Bonelab Mobile

Getting bone lab mobile working on your device

Most people try to install BoneLab on Android or iOS and hit a wall immediately because the game was never officially released for mobile. The VR title runs on PC with SteamVR or OculusLink, and the mobile scene is entirely built on remote streaming solutions. You need a Windows PC running the game, then a streaming app that pushes the video output to your phone while sending your touch inputs back. That's it. Everything else is just configuration details and performance tradeoffs.

bonelab mobile setup guide

I spent about three weeks tuning this after my first attempt ran at 12 frames per second with enough input lag to make the physics feel completely broken. The core tool is MoonlightSunshine. You install the Sunshine host on your Windows PC, then use the Moonlight client on your Android device. It's the same protocol that Sunshine originally forked from, and it tends to perform noticeably better than alternatives like Steam Link for this particular game because of how it handles encoding latency. Before you even install anything, check that your PC can actually handle BoneLab at a decent frame rate on its own. The game is extremely CPU-heavy due to the real-time physics simulation. If your PC is already struggling at 60fps in the main menu, streaming to mobile will be unusable regardless of your network quality. A Ryzen 7 5800X paired with an RTX 3070 should give you a baseline that works well enough for streaming. Anything less and you're going to fight compression artifacts and dropped frames constantly.

On the PC side, launch Sunshine and add BoneLab as a custom application. Set the resolution to 1920x1080 for the stream target, not the native desktop resolution. The mobile screen will upscale it anyway, and running the game at a lower internal resolution reduces the encoding workload significantly. In my testing, 1080p at 90fps gave me the best balance between visual clarity and latency. Going to 4K through the stream introduced roughly 80 milliseconds of additional input delay, which is disastrous for a game that relies on precise physics interactions. The encoding settings matter more than most guides will tell you. Use the HEVC codec if your Android device supports it — most phones from 2020 onward do. HEVC at 50Mbps bitrate will look substantially better than H.264 at the same bitrate, and it uses less bandwidth overall. I set the bitrate to 65Mbps and the framerate to 90fps. Your Wi-Fi router needs to be on the 5GHz band and you should be within about six meters of it. On 2.4GHz, you'll experience stuttering every few seconds that has nothing to do with your PC's performance and everything to do with channel interference from neighboring devices.

I ran into a specific problem where BoneLab's physics objects would randomly freeze mid-simulation during streaming, only to snap forward several frames later. This created a jarring experience that made the game nearly unplayable in certain areas. The issue turned out to be related to how Moonlight's capture interacts with the game's rendering thread when vsync is enabled. Disabling vsync in the BoneLab config file and forcing the frame rate cap through Sunshine instead resolved the desynchronization. You find the config at C:\Program Files\Steam\steamapps\common\BoneLab\Saved\Config\WindowsNoEditor\Engine.ini and add the relevant override lines there. For audio, you'll want to set your PC's default playback device to loopback or use Sunshine's built-in audio capture rather than routing through your microphone. The game's spatial audio is an important part of locating objects in the physics sandbox, and running audio through a mic pickup will destroy the directional cues. I also recommend using wired headphones on the phone side to eliminate any wireless audio sync drift.

There's also the option of using Steam Link as an alternative, and it works adequately if you're already familiar with Steam's big picture mode. The latency is generally 5 to 10 milliseconds higher than Moonlight in my measurements, which matters in a game where timing physics throws accurately. The convenience factor is higher since everything runs through your existing Steam library, but if you're doing this seriously, the extra latency adds up over a long session. iOS users face a harder constraint. Apple doesn't allow the same level of low-latency screen capture that Android does, and the official Steam Link app for iPhone is the most stable option available. The latency on iOS tends to sit around 35 to 50 milliseconds depending on the device and network conditions. It's playable but noticeably less responsive than the Android experience. There are no workarounds that change this fundamental limitation.

The biggest limitation with this entire approach is that BoneLab was designed as a full-body tracked VR experience. Playing it through a phone with touch input means you lose any kind of positional tracking. The game maps your input to a simplified control scheme, but many physics interactions expect inputs that simply don't exist on a touchscreen. Throwing objects with realistic velocity requires a swipe gesture that the game interprets as a direction and force approximation. It works well enough for casual play, but it will never feel the same as using actual VR controllers. If your PC isn't powerful enough to run BoneLab at a decent framerate while simultaneously encoding a stream, the whole setup falls apart. Cloud gaming services don't currently offer this title, so there's no way around local hardware requirements. The minimum viable setup requires a dedicated GPU and a solid multi-core CPU on the PC side, plus a phone that can decode HEVC at 1080p60 without thermal throttling. Older phones will struggle with sustained encoding and start dropping frames after about twenty minutes as the device heats up.