Wiki / Keybinds

Keybinds

The full control reference, keyboard and gamepad side by side. Thrust is analog on the gamepad and on/off on the keyboard. The autopilot verbs each fly a whole maneuver and hand control back; CANCEL, a main-drive burn, a bound thruster key, entering RCS or the engaged verb pressed again disengages them immediately, while the mouse only swings the camera. New players should start with Your first flight, which teaches these one at a time. Every one of these is REBINDABLE in-game under Settings > Controls, reachable from both the main menu and the pause menu - one binding group at a time, keyboard and gamepad in their own columns. Pressing a key another action in the same live set already holds is refused by name, and Reset Defaults puts the whole table back. The MOUSE group in that same list holds no bindings - it is the three mouse sensitivity sliders, covered in Settings.

Q and E are now the default roll keys. If an older saved control setting assigned either key to another action, that conflicting override returns to its default on load. Check Settings > Controls to rebind the displaced action to a free key.

A dash means the action has no binding on that device.

Flight

DOCK needs a docking port on both hulls, so it is offered only on a ship built with one: build a hull with a docking port in the editor, or fly the docking_approach example. A dock starts neutral: the other ship flies the pair until H takes the helm, and D again lets go. A dock with a derelict or neutralized hull, ship or station, gives you the helm at once; a living station keeps it and refuses H. See Docking port.

Dock and Helm appear in Settings > Controls > FLIGHT with D and H as rebindable defaults.

Roll turns the view and the hull together at a quarter turn a second, through the same controller that points the nose, and draws no RCS. Q rolls left and E rolls right; holding both holds still. Roll does nothing in free look, with weapons raised, while RCS is held or while an autopilot verb is flying. Roll Left and Roll Right appear in Settings > Controls > FLIGHT; no gamepad button is free for them, and a ship's own section keys cannot take Q or E.

Mining has no flight key. Each mining beam section has its own key, like a weapon or a thruster: the mining tug's bow beam answers V, and a beam placed in the editor starts on V with no gamepad button. Hold a beam's key with an ore rock travel-locked, in front of that emitter and within 100 m; it opens, runs its tip out and cuts the rock once a second where it hits. Release the key and that beam retracts. Rebind each beam on the Ship pane. See Mining beam.

RCS is a docking aid on top of standard flight. Every ship has it unless a scenario withholds it: the RCS chip in the keybind dock stays dark while it is withheld, and Basic Training hands it over at the beat that teaches it. See Flight & autopilot.

Targeting and camera

Weapons

One weapon, one button. A gun takes its own key the moment it is placed or generated, so a hull you never drew can be flown as it comes: the thrusters answer Space, the PDC turrets the left mouse button, the tubes F, a railgun R, a mining beam V with no gamepad button. The railgun key is a tap that commits the charge rather than a burst you hold, and a torpedo only launches while you hold a raised (red) combat lock.

None of this is fixed: in the editor, click a section to bind it to any key or mouse button, so a ship's controls are whatever its build assigns.

Interface

Editor

The editor is mouse-first and has no gamepad bindings. Every key below is also a row on the top bar - File, Edit, View, Add, Ship - with the key printed beside it, so this table is a shortcut list and not a second interface. The legend on the bottom line shows the gestures that apply to whatever you are holding right now, and what Esc does next. Under a block's pop-up it shows only what works there. View > Key Legend hides it.

The panels

The panels are fixed: nothing docks or drags. View hides the Hierarchy, the Inspector and the strip's body, and so do Ctrl+1, Ctrl+2 and Ctrl+3.

