Controls

The game is played with the keyboard and the mouse. Every key but Esc, Enter, the number keys and the mouse can be changed on the Controls screen of the main menu or the pause menu; the legend's Keys tab lists the bindings in the game. Open a second window (or a second machine, see Getting started) to see a second player.

Driving

Key	Does
W S (or ↑ ↓)	Throttle; brake, then reverse.
W W	Double-tap and hold: boost for up to 2 s, enough to power-drift any car; it refills in 5 s while you drive on.
A D (or ← →)	Steer.
Space	Handbrake (drift).
V	Next vehicle class, half a second apart: compact, sedan, sports, muscle, SUV, buggy, van, box truck, semi with its trailer, scooter, bicycle, motorbike, police car, taxi, bus, ambulance, fire truck, garbage truck, pickup, limo, delivery scooter, ice-cream van, tractor. Each has its own engine placement, drivetrain, axles and number of seats (Driving model).
G	The horn; in the police car, the ambulance or the fire truck it switches the siren on and off.
B (held)	The radio wheel: the stations round a circle, Off last; point the mouse at one and let go to tune it (Sound and the radio).
. · ,	The radio: the next station · the one before, Off between the last and the first. On foot too, with the settings' Keep listening on foot (earbuds).
E	Get out, at the car's door, at a crawl; faster than 8 km/h you bail out, tumbling, and above 35 km/h you stay in.
1 · 2 in a garage	At the wheel of a car standing still in a garage: 1 resprays it (new paint, repaired, the Wanted level cleared unless the police saw you go in), 2 stores it, each for the price its panel shows, paid in cash (Vehicles).
R	Back to the nearest spawn point, half a second apart, with a repaired car and new tyres.
Backspace	Reset the whole level: everyone back at their spawn in a fresh compact, new pedestrians, no projectiles, the missions from their start (also a button in the legend). Not in a run’s room, whose level nobody resets: the button is greyed out with the reason beside it, and the HUD’s log says it when either is pressed.

On foot

Key	Does
W A S D	Walk.
Shift	Run, at 35 km/h at most.
Space	Jump; the jump goes on the way it took off, whatever the keys.
E	What the prompt above the character says (below).

Out of a versus run (out of lives, or caught where that puts you out) your body is out of the world and the camera follows a teammate: Space goes to the next one (Missions).

The prompts E answers are below. Getting in, you run to the seat's door and get in there, half a second in which the car stands whatever the keys say.

Prompt	Where, and what happens
Get in	An empty car, within about 3 m.
Carjack	A car stopped or crawling, from its driver's door (its left): the driver is pulled out and tumbles, the passengers are put out, and half a second later you get in at that door as at any other. A player at the wheel only where the game lets players hurt each other.
Get in as passenger	A car, from anywhere but its driver's door.
Open trunk	From behind a parked car nobody drives.
Pick up	The items lying nearby.
Open	A crate or a locker: a panel lists what it holds and what you hold; a click takes an item or puts one of yours in, and E again closes it.
Open door, Close door	A door; a Locked door opens only for whoever carries its key.
Unlock	A locked car, with its key (an item tagged key:vehicle:<id>): it unlocks the car and gets in.
Locked · hold to pick	A locked car without its key: E held three seconds picks the lock (Picking…), a crime if somebody sees it, and the car is yours.
Climb	A ladder, at its foot or its top: W up, S down, Shift faster, Space lets go; at the top you step off onto the floor.
Search	A guard asleep, knocked out or dead: its pockets open in the container panel.
Take out	A car you stored, on foot in a garage's empty bay.
Talk, use, hack, enter a code	A contact standing in the world (talk to them), a terminal (use or hack it), a keypad door (its code): all in the phone's panel (Phone).

Weapons and cover

Key	Does
Mouse · left click	Aim · fire the weapon held. On foot the character faces the cursor and the view leans toward it. Hold the click with the grenade to cook it, let go to throw.
1–9	Select the inventory's first nine slots: the selected slot's weapon is the one in hand, an empty slot or an item that is no weapon being the fists.
Wheel	Pick the target when several stand on the line of fire at different heights (a terrace, a pit): the shot pitches up or down to the one picked.
Q	Take cover at the wall or car ahead, or leave it. Hidden: no shooting, no damage; crouching behind low cover. W A S D move along the cover, never away from it, and stop at its end.
Right button	Pop up out of cover (shooting again, and hittable) and hide again; at the end of a tall wall, peek out past the edge instead, with a line of fire at what the wall hid.

Weapons and their ammunition are items in the inventory's sixteen slots, the ammunition in a pouch beside them, each weapon's tile showing its rounds left (Items). Free roam's arsenal keeps the old keys: 1 the fists, 2–7 the pistol, shotgun, rifle, rocket launcher, grenades and tranquilizer; a game may give its own loadout. Every shot spends a round, a shell, a rocket, a grenade or a dart; out of it the weapon does not fire and the HUD says OUT OF AMMO. From a car only the pistol fires, selected, and only forward. Hits take health off people and cars; blasts and punches shove too. The fists knock out from behind and stun from the front; the tranquilizer's darts, carried as items, put a person to sleep three seconds after the hit, half a second after a precise shot at the head (Stealth).

