SETTINGS & THE CURSOR GUI

Two doors, one menu

Every major menu in QuantumRift is actually built twice:

• Cursor GUI (modern, default experience): a flat panel that hangs in front of your view with real text, buttons, hover tooltips, scrollable lists, and a mouse cursor — not blocks in a chest.
• Chest menu (classic fallback): the traditional Minecraft chest-style inventory GUI, made of items with names and lore. You click items to cycle through choices instead of picking directly from a list.

You only ever see one of these at a time. You can choose which you prefer on the MENUS tab of /settings, or from chat with /settings classic, /settings advanced and /settings default (see below); otherwise the game decides based on your client. Without the resource pack, there is no cursor engine — if your client hasn’t got the pack, the game can’t safely draw the floating cursor panels (they’d come out broken and perspective-warped), so it automatically and cleanly falls back to the chest menu instead. Nothing is ever broken or unreachable — you just get the older-style menu.

When you get the chest menu even with the pack installed

Even if you’ve accepted the resource pack, a few in-the-moment situations will still drop you into the chest fallback:

These cases exist because of how the cursor GUI works: it freezes your camera on an invisible anchor and tucks your body out of sight a few blocks away while the menu is open — that doesn’t work if you’re already riding something, falling, spectating, or there’s nowhere to put you. Either way, you can still do everything the menu offers; you just get it in chest form.

How the cursor GUI feels to use

• Panels hang on a flat plane about 3.5 blocks in front of your view, and your view stays perfectly still while a menu is open.
• The mouse pointer is drawn by your own game, every frame, straight from your mouse — so it has zero lag, whatever your ping, with no smoothing, glide or prediction. It stops at the edges of the menu like a desktop cursor, and sliding it along an edge stays smooth.
• Precision mode is on by default: quick, big movements run at your full pointer speed, and the slower you move the mouse, the finer the pointer gets — handy for small buttons and sliders.
• How fast it moves, and how much precision you want, is up to you: see the POINTER tab below.
• While a menu is open your hotbar, hearts, hunger, air, XP bar and crosshair are hidden so nothing sits on top of the panel, and your cursor won’t highlight or target blocks and mobs behind it. Everything comes back the moment you close it.
• Clicking, scrolling, dragging, and hover tooltips all work the way you’d expect from any modern UI.
• F5 hides the pointer (and the front-facing view hides the whole panel). Press F5 again to get back to first person.

Keyboard navigation (WASD / E / Space)

If you’ve got high ping, or just don’t want to reach for the mouse mid-menu, every cursor screen fully supports keyboard navigation:

• Press any WASD key to hide your mouse pointer and put a white focus ring on a widget (a button, field, tab, etc.).
• WASD moves that focus ring to the nearest logical neighbor in the direction you press — up, down, left, or right. It won’t jump across the whole panel or skip past the widget right next to you.
• SELECT (default E, the Inventory key) activates whatever’s focused — same as clicking it with the mouse.
• BACK (default Space, the Jump key) backs up one level at a time: closes a dialog first, then a drill-down/sub-page, then the whole screen — in that order.
• Moving the mouse at all instantly cancels keyboard mode and hands control back to the pointer.
• Holding a key auto-repeats, moving the ring rapidly while held — just like normal OS key-repeat.
• Inside a scrollable list, WASD is contained to that list — you have to reach the very top or bottom before the ring can move on to things outside it, like tabs or a Close button.

Which keys can be bound

SELECT and BACK can each be bound to one of four physical keys:

Two keys are deliberately not offered in the picker:

• Ctrl (Sprint) — double-tapping W to sprint would misfire during fast WASD menu navigation, so it’s excluded from the in-game picker. (A server admin can still force it on via config, at their own risk.)
• Sneak and the 1–9 hotbar keys — can never be bound at all. Sneak is reserved as the “dismount safety,” and the hotbar keys are indistinguishable from mouse-wheel scroll input.

You can’t bind the same key to both SELECT and BACK — the game blocks the conflicting choice and tells you the key is already in use by the other action.

Server defaults and pinning

Before you ever touch /settings, both actions track whatever the server admin has set as the default — forever, unless you change something. The moment you pick a key for one of the two actions, that action becomes “pinned” to your personal choice and stops following server default changes. The other, un-pinned action keeps tracking the default as normal.

• Server default SELECT: E
• Server default BACK: Space

The /settings command

Type **/settings** (permission quantumrift.settings.use, granted to everyone by default) to open the settings menu — cursor screen if you have the pack and the engine is running, chest menu otherwise.

/settings follows your menu style like every other menu: pick Classic on its MENUS tab and it opens as a chest menu too, where one item switches you back.

From chat, no menu needed: /settings classic switches every menu to the chest menus, /settings advanced back to the cursor GUI, and /settings default follows the server setting again. This is the way out if a cursor menu ever opens huge, with giant buttons or no arrow: that means your client is not drawing the resource pack’s shaders (a shader pack such as Iris with shaders on, OptiFine, or a Minecraft version the pack does not draw on yet) and nothing inside the menu can be clicked to fix it. The hint before your first cursor menu says so too.

The settings screen has six tabs.

CONTROLS tab — “Keyboard Navigation Keys”

• One row each for SELECT and BACK, shown as a row of clickable pill buttons: E / SPACE / Q / F. Click a pill to pick it immediately.
• Each row includes a short explainer (“activates the focused widget” for SELECT; “dialog, then drill-down, then close” for BACK) and tells you whether that action is currently tracking the server default or your own pinned personal choice.
• A reminder note: “F is also the panic-close key — binding it moves close to BACK.”
• A note explaining that WASD moves the focus ring, and any mouse movement instantly takes back over.
• A “RESET TO DEFAULTS” button that clears both key bindings back to tracking the server default. This does not touch your respawn point, your PDA slot, your pointer settings, your friend settings or your menu style — they are all completely independent.