• Top bar: the menus, the view switch, the four tools, Axes, Snap, Undo, Redo and Play; in the Ship editor Parts and Back to {name} instead of the tools, Axes and Snap. Each button does what its key does. Snap inverts Ctrl: with it on, a handle snaps until you hold Ctrl. A menu shows only the verbs of the open document, and the Ship menu shows only in the Ship editor. A verb that fits but cannot run now is grey, and its hover says why.
• View switch: the views of the open document only. A scenario has Scene and Events, a ship has Ship, a section has Section, and every other kind has Form. A view change adds no undo step.
• Hierarchy, on the left in Scene: the tree of the document. A caret opens a row, the filter box finds a row under any shut one, Ctrl+click and Shift+click mark many, and right-click opens the row's menu: Rename, Duplicate, Delete, Frame and what can be added under it.
• Inspector, on the right in Scene: the selected node's fields. Its header carries the kind, the name, the id and a validity word, and a group heading folds. In Form view the open asset's form takes the main area instead, and the stage and its tools hide. A UI theme's palette is a grid of named swatches; press one for the colour picker.
• Events fills the window above the strip with a block palette and a canvas. The palette groups the blocks in build order: Events (the hats a script starts with), Conditions, Actions, Flow, and Values and logic. Only an Events block stands alone on the canvas. A right click on the canvas holds Paste, Clean Up (the scripts in one column, one undo step), and Duplicate and Delete on a block. It has no Hierarchy and no Inspector: fill a value on its block, and a block's ... chip opens a pop-up with every field. The four tools, Axes and Snap hide, and Q W E R X do nothing.
• Strip, along the bottom: Assets shows the mod's items and the files in its folder as tiles, sorted by kind, with a count per kind. A double click or Enter opens a tile in its view, views an image or a mesh, or plays a sound. A right click on a tile holds its verbs, and on empty space New Asset and Import File. + adds a blank item, and a hover shows the whole id. A new section asks its kind first: the arrows pick one, Enter makes it, Esc cancels. Drag a ship design onto the stage, or right click it and choose Place in Scenario, to place it in the open scenario. A ship a scenario made is listed under that scenario. A file the package leaves out wears a dotted mark. Problems is the live lint of what Play would load; a row selects the node it names. Ship appears in the Ship editor and holds the skin, the styles and Generate. Log keeps what the status line said and what the game warned of, with Clear, a level filter and a text filter. In the Log and Problems a click marks a row, Shift+click a range, and Copy copies the marked rows as text, or every shown row when none is marked. Drag the strip's top edge to resize it.

The stage camera has no fly keys: in a scenario the letters are the tools. Hold right mouse to look about, and orbit, pan and dolly to move. The wheel always dollies. A right click without a drag opens the stage menu: the Add menu, Paste, and Frame and Delete on a node.

Add holds what the open document takes, in groups: a scenario has Ship (New Ship and each ship design of the mod), Objects, Lights and Markers; a ship has Parts; a section has Mesh, Collider and Socket. Every document has Asset, which starts a new item of any kind. Shift+A over the stage opens it at the pointer, and what it adds lands there. A group opens on hover or on Right. Up and Down move, Left closes a group, Enter adds, and Esc closes the menu. Type to search every group at once. F frames whatever is selected, and at the scenario level it frames the whole document.

Every ship opens in the Ship editor, alone and square on the origin: double click it in the Hierarchy or on its tile, or select it and press Enter. Its position and rotation belong to the scenario, and only show there. A placed design opens the design. Esc or Back to {name} on the bar returns to the document you came from, with its camera, selection and view. The Ship editor has no stage tools: parts mate where they go, so Q, R and F are part keys there, as in the game's Ship pane.

Keys are verbs only while nothing else has the keyboard. With the parts gallery up, the arrow keys move its grid and Esc closes the gallery rather than backing out of the ship; with the caret in a text field, every key is a character; and while a rebind waits for a key, it takes all of them except Esc. A block's pop-up in the editor stops the verbs too, and Ctrl+Z closes it before it undoes. Ctrl+S answers under all of that except a field and a pending rebind.

Esc takes one rung per press, in this order: a block in hand, a row's menu, a block's pop-up, an open top-bar menu, an open colour picker (its pick is taken back), the part in hand, Back to the document you came from, and finally the pause menu. A text field with the caret, the gallery and a pending rebind hold the keyboard, so Esc goes to them first. Bksp is the shortcut past all of that - it goes Back from wherever you are, unless a text field has the caret, where it deletes a character instead.

The build readout

The Hierarchy prints what the hull on the stage would fly like under its tree, repainted as you place. Five lines, values aligned:

A hull with nothing on it reads no parts yet rather than - down the column, because nothing has failed - nothing has been built. The numbers are measured off the parts as they are POSED, through the same arithmetic the flown ship spawns with, so the readout and the hull cannot disagree; a design that mounts its engine at half health is counted at half health here too.