Items and the phone

Key	Does
F	Use the selected item of the inventory strip (a first-aid kit heals).
G	Drop it at your feet (on foot).
X	Select the next slot (or click one; X and a click reach all sixteen).
T	Take out the phone or put it away (in free roam, a phone with only the Radio app). In a game: the contacts' messages with their replies, calls to answer and to make, the apps, the map that drops a waypoint on the minimap. The game goes on under it, and W A S D, Space, Shift and E still drive, while Esc goes back a page and 1–9 press its numbered buttons instead of selecting a slot (Phone).

Menus and chat

Key	Does
Esc	The pause menu: Resume, Settings, Controls, Quit to the main menu. Alone in the room the world waits for you; with others it goes on. With the phone out, Esc goes back a page instead.
Enter	Open the chat: type a line on the room's channel, the party's or to a friend, or pick a quick-chat phrase or an emote; Enter sends, Esc closes it and the keys drive again (Social).
M	Music on or off (quiet while the radio plays) (also a button in the legend; the engine and tyre sounds always play).
H	The HUD on or off (also a button in the legend; the legend and the minimap stay).

For developers

Key	Does
P	Prediction on or off (off: the raw authoritative stream the server sends at 20 Hz).
L	Cycle the simulated latency, added in the client both ways: 0, 50, 100, 150, 250 ms.
K	Cycle the simulated loss of the snapshots and the inputs, with some jitter: 0, 2, 5, 10, 20 %; the server then sends snapshots onto the last one acknowledged, and the inputs go four to a frame.
N	Correction smoothing on or off.

What to look at while turning them is in Testing by hand and Netcode.

On the screen

The HUD

Top left, hidden and shown with H (or the legend's HUD button): speed, wheels on the ground (FLAT while a tyre is flat: nail strips pop them, R puts new ones on), front and rear grip, wheelspin, the boost meter, the car's class and layout (as a passenger, the car and the seat), the weapon held with its rounds left, the target on the line of fire (what it is, how far, how high above or below you, which of several the wheel picked), health (yours and the car's, WRECKED at zero), the Wanted level and its Heat, the character's stance, facing and position on foot (standing, walking, running, in the air, crouching, pressed against the wall, peeking out; the character is drawn crouched behind low cover and flattened against a tall wall; the facing is a compass bearing, 0° north up the screen and 90° east, see Directions), cover and what the keys do there, a log of hits given and taken (you hit pedestrian −25 (DOWN)), prediction statistics (straight-line driving reads correction 0.00) and the connection. Every reading is in Testing by hand.

The Wanted stars and the stealth badge

The Wanted stars sit top centre (★★☆), flashing while a police officer sees you, the fine of an arrest under them. Where a level has guards or security cameras, a badge under the stars says whether you are hidden or seen and the guards' alert (suspicious, alert, search, caution). See Stealth and What the game has.

The legend

The card in the bottom-left corner (React with i18next, see apps/client/README.md). Under its tabs sit the language button (English, Italian), the music, HUD and level-reset buttons; it folds away with its Hide button and comes back with the Legend button left in its place, scrolls inside itself when the window is short, and the whole overlay rearranges itself for small windows. A click on the card or on the minimap is never a shot, and a key typed in a field never drives the car.

Tab	What it has
Keys	The bindings.
View	The NPCs' view cones (90°, 12 m, red when they see you), in the game and on the minimap; Colliders, the collision meshes as a wireframe over the level (?colliders=1 in the URL starts that way, see Levels); Go to, which puts your car on any road of the level, or you at one of the game's places, a landmark's roof or upper hall, and the clock and the weather (on a server whose debug commands are on; on one that takes none they are greyed out under a line that says why).
Chasers	Three pages: the chasing style, picked by clicking its chip (tail, pursuit, aggressive, guard) and explained in a few lines; the car tactics of a chaser spawned in a car (shoot from the car, ram, get out and fight; the crew, up to the car's seats; the car's class); and the player's infinite health (enemies shoot, you never fall; the HUD reads ∞) or max health (a slider from 25 to 250; a player has 100) and Wanted level (a button per star: the police without the crime). Its buttons drop a chaser behind the player, on foot or at the wheel of a car on the road behind (armed or not), and clear them again, on a server whose debug commands are on (a test-* level, FOI_DEBUG=1, or npm run dev; never a platform's rooms, the live platform's among them): on one that takes none the tab says so and its options are greyed out, its pages still turning. The legend works with the mouse and with the keyboard alone (Tab to a control, Enter or Space on it; the arrow keys move between the tabs). Enemies are drawn orange (the dead lie in their own colours); the HUD lists every chaser with its mode and distance. See AI.
Games	The platform's published games and their rooms (Platform).
Social	Friends (add one by name, accept, join the room a friend plays in, invite them to a party, write to them), the party (start one, leave it, join an invitation) and the room's players (mute, vote out, report, befriend). See Social.
Server	A field for another game server: type host:7777 (or a full WebSocket URL) and press Connect; the page reloads with it in the server query parameter.

What each switch does, the clock's among them, is in Testing by hand.

The minimap

The square in the bottom-right corner is the whole level, north-up (east on its right, as on the screen): the ground lighter the higher it stands, the roads as dark strips, buildings in blue, structures in teal, props in brown, the nail strips in red, other players as dots in their colours, pedestrians as faint dots, enemies in orange (the chasers' dots coloured by their mode), the police's dots flashing blue and red, and you as the yellow arrow. It draws every guard's view cone coloured by its alert, and the cameras' while they watch. Every colour is in Testing by hand.