RESPAWN tab — “Where you wake up after dying”

Lets you choose where you’re carried to a moment after respawning — you’re not teleported instantly on the death screen, but a beat after you click Respawn.

A couple of extra behaviors worth knowing:

• If your chosen destination becomes unreachable (for example, your team has no Core), you’re simply left wherever vanilla would have put you — no error, no fuss.
• This respawn-destination teleport also skips the normal “empty inventory required” rule that applies to manual Base teleports elsewhere in the game.

PDA tab — “Which hotbar slot holds your PDA”

The PDA is locked into one hotbar slot (slot 9 by default) and you can’t drag it out. If you’ve rebound your hotbar keys in the client and want that slot for something else, this tab lets you move it.

• A row of nine pill buttons, 1 to 9, numbered like the hotbar keys. Click one and the PDA moves there immediately.
• Whatever was sitting in the slot you picked is swapped into the PDA’s old slot, so the rest of your hotbar stays exactly as you laid it out.
• The sub-line tells you which slot you’re on and whether it’s the server default or your own pinned choice.
• A “USE SERVER DEFAULT” button clears your pick and puts the PDA back in the server’s slot (9 unless the admin changed it).
• All the usual PDA locks follow the slot you chose: you can’t drag it out, number-key swap into it, or drop it, wherever it lives.

POINTER tab — “How the pointer moves”

Two cards side by side.

POINTER SPEED — how far the mouse pointer travels across a cursor menu for the same movement of your mouse.

• SLOWER and FASTER buttons step the speed by 0.1×, from 0.5× up to 2.0×. The current speed is shown between them. (If you had picked a speed above 2.0× before the range changed, it is now 2.0×.)
• The sub-line tells you whether you’re on the server default or your own pinned choice.
• “SERVER DEFAULT (1.0×)” clears your pick and goes back to the server’s speed (1.0× unless the admin changed it).

PRECISION — how much finer the pointer gets when you move the mouse slowly. Fast moves always keep your full speed.

• OFF — the pointer always runs at your speed.
• LOW — slow, careful movements ease the pointer down to 0.75× of your speed.
• HIGH — eases it down to 0.6× of your speed. This is the server default.
• “SERVER DEFAULT (HIGH)” clears your pick and goes back to the server’s setting.
• Precision switches itself off while your ping is very high (above about 150 ms), so the pointer keeps a steady speed on a laggy connection.
• The pointer never goes slower than 0.45×, so at the slowest speeds precision has less room to work: at 0.5× it can only ease you down to 0.45×.

Both cards apply straight away, on this very screen — move the mouse after clicking to feel the change. The pointer stays right where it was when you click, so you can keep clicking without chasing the button.

FRIENDS tab — “Notices and friend requests”

Two cards side by side, both applied straight away:

• FRIEND JOIN/LEAVE NOTICES — ON (the default) tells you in chat when one of your friends joins or leaves; OFF stops those lines.
• FRIEND REQUESTS — ACCEPT (the default) lets players send you requests; REFUSE AUTOMATICALLY turns every incoming request down for you. The sender is only told you aren’t accepting requests.

Friends themselves are managed with /friend and in the PDA’s Friends tab.

MENUS tab — “Menu style and sounds”

Choose how every menu in the game opens — the PDA, NPC shops, the Base Core, teleporters, machines, tags, tokens, crates and /settings itself.

• ADVANCED — the cursor GUI described at the top of this page. This is the server default.
• CLASSIC — the chest menus instead, mouse only, the same ones you get without the resource pack.
• The sub-line tells you whether you’re on the server default or your own pinned choice.
• “SERVER DEFAULT (ADVANCED)” clears your pick and goes back to the server’s setting.

Picking Classic applies at once: the cursor screen closes and /settings reopens as its chest menu. From there, one item switches you back to Advanced, which reopens /settings as the cursor screen. Advanced still needs the resource pack and still drops to a chest menu in the situations listed at the top of this page.

The same three choices are available from chat as /settings classic, /settings advanced and /settings default; picking Classic from chat closes any cursor screen you have open.

NPC dialogue boxes aren’t menus, so they look the same whichever style you pick.

Menu sounds. Next to the menu style is a second card, MENU SOUNDS, with ON / OFF pills. Menus play small sounds as you use them: a soft tick when the pointer reaches a button, a click, a page turn when you change tabs or pages, a short swoosh when a confirm box opens or closes, a chime when a purchase or sale goes through and a low note when something is refused. The cursor GUI and the chest menus play the same sounds. They are on by default, and only you hear them. Turn them OFF to silence every menu sound for your account, on both kinds of menu.

The chest-menu version of /settings

If you’re on the chest fallback (no resource pack, or any of the other fallback triggers above), /settings opens as a 3-row chest GUI titled “Settings”:

Because a chest slot can’t offer a direct picker the way the cursor UI’s pill buttons can, every option in the chest version works by clicking to cycle through the same choices, in the same order, rather than selecting one directly.

How your preferences are saved

Your key bindings, respawn destination, PDA slot, pointer speed, pointer precision, friend settings, menu style and menu sounds are saved to your player profile server-side, not just for the current session — they follow you across every login.

• In the cursor UI, changes are confirmed with a toast/message, e.g. “Keybinds reset to server defaults.”, “You will respawn at Imperial City.” or “PDA moved to slot 4.”
• In the chest UI, changes are confirmed with updated item lore on the spot.