Controls

Boxy is played with keyboard and mouse, with a gamepad, or with touch, and all three work in the browser client and the native app. The tables below are the defaults; every action can be rebound, so if a key here does nothing, check the Controls screen before assuming a bug.

On desktop the game takes the mouse when you click into it, and gives it back whenever a menu opens. That is the whole model: pointer locked means you are looking around, pointer free means a menu has focus. Pressing Escape closes the menu and hands the mouse back to the game.

Movement

Sneak is worth the habit. Bridging over a drop or mining along a cliff edge with sneak held is the difference between a long climb back up and a death notice.

Acting on the world

The crosshair decides what you act on. If a use does nothing, you are usually aiming at the block in front of the thing you meant, standing too far away, or in an area whose claim does not permit you to build there.

Menus and screens

Handling items

Every container in Boxy — your inventory, a chest, a furnace, a machine, a trade window — uses the same slot behaviour, so this is worth learning once:

• Click a slot to pick up the whole stack, and click again to put it down.
• Right-click while carrying a stack to place one item at a time.
• Shift-click to send a stack straight to the other side of the window where the menu supports it.
• Tools show a durability bar instead of a stack count. Armor goes in the equipment slots on the character panel, not just anywhere in the bag.

Chat and commands

T (or Enter) opens chat; / opens it with a slash already typed. Anything you type without a slash is spoken to the world you are in.

/help prints your personal command list — the one filtered by your privileges in that world, which is why it is the authority rather than any list on this site. Commands most players use: /who, /worlds, /time, /biome, /town, /spawn, /sethome, /home, /homes, /whisper, /global, /me, and /bug to file a report with your position and character attached automatically.

Gamepad

A connected controller works without configuration. The left stick moves and the right stick looks; sensitivity, deadzone, Y inversion, and swapping the two sticks are all in the controller section of the Controls screen.

Touch

On a phone or tablet the left half of the screen is a movement stick and the right half is the camera. Jump, sneak, and sprint are on-screen buttons that behave exactly like Space, Shift, and E.

• Tap and hold to mine, in the same place a mouse would hold the left button.
• Double tap to place or use — the touch equivalent of a right click.
• Tap acts on whatever your finger lands on, rather than on the crosshair. It is the quickest way to open a chest or talk to an NPC on touch.

Opening a menu clears any held movement or action input, so you will not walk into a wall while reading your inventory.

Rebinding, and the built-in profiles

Open the game menu with Escape and choose Controls. Every action is listed by group, and each one can hold more than one binding — that is how W and ↑ both walk forward by default. Bindings are per-account and follow you between the browser and the app.

Four profiles ship with the game, and each is a starting point you can then edit:

Standard

The Boxy default described on this page: sprint on E or Ctrl, inventory on I, arrow keys as a second set of movement keys.

MT

For players coming from the classic open-source voxel sandbox: sprint on E, inventory on I, debug read-out on F5, no arrow-key movement.

MC

For players coming from the best-selling block game: inventory on E, sprint on Ctrl, Q drops one item and Ctrl+Q drops the stack, controller triggers swapped.

Arrows

Movement on the arrow keys, for playing with the mouse in your left hand. Everything else stays where it is.

If you bind one key to two actions the Controls screen points it out rather than refusing the edit — occasionally that is exactly what you meant. Reset returns a profile to the built-in layout it was forked from.