This game had three ways of teaching, and all three left out the same thing:
- The six tutorial missions teach by doing: fly, mine, jump, kill, dock, equip. They name no keys.
- The twelve radio lessons tell you a system exists — the ability bar, the scatter gun, the Forge, ranks. They name no keys either.
- Settings › Controls has the full list, if you go looking for it.
There was a fourth place that did name them: a strip of controls along the bottom of the screen. It was removed, for a reason worth remembering: it was in the way and it lied. It listed fixed keys when all of them are remappable, so the moment anyone changed one, the help became misinformation.
Cards with the key drawn out
Now, the first time you fly each class, six screens open with the key in a box — like on a keyboard — and one line about what it does. Next, next, and they never come back. They stay in Settings › Help so you can go through them again whenever you want.
The box reads the input map live. If you rebind W in Settings, the card says the new key without anyone updating it. That is exactly what the old strip lacked, and the reason this cannot go stale.
Where it was really needed: heavy ships
A fighter and a heavy ship fly differently in almost everything, and anyone arriving from a fighter gets none of it right:
| Fighter | Heavy | |
|---|---|---|
| Steering | the mouse leads the nose | the mouse does not fly: it designates |
| Throttle | W · S | the mouse WHEEL |
| W · S | throttle | pitch, with a limit |
| Q · E | free roll | side camera view |
| Firing | left click | designate + SPACE, and it fires from the flanks |
| Its own | — | drift with Ctrl |
That throttle-on-the-wheel change is the one that catches everybody out, and until today there was nowhere that said so.
You advance with a button, not the space bar
It looks like a detail and it is not: SPACE already advances radio dialogue, and on a heavy ship it is the weapons-free order. A tutorial that opens fire when you press “next” would be the worst possible first impression.
It does not pause anything either. This is an online game: pausing only freezes your client while the server keeps simulating, so you would sit there still and visible. The only thing cut is control of your ship, exactly as when the chat is open. And the card appears as you launch from your own base, where there is not a single enemy.
And the content was written from the code
There was a keys document from months back listing keys that do not exist — TAB, I, C, P, O, B — and others that mean something else today: R is docking, and SPACE is the weapons-free order, not the brake. Writing the cards from that would have made them lie in half their lines.
They were written by reading the flight controllers, one at a time. And there is a check that runs with the rest and fails if a card names a key that no longer exists.
