Wiki / Settings
Settings
The Settings menu is the same modal from both the main menu and the pause menu, so you can change anything mid-run. Every choice is remembered across restarts - saved to a config file on the desktop build and to browser storage on the web.
Audio
Four draggable sliders, top to bottom. Each shows its level as a whole percent and takes effect live as you drag.
| Slider | What it moves |
|---|---|
| Master | Everything at once. The one control most players ever touch. |
| Interface | Menu clicks, HUD ticks, the editor and the flight computer - the sounds that come from the cockpit, not from the world. |
| World | The engine hum, weapons, hits, the rocks breaking up - everything out there, heard at the distance it happens. |
| Music | Reserved. The slider moves and the setting is saved, but the game ships no music yet. |
Master multiplies the other three, so a track you have turned down stays down when you raise Master.
Most buttons tick when the pointer reaches them and play a press sound, at the Interface level. Most refused presses buzz instead. A disabled button stays silent, and the NOVA OS monitor's controls follow its SND switch.
Graphics quality
The Preset row offers Low / Medium / High; the four lever rows under it are what a preset sets. Move any lever on its own and the preset row reads Custom; land the levers back on a tier's values and it reads that tier again. Every row applies live. A preset also sets the torpedo trail: 1.5 s of path on High, 0.75 s on Medium, none on Low. With Custom levers the trail follows Particles: 0.75 s on, none off.
| Row | Choices | What it moves |
|---|---|---|
| Preset | Low, Medium, High, Custom | All four levers at once. Custom is read-only: it means the levers match no tier. |
| Particles | Off, On | Torpedo and muzzle bursts, hit sparks and the railgun wake. Off spawns none of them. |
| Resolution | 50%, 70%, 85%, 100% | The internal resolution the 3D world is drawn at before it is upscaled to the window. The HUD and menus stay crisp. |
| Flash lights | Off, 3, 6 | How many detonations and slugs may light the hull at once. |
| Camera shake | Off, On | The shake on hits and detonations. |
| Preset | Camera shake | Flash lights | Particles | Resolution |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| High | on | 6 | on | 100% |
| Medium | off | 3 | on | 100% |
| Low | off | off | off | 70% |
Show explanation
Particles Off is spawn-less: the bursts and the wake are not created at all, rather than created and hidden, which is the cut the frame-time baseline measures as a real combat cost. A lower Resolution renders the world smaller and upscales it to fill the window - a lever aimed at fill-bound hardware (laptop iGPUs, phones). The HUD and menus stay crisp and fully clickable; only the 3D world softens. On a strong discrete GPU the win is small, so it is a knob for the low end rather than a general speed-up. Flash lights are paid per pixel they touch, so the step from six to three is a real one on a busy salvo and costs nothing on a single hit.
Window
The desktop build opens borderless fullscreen, filling the monitor it starts on. The Windowed row on the Graphics tab gives the desk back, and whichever you pick is remembered - an install that has already chosen keeps its choice.
A window will not be dragged narrower than 640x600. The Settings panel is the widest thing the game draws, and below that size there is no layout left to read it in.
VSync sits under the same heading. On, the default, presents each frame on the display's refresh; Off presents as soon as a frame is drawn, for a player measuring frame times or chasing input latency, at the cost of tearing.
The web build has neither row: the game fits the canvas the page gives it and the browser presents on its own schedule. The panels themselves are sized as a share of the window, so a narrow browser column still gets a readable Settings modal with its Back button on screen. Esc, or B on a pad, does what Back does on every main-menu screen; in the pause menu it closes Settings first, and the next Esc resumes.
Pause when unfocused
Alt-tab, or clicking away from the game, leaves the run going: the fight does not wait. Switch Pause when unfocused to On under Focus on the Graphics tab and losing the window opens the ordinary pause menu instead. Coming back never resumes by itself; Resume is yours. It works the same in a browser tab.
Controls
The Controls tab is where you REBIND. It shows one binding group at a time - FLIGHT, TARGETING, CAMERA, SCENARIO, SYSTEM, INTERFACE, MAP, SHIP and INVENTORY - with the keyboard and gamepad columns side by side, drawn as the keycaps and pad glyphs you actually press. The same table is laid out on the Keybinds page.
Click a chip and it prompts PRESS A KEY; the next key, mouse button or pad
button you press becomes that column's whole binding. Esc backs out,
which is why no row can be bound to it, and Reset Defaults puts the whole
table back. It asks twice: the first press puts Cancel where the button
was, beside a red Confirm and what it resets. Cancel, Esc
or any other button cancels.
A press something else could answer at the same instant is refused by name -
W is already bound to Main Drive - and the chip stays armed for another try.
Sharing a key across screens is fine and deliberate: G is GO TO in
flight and the mates overlay on the interface's Ship pane, and only one of them is ever
listening.
Two rows are read-only, drawn greyed: Esc and the pad's pause chord. They are the way out of every other screen, including this one.
A section's weapon, thruster or mining beam key is not here - that is per
ship, assigned in the editor or on the interface's Ship pane. From the pause
menu, a flight row cannot take a key that a section of your ship holds:
V is already bound to the ship's mining_beam section.
Mouse
MOUSE is a group in the same list, and the one page with nothing to rebind on it: three sliders and the Invert Y switch, and no Reset Defaults - that button is a keybinding operation and would not put a sensitivity back.
| Slider | Range | Default | What it scales |
|---|---|---|---|
| Look | 100-300% | 200% | Ship steering, free look and turret aim |
| RCS | 100-500% | 100% | Mouse-driven translation, the docking fine-adjust |
| Free Camera | 100-300% | 200% | Mouse look on the free (WASD) camera |
Each 100% is that slider's OWN baseline, not a shared number - the three gains
behind them differ by two orders of magnitude, so a single scale would be
unreadable. Only the mouse is affected; the gamepad sticks and the keyboard have
their own curves and are untouched.
Invert Y turns mouse look's pitch the other way: push the mouse forward to look down. It applies to the Look path only - ship steering, free look and turret aim. The free (WASD) camera and RCS translation keep their direction.
A slider or switch moved from the PAUSE menu takes effect on the ship you are already flying - there is no reload and no ship to respawn.
Why Look 200% is the new default
Mouse look shipped before this page existed, on one fixed gain. That gain is
what 300% is now, and it was too fast for most pointers - so 100% is a third
of it and the default sits at 200%, about two thirds of what mouse look used
to feel like. If the old speed was right for you, put Look at 300%.
Interface
| Row | Choices | What it moves |
|---|---|---|
| Theme | Phosphor, Hardware, and any theme an enabled mod declares | The look of every panel, button and readout. A theme that fails to load says so under the row and the game falls back to Phosphor. |
| UI scale | 75%, 100%, 125%, 150% | How large the interface draws. Panels are capped at a share of the window, so a larger scale still keeps them on screen. |
| Training prompt | On, Off | The Basic Training offer in the main menu's corner. |
| Field notes | On, Off | The handbook hint card beside it. |