Keyboard & Controls

Naval Action is a keyboard game. You steer, trim, aim and fire almost entirely from the keys, and the first time you open the controls list it can look like a lot to take in. It’s less daunting than it first appears — the bindings cluster into a handful of jobs (handle the ship, work the guns, manage the crew, move the camera), and within a few battles they become reflex. This page lays out the default bindings by job so you can find the one you need, then explains the inputs that are more than a single keypress.

Customizing your controls

Nothing in this guide is fixed in stone: the bindings are defaults, and the controls screen lets you remap any of them to keys that suit your hands. Reach it from the options menu while docked. Because a broken or half-changed control scheme is dangerous at sea, treat rebinding as a port activity — make your changes, then test them in a tutorial or a low-stakes fight before you rely on them. If you ever inherit someone else’s settings or get lost, the controls screen also lets you restore the defaults that the rest of this page describes.

Common & global keys

These work both in the open world and inside a battle. They cover the basics of moving the ship and a few quality-of-life tools you’ll use constantly.

Handling your ship in battle

In a battle instance you have far finer control of the ship than the open world’s simple point-and-go. Speed comes from how much canvas you fly and how your yards are angled to the wind, and these keys are how you set both. Manual sailing — trimming each set of yards yourself — is what separates a captain who can hold the wind from one who drifts; the full technique lives in Manual Sailing, but the keys are here.

Gunnery: aiming and firing

Firing well is a two-part habit: aim, then choose how much to send. Look toward the side you want to fire and right-click to enter the aiming view (right-click again to leave it). In aiming view you’ll see the shot’s dispersion and a red elevation bar; hold Left Alt if you want to swing the camera around while still aimed. Left-click fires a full broadside; Space fires a single “tracking” shot so you can check your elevation before committing the whole battery. The deeper theory — lead, range, and where to aim — is in Gunnery & Aiming.

Choosing a battery and ammo

Loading the right shot is a two-step sequence done with the number keys. First pick the battery, then pick the ammo type:

• Battery: 1 port side, 2 starboard side, 3 stern chasers, 4 bow chasers.
• Ammo: 1 ball, 2 chain, 3 grape, 4 double shot, 5 double charge.

So loading grape on the starboard guns is “2 then 3.” You can only load what you stocked in port, so plan your ammo mix before you sail — what each type does is covered in Ammo & Damage Model.

Crew & boarding orders

Your crew is a shared pool divided between sailing, gunnery, survival and boarding, and a few keys cover close-quarters work — grappling an enemy, bracing for a hit, and searching a foe who has struck. Boarding in particular is its own minigame — these keys get you into it; the actual fight is in Boarding and the crew trade-offs are in Crew Management.

Camera & screenshots

Home toggles the free camera through a short cycle: first a fixed external view above your ship, then a moving view that stays locked to the ship, then back to normal. It works in the open world and in battle, and it’s how you line up a good screenshot or read a developing fight from outside the helm. While the free camera is active you fly it with the movement keys — the same left/right and forward/back keys you sail with — with Z to raise the camera and X to lower it (it will even dip below the waterline), and the middle mouse button toggles fast camera movement. Pair the camera with Left Ctrl + H to hide the interface, and P or F9 for the shot.

Opening the map, port and chest windows

The windows you open outside of combat have single-letter shortcuts so you don’t have to hunt for an icon. The one to learn first is the map (M); the rest open the port screens and your chests. Which are available depends on where you are — the map and chat work at sea, while the Navy, Shop, Admiralty and crafting screens only open while docked — and what each window actually contains is covered in Port UI and Open-World UI.

Don’t be thrown that some of these letters appear in the battle tables above — G, B, C, Q, V and Z all do one job in a fight (board, battle sails, trim a yard, and so on) and a different one out of it (open a window). The game knows which context you’re in, so the same key is safe to reuse. The fleet and hold panels have shortcuts too; this guide documents those alongside the screens they open, in Open-World UI. As always, these are defaults — if any letter here opens something other than what you expect, your controls options screen shows the current binding.