Under the block sits one line naming the limit that holds Turn down, and the one thing that raises it: torque-limited - fit another computer or structure-limited - shorten the hull. The two ceilings want opposite answers - more computers do nothing against the metal, and shorter metal does nothing against the computers - so the remedy is printed rather than left to be guessed. See What sets how hard a ship turns.

The inspector

The right-hand panel, and a block's pop-up in Events, show the selected node's own fields, read off the thing itself rather than from a list the editor keeps - so a part that grows a setting grows a row. It opens on the fields that matter for that kind; View > All Fields shows the rest. A field the editor cannot edit is still listed, greyed, rather than hidden.

A number's NAME is its grip. Drag the name left or right and the value follows, one step per pixel, live - there is nothing to confirm. A vector row has three of them, one per axis letter. Click into the box instead to type a number. What a row is measured in comes from the field's own type, and the unit is printed beside the box: m, m/s or m/s2 for a length, a speed or an acceleration, and cells for the build-grid sizes a section's own mesh is drawn in. Nothing is converted on the way in or out - the file already holds the number the box shows, so a builder types what the HUD would read.

The two gestures are not the same rule. A drag ARRIVES at a field's floor and stops there - dragging a radius past zero is asking for the smallest value there is. A typed number below the floor is REFUSED, because typing -3 into a radius is a mistake. A drag that runs out of screen wraps the pointer to the other side, so a 0.05-per-pixel field is still reachable on a narrow window.

Ship Skin, in the strip's Ship tab, dresses the build in the cladding the ship would fly with. Nothing places a plate: the skin is derived from the structure you have assembled, and it is re-derived as you build - including around the part you are still holding, so a hull is dragged about UNDER the skin and the plating closes over it before you click. A placement the editor refuses stays bare. The toggle carries through to Play, so the ship you built clad is the ship you fly clad.

Station, a checkbox on a ship's inspector, spawns that hull as a station: parked, docked with, and offering Rebuild, Refit, Trade and Storage. The hull needs a docking port and a controller, and no thruster. Under the box, the Station Check row reads ready, or the first fault, with all of them in its hint. Play refuses a marked hull that fails and names it and its faults on the status line. The ship you fly cannot be a station. Driver AI spawns a living station, and None spawns a dead one. Save writes the hull as a station, and Open reads it back as a marked ship.

Generate a hull

Generate, in the same tab, rolls a whole hull into the ship you are inside. It is a ship verb: a hull is what one ship IS, so what the roll produces REPLACES the sections that ship is already holding. That is what makes a seed a dial you turn until you like the answer rather than a way to fill a scenario with drafts.

Three controls and a list:

• Hull Seed is the number the roll is built from. It starts random, so the first press is a ship rather than everyone's ship zero, and Reroll Seed hands you a fresh one. A hull you liked is a number you can write down and type back in. Anything that is not a whole positive number is refused in the field - Enter an unsigned integer - and greys the Generate button with it, because a button that cannot work should not look like it can.
• HULL PLAN reads back what your ticks add up to, stern and bow. The roles are derived, not chosen: the biggest ticked drive becomes the ship's main engine and the biggest ticked spinal gun its bow gun, and the engine is what decides how big the ship comes out.
• DRAW FROM lists every section the merged catalog holds, a mod's included. Only the ticked rows are drawn, at the weights the standard hull plan already prices them at; a section that plan does not name joins the draw at 1. The chip on a ticked row says where on the hull that part may stand, and the zone you set on the row beats the plan's own.

The order is collapse, lint, then place. A roll that fails - or a hull the game's own content lint would reject - writes one line to the status bar and leaves the document exactly as it was, so the ship on the stage is never left holding something that will not save. Generate outside the Ship editor, or with nothing ticked, and you get the same treatment: open a ship to generate a hull into it, tick at least one section for the collapse to draw.

The ship's current Ship Skin and style go INTO the collapse, so rolling the seed asks for a different hull under the same ship rather than the cladding back at its factory setting. What lands is ordinary section nodes - selectable, movable, deletable - and each one arrives already bound to the flight key its kind answers to, so a generated ship can be set to the player's and flown as it is. The status bar names the seed and the part count it built.

Button glyphs from PromptFont by Yukari "Shinmera" Hafner (SIL Open Font License).