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Controls and settings

Gleamheart plays on a computer, a phone, a tablet or with a gamepad, and you can change almost every control. This page lists them all, then walks you through the settings that matter most when you start. Read the parts for your device and skip the rest.

On a computer

Click the game to capture the mouse. Now moving the mouse turns your view. Press Esc to let the mouse go and open the pause menu.

Your mouse does the most work. Hold the left button to break a block, or click it to hit. Click the right button to place a block, open a chest or table, or use what you hold, and hold it to eat. Roll the scroll wheel, or press 1 to 8, to pick what is in your hand.

Every key

Here is every action the game has, with the keys it starts with. That is 48 actions, so look for the ones you need now and come back for the rest. A few have no key at first, because every key near your hand is already busy. You can give them one.

Changing a key

Open Settings, then Controls, and scroll to the keys. Click a key, then press the new one. Each action can have two keys. Esc cancels and Delete clears. Esc and 1 to 8 always stay as they are.

If you give an action a key that another action already uses, the game moves it and tells you which action lost it. A red mark means two actions share a key. The arrow beside a row puts that action back the way it started, and there is a search box to find an action by name.

Emotes

Say it without words. On a keyboard, hold 9, aim at an emote on the wheel and let go. On a touch screen, the wheel button opens them by your right thumb: slide to one and let go. These are yours from the start: Salute, Bow, Wave, Point, Kneel, Sit, Cheer, and War cry. You earn 3 more by beating the great bosses. Settings, Controls, Wheel picks the fan by your thumb or a round wheel in the middle, and Settings, HUD can hide other players' emotes.

Inventory shortcuts

• Click picks up or puts down a stack. Right click takes half, or puts down one.
• Shift+click moves a stack between bag and satchel, into or out of a chest, ore and fuel into a Forge, and armor onto your body.
• Double click a stack to gather every matching item into your hand. Shift+double-click moves every stack of its kind.
• Scroll over a stack to move one item across, and Alt+click locks a slot. See your bag and chests.
• Drag a held stack across slots: the left button shares it out evenly, and the right button puts one in each.
• Press a number key over a slot to swap it with that satchel socket, or the off-hand key to swap it with your off hand.
• Sort buttons tidy the bag (the satchel stays as it is) and an open chest. Stow, beside Sort, puts every bag stack the chest already holds into it.
• A satchel stack that runs out restocks from your bag. In the recipe book, the Make buttons craft straight into the bag, and each item’s card shows what it goes into and where to find it.

Chat commands

Press / or T to chat, and type /help to see the commands you can use where you are. Every command, with an example and who can use it, is in Chat commands. In chat, the up and down arrows bring back earlier messages, and Tab finishes commands, their options and player names for you.

On a phone or tablet

Turn your phone sideways: Gleamheart plays in landscape. Your left thumb walks and your right thumb does everything else.

• Move: the joystick at the bottom left. Push it to its edge to run, or push forward twice quickly.
• Look around: drag anywhere else on the screen.
• Use or place: tap where you want it. Mine or attack: press and hold, and a ring fills under your finger.
• Jump: the big button at the bottom right. Sneak shows beside it when it matters, like at the edge of a drop.
• The wheel: the button above Jump. It holds chat, the camera view, zoom, marks, sharing a moment, hiding the HUD, sneaking and your emotes.
• What you hold gets its own button: Draw for a bow, Cast for a staff or a fishing rod, Place for a block, and Block for a shield in your off hand.
• Lock on: near a boss, a lock button shows above Dodge. Tap it to lock on, again for the next weak point, and once more to let go.
• The bag is at the top left. The menu button is at the top right.
• Drop: hold a satchel slot until its ring fills, then slide up and let go. A short slide drops one, a long one drops the stack. Letting go without sliding drops nothing.

Making touch fit your hands

Everyone holds a phone a little differently, so the touch controls bend to you. Find these in Settings, then Controls:

• Move with: pick Joystick or D-pad. On the D-pad, slide your thumb between arrows to turn, tap up twice and hold to run, and tap the middle twice to sneak.
• Joystick: Fixed keeps the stick in its corner. Floating puts it wherever your thumb lands on the left half of the screen.
• Push to run: push the stick past its ring to run. Hold it there a moment and running locks on, lit gold, until you touch the stick again.
• Left-handed: the stick moves to the right, and Jump and the buttons to the left.
• Arrange controls: drag any button to a new place and tap it to resize it. Portrait and landscape keep their own layouts.
• Button size (in the Comfort tab), Touch control opacity and Dead zone set how big, how solid and how touchy the controls are.
• Touch look speed: how far the view turns when you drag a finger. Lower it for finer aim.

With a gamepad

Plug in a gamepad and play with it straight away. The left stick walks and the right stick looks around. The game knows 17 gamepad actions, and starts them on these buttons:

To change a button, open Settings, then Controls. Press Change beside an action, then press the new button on your pad.

