Controls & Input

How your game is played is authored, not hardcoded. You pick the control scheme your game ships with, decide which actions are bound to what, and players can rebind from the in-game settings.

Presets

A preset is a starting point — every switch underneath it is individually authorable: click-to-move, click-to-select, click-to-interact, double-click auto-attack, whether interaction needs an explicit binding, and whether the camera can rotate.

Bindings

Every action in the game — movement, the ability slots, panel toggles, social panels, taming, mounting, stealth, build mode — is a named action with a list of inputs. An input can be a key, a mouse button, a gamepad button or axis, or a touch gesture, and an action can carry several at once.

Defaults include the ability row (Q/W/E weapon abilities, R/D/F armor abilities), panel keys (I inventory, P character, K skills, U quests, H achievements, M market, B build, N world map, G guild, O friends, J pets, L breeding, Y store) and world actions (T tame, A mount, C stealth).

Aiming abilities

World → Player Controls → Casting decides what pressing an ability key means, as opposed to which key it is.

Some abilities land on a point rather than a unit — a skill shot, or any ability with an area shape. Those are unusable without a preview, because the only other way to learn where one lands is to spend it and watch. The casting mode is how a player gets that preview.

Two switches sit underneath:

What always happens

• Skill shots and area abilities always aim, whatever these settings say. What the preview draws comes from the ability's shape under Abilities → Targeting & AoE.
• Target-locked abilities always fire on press unless you turn the second switch on — combat keeps its snap.
• Holding a key never repeats a cast. One press is one cast.
• Right-click, or Escape, always drops a pending aim — in every mode, including mid-hold, and including when the cursor is sitting on an enemy. Cancelling costs nothing: no mana, no cooldown. The click is spent on the cancel, so it does not also walk you or open a context menu.
• Losing focus cancels a pending aim (alt-tab, a browser shortcut) rather than leaving it stuck.
• The preview sits where the ability will actually resolve, which the ability's Aiming mode decides (Abilities → Targeting & AoE): a Free aim ability's area follows the cursor even with a target highlighted; an Auto or Locked ability's area snaps to the selected target, because that is where the server will land it.
• A spell you cannot afford never starts aiming. Pressing it shows the refusal immediately — no indicator, no cast bar (see below).

Aiming and movement

An ability with a cast time is winding up while you hold it, so it follows that ability's Move while casting rule (Abilities → Timing) exactly as it would if you had simply cast it:

• Set to none (the default), pressing the key stops your character, and moving cancels the wind-up.
• Set to slowed, you keep moving at the authored fraction of your speed.
• Set to free, movement does nothing to it.

Once the cast bar is full, the rest of the hold is only aiming — you can walk wherever you like and the shot stays ready. An ability with no cast time is never restricted, because there is nothing to interrupt; raising its indicator will not stop your character, cancel the walk you were already taking, or change your animation — aiming an instant ability is invisible to everyone else until you fire it.

A channelled ability is different again: the press starts it, the effect runs while the key is held, and letting go stops it. See Channelled abilities on the Abilities page.

When movement does break a wind-up, the indicator comes down with it — the aim ends when the cast does, rather than leaving the player pointing at a spell the server has already dropped.

Casts you cannot afford — or that are not ready

A spell is checked against your mana and its own cooldown on the press, not on the release. Too expensive, or still cooling down? Nothing starts at all: no cast bar, no cast pose, no indicator — just the refusal ("Not enough MP" / "Not ready (2.1s)"). Holding a spell all the way through its wind-up only to be told you were never able to cast it reads as the game changing its mind, so it does not happen. Mana can still run out during a long hold, and that is caught when the cast resolves.

One deliberate exception: a press landing just before the cooldown clears (inside the input-buffer window) still opens the aim — that is the pre-aim the buffer exists for, and the release fires the instant the ability is ready. The global cooldown never blocks aiming at all, so weaving your next cast during it stays possible.

Aiming on phones

Hold-to-aim means pinning a virtual button with one thumb while dragging to aim with the other, which is miserable on a touchscreen. Touch devices therefore default to Click instead — tap to arm, tap to fire — whenever you have left the world on the shipped default. Pick a mode deliberately and it applies everywhere, and a player's own choice always wins.

Letting players choose

Aiming style is muscle memory, so players can override your default in Settings → Combat — the same way the games this borrows from treat it. Turn off Allow player-side overrides on the Movement tab and your choice is enforced instead; the Combat section then disappears from their settings rather than showing a control that does nothing.

Gamepad

Controller support is configurable per project: enable it, set the stick deadzone, invert look X or Y, and toggle vibration. Gamepad buttons and axes appear alongside keys in the same binding list, so a project can ship a controller layout without a separate input system.

Touch

Touch layouts are authored, not improvised: choose the movement mode and lay out the on-screen buttons, then exported mobile builds get controls that fit the game instead of a desktop HUD shrunk down.

Zoom

The camera's default, minimum and maximum zoom and its wheel step are set per project, and the in-game Default Zoom setting is bounded by the range you allow.