Controls

Language: English · Português (Brasil)

Controls

Flapforge deliberately keeps its primary control to one button: difficulty comes from timing, positioning, reading obstacles and build decisions, not from input combinations. A second input fires the equipped active ability, and everything else is menu navigation. Keyboard, mouse and touch all work, on every screen.

Keys and mouse

Input	Action
Space, Up arrow, left mouse button	Flap
X, Shift, right mouse button	Use the equipped active ability
Esc	Pause the run / go back a screen / on the home hub, twice to quit
Enter	Confirm the focused item
M	Mute / unmute audio
F3	Toggle the debug overlay (tick rate, frame time, seed)
F11	Toggle borderless fullscreen

A flap is an edge: one press is one flap, however long you hold the key, unless Hold to flap is on (see below). In the READY moment before a run, the first flap is what starts it.

Menus

Every screen is usable with either input device:

• arrow keys or Tab move the focus ring, Enter or Space activate the focused control, and Esc goes back one screen;
• every control also responds to mouse hover and click, and to touch;
• on the home hub Esc shows "Press again to quit" and a second press closes the game. On the desktop, Settings › About has a Quit row too.

Lists and tabs (the Shop, the Goals tabs, the upgrade trees) take the same focus ring, and the text-size and colour-blind settings apply to all of them — see Settings and Accessibility.

Rebinding

All seven keyboard bindings in the table above are rebindable in Settings › Controls: select the action and the screen waits with "Press a key, or Esc to cancel". The arrow keys, Esc-to-go-back and the mouse buttons are fixed. Bindings live in settings.json under keyBindings, which carries exactly those seven actions; "Restore defaults" puts them back.

In a run

Situation	Input
Flying	flap; ability; Esc pauses
Paused	the Resume and Menu buttons; Esc resumes; a click or tap outside the buttons resumes too
Modifier draft	arrows compare the cards, Enter (or Space) takes the focused one, Esc or the Skip this draft button skips
Boss	nothing new: fly through the streamed patterns until the timer runs out

While the draft cards are up, a flap, an ability press or a pause are not forwarded to the run, so mashing Space over the cards cannot fly the bird into a pipe it cannot see; the flap you were holding when the draft opened cannot take a card by itself either. See Modifiers and Synergies.

The game-over strip and retrying

When the bird dies the game-over strip appears with three buttons: Retry, Summary and Menu.

• Space (or a left click, or a tap outside the buttons) retries instantly with a fresh seed.
• Enter opens the run summary.
• Esc returns to the home hub.

Rewards are banked the moment the run ends, so a retry never loses them. A retry of the daily keeps its seed and only counts the attempt; see Game Modes and Difficulty. The strip and the summary are described on Playing a Run.

M, F3 and F11 are remembered

The three toggles work on every screen and are not throwaway switches: each one flips the matching setting (mute, the debug overlay, fullscreen) in settings.json, applies it and persists it, so the game starts up the way you left it and the Settings screen always shows what is in force.

Input timing

Input is sampled per simulation tick (60 Hz), not per frame: a tap shorter than a frame is never lost, and key auto-repeat never produces an extra flap. A key still held when the window loses focus is released cleanly, and a key held across the fullscreen switch (F11 recreates the window) does not turn into a second press.

Touch (Android)

• A tap anywhere on the playfield flaps.
• The game-over strip's Retry / Summary / Menu and the pause panel's Resume / Menu are real buttons; a tap outside them still retries (game over) or resumes (pause).
• Every menu control responds to a touch the way it responds to a click.
• There is no Quit row on Android; leave the app the way the system does.
• The picture fills tall screens edge to edge; the Fill screen setting (on by default) restores the letterbox when switched off.

Hold to flap

Settings › Game › Hold to flap makes holding the flap input flap continuously — one flap every 24 ticks — instead of once per press. It is an accessibility option, persisted like every other setting; see Settings and Accessibility.

Tip: the HUD and the F3 overlay both show the seed of the run you are flying. Seeded mode replays the seed of the last run you finished, so the pipes that killed you can be flown again in exactly the same places — see Game Modes and Difficulty.