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.

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. See Docking port.

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

Mining has no flight key. Each mining beam section has its own key, like a weapon or a thruster: the line warship'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, not standard flight: it appears only when a scenario grants it (the RCS chip appears in the keybind dock only when it is available), and the training range hands it over for one leg of its pattern. 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 bottom-left legend shows the gestures that apply to whatever you are holding right now; View > Key Legend hides it.

The stage camera starts at a walking 60 m/s, which is the register a plate is inspected in, and a held direction ramps it to 32 times that over two seconds - the far end of an 8 km range is about four seconds away. Let go and it is back at walking pace at once. Double-click a ship and the camera frames the whole hull, however big it is; F does the same for whatever is selected, and at the scenario level it frames the whole document.

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. Ctrl+S answers under all of that except a field and a pending rebind.

Esc takes one rung per press, in this order: an open top-bar menu, the search field, the gallery, a pending rebind, the part in hand, the ship you are inside, and finally the pause menu. Bksp is the shortcut past all of that - it leaves the ship from wherever you are, unless a text field has the caret, where it deletes a character instead.

The build readout

The left rail prints what the hull on the stage would fly like, 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 rail 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 shows 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 left rail's Ship Settings block, 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.

Generate a hull

Generate, in the same left-rail block, 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 a ship, or with nothing ticked, and you get the same treatment: go inside 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).