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, and the game decides which 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:

The mounted/airborne cases exist because the cursor GUI works by mounting you on an invisible camera anchor that locks your view in place — that trick doesn’t work if you’re already mounted on something else or mid-air. 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.
• The mouse cursor tracks your real mouse 1:1, with no smoothing or prediction — it’s built to feel precise, like an OS cursor, rather than “assisted” or laggy. Small movements snap instantly; only bigger, faster swipes get a slight glide animation, which is purely cosmetic and never affects precision.
• Clicking, scrolling, dragging, and hover tooltips all work the way you’d expect from any modern UI.

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 park 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.

Unlike almost every other menu in the game, /settings has no server-side toggle to force everyone onto the chest fallback. This menu is the cursor engine’s own settings surface, so an admin can’t turn off its cursor version.

The settings screen has three 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 or your PDA slot — the three settings are 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 Ship/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.

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 and PDA slot 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 The Ship.” or “PDA moved to slot 4.”
• In the chest UI, changes are confirmed with updated item lore on the spot.