UPDATE 122026.10.12Mouse controls

Point and click

With a mouse you can now play the whole game with the cursor. Left click the ground and your survivor walks there, finding a way around walls, rocks and water. Left click a raider to walk into range and attack, or click a crate, tree or door to walk over and use it. Right click attacks right where you stand. The character always faces the cursor, and WASD and the gamepad work exactly as before.

A left click on open ground: the amber ring marks the spot, with the crosshair cursor just past it, while the survivor walks over.

What's new

Left click the ground to walk there. Hold the button and your survivor keeps walking toward the cursor.
Routes go around walls, props, deep water and anything you have built. If a spot can't be reached, you walk to the closest point you can.
A small amber ring marks where you clicked, then shrinks and fades. You stop right on the spot, with no shuffling.
Left click a raider or a mech to walk into range and attack. With a gun you stop at shooting range, as long as you have a clear shot. Hold the button to keep attacking.
Left click a crate, door, workbench or bed to walk over and use it. Hold on a tree or a rock to keep chopping or mining.
Right click attacks or swings your tool toward the cursor without moving, and stops a walk.
New pixel cursors: a crosshair, a red attack cursor with a red ring under the enemy, a hand for things you can use, a gear for things you can harvest, and a pointer over menus.
Shift sprints on a click-walk too. WASD or the left stick cancels a click-walk straight away. Build mode and menus work as before.

How it was made

Routing: the area between you and the click is cut into 8 px cells. Each cell asks the physics engine one question: would the survivor's feet fit here? A grid pathfinder then finds the route, and a second pass straightens it so the walk isn't a staircase. A walk across the screen takes about 2 ms to plan.
The world streams in chunks, and you can build walls anywhere, so nothing is baked ahead of time. Answers are cached and thrown away when a chunk loads or a wall, door or crate changes nearby.
Arriving: the last stretch follows a braking curve, so you land exactly on the spot instead of overshooting and stepping back.
The tests send real mouse button events into the game. They click the ground, a wall, a closed box, a raider, a crate and a tree, then check where the survivor ends up and what happened.

Screens

Close-up of the destination ring and the crosshair cursor.

Hovering a raider: the cursor turns into a red attack reticle and a red ring appears under its feet.

Close-up of the red attack cursor and target ring on the raider.

A click behind a wooden wall. The dotted line (added for this picture) is the planned route around the end of the wall, with the survivor partway along it.

The new cursors (crosshair, attack, use, harvest, walk, menu pointer), the destination ring's four frames and the target ring.

Tools used

Godot 4.7	AStarGrid2D for the walking routes, tested against the live physics world, so it works anywhere in the procedural world.
Python + the game palette	Six cursors, the destination marker and the target ring, hand-placed pixel by pixel from the game's 32 colours.
Claude + Hermes	Wrote the controls and 64 automated checks that drive real mouse clicks, and checked every screenshot.

How to try it

Start a game and left click anywhere on the ground. Click behind a wall to watch the route go around it.
Click one of the training dummies east of camp, or a raider, to walk up and fight. Right click to swing where you stand.
Click a crate to search it, or hold the button on a tree with an axe in your hotbar.

Known issues

Clicking far off-screen routes at most about 75 tiles at a time. Click again to keep going.
Raiders that move a lot are re-chased four times a second, so a fast enemy can briefly pull away before you catch up.

Ironfall dev log · Update 12 of 18 · All updates