The HUD

The HUD is everything drawn over the world while you play. Here is how to read it:

• The medallion (bottom left; top left on a phone): your life is the ring of Crystal shards around it, two life to a shard, with Live Hearts rimmed in gold. Your food is the ember bowl in its middle and the embers around it, two food to an ember. Armor shows on the gold shield under it, a Sunapple's ward as a gold halo around it, and your Ether as the arc on its side once you know a spell. When your life runs low, it throbs red: time to back off and eat.
• The satchel (bottom right; along the bottom on a phone): the round socket holds what is in your off hand (tap it, or press the key left of 1, to swap it with what you hold), then sockets 1 to 8, one for each key.
• Breath: under water, a ring of bubbles circles the crosshair (the middle of the screen on a phone) and pop as your air runs out.
• Hide the HUD: F1, or the crossed-out eye on a phone. The medallion, the satchel, the compass, chat and your hand all go. Press it again to bring them back.
• Zoom: hold U, or the Zoom button on a phone. The view narrows to a third, and looking around slows to match. Wearing Gloomseer Lenses, it narrows even further.

The settings worth knowing

Open Settings from the title screen (top right) or from the pause menu. On a computer, O opens it from the pause menu. Point at a setting, or tap its name on a phone, and a line under the list tells you what it does. Your browser remembers everything you choose.

The settings sit in tabs: Video, Controls, HUD, Sound, Comfort, Gameplay, Chat and Language. Where you can sign in, there is an Account tab too. Here are the ones a new player most often wants.

Graphics and Recommended

The first time the game opens, it runs a short test and picks graphics that suit your device. That choice is called Recommended. Change anything and it says Custom instead, so you always know whether you are on the game's pick or your own.

Under Graphics sits a row for each of 37 details, like clouds, glows and swaying plants. A detail that may be too much for your device says May run slowly. Changed too much? Reset to recommended puts every detail back. The other rows on the Video tab:

• View distance: how much of the world is drawn around you, in chunks of 16 blocks. Lower it if the game stutters or your phone gets warm.
• Render scale: below full size, the world is drawn with fewer pixels and stretched to fit. It looks softer but runs faster. Menus and text stay sharp.
• Far land: the hills and mountains beyond the loaded land, drawn cheaply out to the horizon. Turn it off if the game stutters.
• Steady 30 when struggling: when your device can't keep up, the game draws a steady, slower frame rate instead of a jumpy one, and speeds back up when it can.
• Battery saver (phones and tablets): one switch for a long session. It sets Low graphics, a view of 4 chunks and a slower frame rate. Turn it off and your own settings come back.
• Menu rest: while the game is paused or a big menu is open, it draws fewer frames. That saves power and keeps phones cooler.

If the game runs slowly

1. Lower View distance first. It makes the biggest difference.
2. Press Reset to recommended if you changed things, then turn down any detail marked May run slowly.
3. Lower Render scale. The world gets a little softer and a lot quicker.
4. Close other browser tabs. Gleamheart needs WebGL, which Chrome, Edge, Firefox and Safari all have.

Sound

The Sound tab has a Master slider for every sound, and one each for music, effects (blocks, footsteps and creatures) and ambience (wind, water and rain). Mute silences everything at once and keeps your levels for when you turn it off. Captions put a short line at the side of the screen for each sound you hear, with an arrow toward it, so you can hear a creature sneaking up even with the sound off.

Comfort and accessibility

If something makes the game hard to play, there is probably a setting for it. Most of these live in the Comfort tab:

• Reduced motion: no zoom when you run, no dip when you land, no hand sway, smaller wobbles and calmer menus. It also turns off View bob, the gentle rock of the view as you walk.
• Color-blind safe colors: the colors that mean good and bad, like ready recipes and poison, change to pairs that stay apart with red-green or blue-yellow color blindness.
• Captions (Sound tab) show every sound as words. Subtitle size sets how big the words in the opening scene are.
• UI scale: makes the satchel, chat, the bag and the menus bigger or smaller, from 80% to 140%.
• Toggle run and Toggle sneak (Controls tab): press once to start and once to stop, so you don't have to hold a key down.
• Invert look: moving up looks down, like a flight stick. Mouse sensitivity and Raw mouse input tune how the view turns on a computer.
• Auto-jump hops you up one-block steps by itself. Hold to repeat, on touch screens, keeps placing blocks while you hold.

Helpful extras

These are on when you start, and each one quietly saves you time. If one gets in your way, turn it off.

• Keen Eye (HUD tab): one line at the top tells you what you are looking at and which tool mines it.
• Torchsight (HUD tab): with a torch in hand, ground dark enough for creatures to rise on is marked. Put a torch there and they can't.
• Danger hints and Threat edge (HUD tab): a line warns you when your air or health runs low, and a red edge shows a creature coming at you from where you can't see.
• Placement ghost (HUD tab): a faint outline shows where the block in your hand will go.
• Felling, Restock and Ready hand (Gameplay tab): chop the bottom log and the whole tree falls, an empty stack refills from your bag, and the right tool jumps to your hand when you start to mine.
• Take back (Gameplay tab): break a block you placed in the last 5 seconds and it pops straight back into your bag. Oops, fixed.
• Drop guard (Gameplay tab): dropping a tool, weapon or armor takes a second press, so a stray key never throws your best sword into a lava pool.

Settings, tab by tab

Looking for one setting and not sure where it lives? Here is what every tab holds.

For grown-ups: Kinholds only

Kinholds only, in the Gameplay tab, keeps this browser to your own worlds: no online worlds, no chat with strangers and no friends list. A grown-up picks a code to turn it on, and only the same code turns it off. Hide chat, in the Chat tab, takes chat off the screen while you play.

Every command you can type in chat is on the commands page. How to start a world and get through the first night is in Your first day.

Your next step: Your worlds. All sections: the guides.