Revision - controls and piloting - SpaceCraft Wiki

Flying is the first thing you do in SpaceCraft, and the developer has aimed for controls that are intuitive to pick up without being simplistic. This page covers the flight and on-foot controls that have been confirmed, the information the piloting interface puts on screen, and the settings you can change. See Getting Started for the wider opening walkthrough.

Perspective

The game switches perspective by context. On foot, inside buildings and on planet surfaces, you play in first person. Flying a ship, the camera sits in third person. A first-person cockpit view was one of the most requested additions during development and the developer confirmed it had been added to the ship controls.

Flight Controls

Input	Action
Mouse	Steers the flight path, which is the direction the ship is heading rather than a free-look camera.
W	Increases throttle.
S	Decreases throttle.
Shift	Engages the after-burners. They get you somewhere faster but drain the battery, so they are not free speed.
E	Enters your ship when you are standing next to it, and docks when you are in range of a hangar.
Number keys	Trigger the skills granted by installed modules. Mining sits on 1 by default on the starting ship.

Skills are tied to the modules fitted to your ship rather than to a character class, so which numbers do what depends on your loadout. See Ship Building.

Taking off and docking both run an automatic sequence. Undocking flies you clear of the station before handing you full control, and flying into a hangar bay or pressing the interact key in range begins a piloted docking sequence that doubles as the transition into the station. See Space Stations.

The Piloting Interface

Once you are outside the hangar the flight HUD appears. Five elements were confirmed in the developer's walkthrough of the tutorial.

Element	What it tells you
Skill Slots	The skills your installed modules provide. Not every module grants a skill, and some grant more than one.
Thrust bar	How hard the engines are being pushed. It is a throttle reading, not a speed reading.
Hull bar	The ship's health.
Battery bar	Drains as you use skills and recharges automatically whenever the ship's solar panels are in direct sunlight.
Mag-Plasma tank	Magnetic-Plasma, the fuel consumed by Faster-Than-Light jumps.

Flying near a planet adds two more readouts, altitude and planetary temperature, plus a compass tied to your radar skill that points toward nearby resource nodes. Nodes show as question marks until you get close enough to identify what they are. See Exploration and FTL Travel and Mining and Resources.

Orientation Between Space and Planets

Space has a single universal up and down so that you do not lose your bearings between systems. A planet has its own gravity, so the ship has to reorient as you descend. The transition runs through a buffer zone that rotates your up direction gradually rather than snapping it. Leaving a planet is smoother still, because the ship is already pointing at the sky.

On Foot

You leave the ship to move around stations and to gather some resources by hand. The Permits menu opens with P. Mining can be performed with left-click, an option added after demo feedback. Sprint or walk can be set as the first-person default in the settings.

Settings and Accessibility

A batch of control and comfort options was added in response to demo feedback and applies to the live build.

Option	Notes
Full key rebinding	Every action can be remapped.
Mouse sensitivity	Adjustable.
Invert Y-axis	Toggle.
Default sprint or walk	Sets which one first-person movement uses by default.
Screen shake and camera effects	Can be disabled.
Field of view	Adjustable.
UI scaling	Adjustable. A known issue affects UI scaling at the Steam Deck resolution of 1280 by 800, particularly base interfaces.
Control hints	Non-intrusive prompts for certain actions, with more added in the ship editor.

Controller support is not available. The developer said its focus was a control scheme tailored to the keyboard-and-mouse audience and that controller support posed enough challenges to make it unlikely at earlier stages of development. Nothing published since has announced it. See System Requirements.

Changing Region

Region selection lives in the options menu and is also how you reach the offline experience: Options, then Change Region, then Offline Mode. See Solo Offline Mode.

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