This page lists what the game does with each key and button by default, then walks through the screens you will use all the time. Every key can be changed in Options, Controls.
Keys and buttons
Keys are physical keys, named after their place on a QWERTY keyboard: on an AZERTY keyboard the forward key is Z and the left key is Q, at the same spot under the hand.
Moving
| Action | Default key | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| Forward, back, left, right | W, S, A, D | Walk. A diagonal is no faster than a straight line. |
| Run | Shift (held) | Run at 6.5 m/s instead of 4.3, spending breath. |
| Crouch | Ctrl (held) | Crouch at 1.5 m/s; swim down in water; hold still on a ladder; fly down. |
| Jump | Space | Jump a little over one block (1.25 m); swim up in water; climb a ladder; fly up. |
| Fly | F | Toggle fly mode (no gravity, no collision), when the server allows it. |
Running spends breath, 9 points a second out of 100. It comes back on the ground only, and once run dry you need 25 breath before you can run again. Ledges one block high are climbed by just walking into them.
Acting on the world
| Action | Default | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| Break, attack | Left mouse button | Held on a block, breaks it over time; with a weapon in hand, strikes. |
| Place, use | Right mouse button | Places the block in hand; opens or closes a door or a gate; held, eats, tends or reads what is in hand; with a shield, guards. |
| Pick up, use | E | Picks up the stack on the ground you aim at; opens a chest or a station; uses a bed, searches a body, feeds, shears or milks an animal. |
| Hotbar slot | 1 to 9, 0 | Takes slot 1 to 10 in hand (0 is the tenth). |
| Next or previous slot | Mouse wheel | Rolling down moves towards the end of the hotbar. |
| Draw the sword | R | Draws or sheathes the sword, with an empty hand or the sword in hand; taking any other item puts it away. |
| Chisel mode | C | Switches between building and chiselling. |
| Smaller, larger brush | [ and ] | The chisel’s brush size (also Shift with the mouse wheel while chiselling). |
Keep the place button held to place block after block, and the break button held to break the instant ones (plants) one after the other. While chiselling, the brush is a cube of 1, 2, 4 or 8 micro voxels a side, a block being 16.
Camera and screens
| Action | Default key | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| Inventory | Tab | Opens and closes the inventory screen. |
| Change view | F5 | Cycles first person, over the shoulder and behind. |
| Swap shoulder | V | Moves the over the shoulder camera to the other side. |
| Network overlay | F3 | Shows or hides the technical overlay. |
| Menu | Escape | Closes the screen on top, or opens the pause menu. |
Escape and the digit keys are reserved: they cannot be bound to anything else. Two actions never share a key: binding a key already in use swaps the two actions’ keys.
The pause menu and the options
Escape in game opens the pause menu: Resume, Options, Switch to Creative (or Switch to Survival) when the world allows it, Quit to Title and Quit to Desktop. The world goes on while the menu is open.
In Options, Controls, click an action then press its new key (Escape cancels); Default Keys puts every key back. The same tab holds the mouse sensitivity and Invert vertical look. Your choices are kept in your own settings file, never in the game’s data.
The HUD
What stays on screen while you play:
- The hotbar, labelled Belt in the inventory: ten slots at the bottom, the one in hand outlined in white, the slot numbers faint in a corner. The name of a newly taken item shows above it for a moment.
- Health and breath, two thin bars over the hotbar: health in red (20 points), breath in a light colour (100 points). A full bar fades out after a moment; low health stays shown.
- Body temperature, beside the bars once it drifts from the normal 37 °C, in blue when cold and orange when hot. The cold and the heat take away the top of your breath first, then your health.
- Effects, small coloured squares over the bars with their seconds left.
- The crosshair, a thin plus in the middle, with under it the prompt of the interact key, for
example
[E] Pick up Flint. A thin bar under it fills while you eat or tie something. - The calendar, top right: the day and the huitaine, then the season and the moon phase.
- Farmland, at the top of the screen when you aim at tilled soil: its nutrients, its moisture and acidity (see Farming).
- Durability, a thin bar at the foot of a slot holding a worn tool, from green to red. A new tool shows no bar.
The inventory
Tab opens the inventory. It is drawn as a curved panel standing in the world in front of you (in third person, beside your character): untick Inventory drawn in the world in the interface options to have it flat over the screen instead.
