others (see below).
7. Watch your footing. Rusty rebar sticks out of the walls, and a cut from it almost certainly means tetanus. Some almond water puddles are False Puddles: mouths full of teeth, 1.5 to 3.6 metres deep. Stay away from paintings that show living things; most are entities that can pull you in.
8. Check your companions’ blood every day. Skin-Stealers wear the skin of the people they kill. Translucent blood means the person next to you isn’t a person.
9. Find the M.E.G., but don’t count on it. The Major Explorer Group has about 25,000 members and is friendly to lone wanderers, but its outposts are rare: most wanderers pass through dozens of levels without seeing one. On Level 1, its Base First Light guides lost wanderers to safer areas.
10. Never open a door that doesn’t belong. An exit door that doesn’t match its surroundings may be the way into Level !, the most dangerous anomalous level in the Backrooms. Its doors appear at random on any level and keep moving, which makes them hard to block off.

The light rule: Smilers vs Hounds

Use light against Smilers and darkness against Hounds. Two of the most common threats need opposite tactics.

	Smilers	Hounds
Where	Dark areas of any level	Most levels, especially damp, abandoned ones
What they do with light	Wince in pain; a flashlight or a lit room usually drives them off	Move towards it
What works	Light and fire (fire slowly dissolves them)	Back away slowly; turn your lights off; fight only at range
The catch	Some tolerate light, and if one spots you, more are likely coming	They hear up to two miles away, and a bite infects you

If a Hound bites you, douse the wound in almond water within about five minutes. That’s the window in which it neutralises the Hound virus; there’s no known cure once it takes hold, and about 20 to 30 minutes after the symptoms start, the body begins turning into a Hound. For the rest of the bestiary, see Backrooms entities explained.

What should you drink? Almond water explained

Almond water is the Backrooms’ main source of drinkable water, and the one thing you can’t go without. It tastes of almond and vanilla mixed with rose water, and turns up in plastic bottles, cans, glass wine bottles, cartons, water fountains and even whole bodies of water. Nobody has ever seen it appear: it only shows up where no one is looking.

• What it does: cures minor illness, helps you focus, and is said to neutralise the effects of hostile entities.
• What it’s worth: enough that some groups use it as money.
• When it’s gone off: it grows white, blue or green mould and smells of rotten milk and cheese. Expired almond water can be poisonous, and deaths have been reported from bottles left too long. Cold keeps it fresh for longer.

Reliable sources on the early levels: supply crates on Level 1 and vending machines on Level 4. Don’t trust every puddle on Level 1 (step 7).

Which levels are safe, and how do you leave them?

The Main Nine (Levels 0 to 8) are the core levels, and the first few are where you’re most likely to start. Here’s the survival view of four of them. For every level and what it does to you, see Backrooms levels explained.

Level	Threat	What kills you	Ways out
Level 0, the Lobby	Class 1, no entities	Thirst, hunger, exhaustion, madness	Walk to Level 1; the Manila Room; break a wall (Level 483) or the floor (Level 27, now and then the Void); a rare emergency exit (Level 14); greenhouse-style glass doors (Level 13)
Level 1, Parking Zone	Class 1, few entities	Blackouts, tetanus, False Puddles, paintings, Skin-Stealers	Keep exploring to Level 2, or take an unlocked door
Level 2, Pipe Dreams	Class 2, unsafe	Steam pipes at 60 to 100 °C, Smilers, Hounds, Clumps	No doors: the exits are in crawlspaces full of live wires
Level 4, Abandoned Office	Class Habitable, no entities	Nothing on the level itself: tens of thousands live here, with an M.E.G. colony and a medical group of 400+. Leaving is the risk	Most exits lead into the Void; doors playing classical music lead to Level 5

Two tips for the in-between. In Level 2’s Biological Pipeline, a living tube up to 200 km long, don’t stop moving: it only digests what stays still for a few hours. And a noclip’s fall through the Void usually lasts three or four seconds at most, but some describe falling for “eons” and a few never come out; the theory is they lacked momentum.

Who can you trust?

Be wary of every group: trust the M.E.G. more than most, and anyone too generous least. People can be as dangerous as entities here:

• The M.E.G. is friendly to individuals but tense with rival groups. If you settle in one of its outposts and you’re over 18, you can be drafted into its Volunteer Squad for at least a year, or be expelled.
• Cultus Sancti on Level 1 is a cult of about 50 that is hostile to everyone outside it. It wiped out another group to “appease the holy one”.
• A colony that seems overly generous shouldn’t be trusted, according to the standard advice on Skin-Stealers. They have been known to live inside colonies for years, picking people off one at a time.

If you end up in Level !: run, and don’t stop

Grab supplies for five seconds, then run 10 kilometres without resting. Level ! is a red-lit hospital hallway with almost every kind of entity chasing you at the same speed. The level’s survival guides say:

1. Spend about five seconds grabbing supplies, no more, and save them for when your legs give out.
2. Don’t open the side doors. Once you’re in, you almost never come back out.
3. At 5 to 6 km the roaring stops. They’re still behind you. Keep running.
4. Most exits are fake. A real exit has no other hallway on either side of it.
5. Once you’re out, don’t sit or lie down straight away: collapsing at your limit can cause sudden death. Keep walking to the nearest outpost.

Very few who enter Level ! escape.

Can you ever leave the Backrooms?

No confirmed way out exists. In this version of the story, noclipping out of the real world (the Frontrooms) only ever leads into the Backrooms, and no exit back has been confirmed. The escapes people talk about are rumours or traps:

• Level 36, an endless empty airport, is rumoured to hold the exit to the Frontrooms at its furthest section. Nobody has reported finding it, and the people who look usually go missing.
• “A Way Out”, a story about a wanderer who opens a door onto reality, is flagged by the Database itself as an urban legend, not a real exit.

So the honest answer is that survival in the Backrooms means a life there: finding a colony, trading almond water, and staying away from doors that look like exits.

What happens if you think you’ve escaped?

Check the mirror. The cruellest level is the one that looks like home. In False Frontrooms Awakenings, you wake up in your own bedroom, except the bed is bigger, the room is smaller, the couch is slightly out of place, and the fridge is empty. Mirrors show no reflection, phones and computers don’t work, and your family may have no faces. The level rebuilds your house from your memory and gets the details wrong. Go outside and it resets you in a different room.

It has no clear exit. Staying is reported to drop you back into a level you’d been on before, a random level or an undocumented one. One letter sent to the M.E.G. ends with its writer boarding a train, certain they were going home. Their photo was later found on the floor of Level 398. They’ve never been found.

Is this how it works in Kane Pixels’ Backrooms or the movie?

No. These rules belong to the fan-written Backrooms only. Almond water, numbered levels and the M.E.G. come from that shared database. Kane Pixels’ series, and the A24 film set in his version, has no levels at all: it’s a single dimension that a research company, Async, found a way into. See which Backrooms is canon and what Async is, or start at the Backrooms world page.