Slots
The inventory has three parts:
- The hotbar (Belt): ten slots, the one in hand among them. Anything goes there.
- Four bag slots, which only take bags. Each bag adds its own slots, shown in a grid of eight
columns under the bags. A new character has no bag at all: until then, the hotbar is all you
carry. A
Small Pouch adds 8 slots and a 
Large Pouch 16, so
four large pouches carry 64 more stacks. - Seven body slots around the portrait of your character: head, chest, gloves, legs, boots, wings and the off hand (a shield). Each one only takes a piece worn there.
A bag can only leave its bag slot once it is empty. A new character starts with nothing: every item is gathered.
The pouches are sewn at a workbench: two Leather and one
Plant Twine for the small one; the large one takes a small pouch, two more leather
and another twine.
Moving stacks
Everything you do with the mouse is checked by the server and shown at once:
| Gesture | Result |
|---|---|
| Left click on a stack | Picks the whole stack up to the mouse; the next left click puts it down. |
| Right click on a stack | Picks half the stack up (rounded down, at least one). |
| Carrying: left click on a slot | Puts the stack down, merges it onto the same item, or swaps it with another one. |
| Carrying: right click on a slot | Puts one item down. |
| Left drag | Moves the whole stack: to an empty slot, onto the same item, or swapped with another one. |
| Right drag | Moves half the stack to an empty slot or onto the same item. |
| Shift + left click | Sends the stack to the other part of the inventory (see below). |
| Drop outside the panel | The stack falls on the ground (half of it with a right drag, one item with a right click while carrying). |
A shift click puts a piece of armour on when its body slot is empty and a pouch in an empty bag slot; otherwise the hotbar empties into the bags and everything else goes to the hotbar first, then the bags. With a chest open, a shift click sends a stack of the inventory into the chest, and one of the chest back to the inventory.
A slot shows its tooltip once the mouse rests on it: the item’s name in the colour of its category, then its details (how many in the stack, durability, damage, what it heals, warmth, the slots a bag adds).
Helpers
Small buttons do the tidying for you:
- Sort the bags: sorts the contents of the bags by category then by item, merging the partial stacks. The hotbar is left as it is.
- Sort the chest and Put away what the chest already holds, under an open chest: the second sends every stack of the bags whose item the chest already has into it.
- Take All, on a body or an earth chest: takes everything at once (a click on one stack takes just that stack).
When a hotbar slot runs out through use (the last block placed, the last food eaten, a tool broken), the server refills it from the bags with the same item, with a little sound.
Making things
With no block open, the inventory lists under By Hand the recipes you can make right now from what you carry; a click on Make makes one. See Crafting for the workbench grid and the stations.
Items on the ground
A stack dropped or knocked out of a block lies on the ground for five minutes. Most items are collected by walking near them (within 2 blocks, half a second after they landed; a stack you dropped yourself waits 2 seconds). Tools, weapons, armour and other things worth not grabbing by accident only come when you aim at them and press E, from at most 5 blocks away: the prompt under the crosshair tells you so. Full inventory? A notice says there is no room left.
Chests and other containers
Aim at a container and press E: its slots open beside the inventory, slots like the others (drag, shift click, split). Breaking a container lets what it holds fall on the ground. Some only take certain kinds of items, shown under their title:
| Container | Slots | Takes |
|---|---|---|
 Oak Chest | 18 | anything |
 Iron Banded Chest | 27 | anything |
 Barrel | 12 | food, materials, plants |
 Basket | 9 | food, plants, materials |
 Jar | 4 | food, remedies, materials |
Double chests
Place a chest beside another chest of the same kind, both facing the same way, and the two pair into one double chest holding both halves’ slots: 36 for oak chests, 54 for iron banded ones. Never more than two join. To place a chest alone next to another one, keep Ctrl (crouch) held while placing it. Each half keeps its own slots: break one and it drops its contents, and the other half becomes a single chest again.
The oak chest is made at a workbench from eight Oak Planks.
Stations and the workbench
A station (a campfire, a kiln, a drying rack…) opens the same way, its slots in three groups: inputs, fuel and outputs, with bars for its heat, the progress of its run and the fuel left. A workbench shows its three by three grid and the item it makes. See Crafting and Fire and slow stations.