totk-pc-recomp/docs/controls.md

Controls

Input comes from the first SDL3 gamepad, the keyboard and the mouse, merged into one Switch controller (runtime/input_win.c). Buttons are ORed; each stick takes the source with the larger deflection. Keys and mouse buttons count only while the game window is in the foreground. TOTK_INPUT=none disables both (automated runs). TOTK_* settings can also be set in totk.ini next to totk.exe (input = none, motion = 0, rumble = 0); the environment overrides the file. TOTK_RUMBLE_STRENGTH is the rumble strength in percent (0 to 300, default 130; 0 is the same as rumble = 0). TOTK_RUMBLE_CURVE is the exponent applied to the amplitude before the strength (0.2 to 1.5, default 0.6; lower makes weak pulses stronger, 1 is linear). TOTK_RUMBLE_TRIGGERS=1 also drives the impulse triggers of an Xbox pad.

TOTK_PAD_LAYOUT (pad_layout, the Button layout row on the Controls tab, live) picks which face button is Switch A:

• nintendo: by position, as on a Switch (the table below).
• xbox: south A, east B, west X, north Y, as an Xbox pad labels them; on a PlayStation pad cross is A, circle B, square X, triangle Y.
• auto (default): nintendo for a pad whose east button SDL reports labelled A (Switch Pro Controller, Nintendo-layout pads), xbox for the others.

The log names the layout in effect (input: gamepad layout ...); the menu shows it under Automatic. Which controller's buttons the game's prompts show is TOTK_PROMPTS (see Xbox button prompts below). 0.1.9's pad_layout = xbox_prompts is read as pad_layout = nintendo with prompts = xbox, and the menu writes it that way.

Switch	Gamepad (by position, Nintendo layout)	Keyboard and mouse	Action in the world
Left stick	left stick	W A S D	move
Right stick	right stick	mouse; arrow keys as a second source	camera
Y	west	left mouse button	attack
ZL	left trigger (over 50%)	right mouse button, Z	shield, lock on
ZR	right trigger (over 50%)	F, X	bow
X	north	Space	jump
B	south	Left Shift	run, cancel
A	east	E	interact, pick up
L	left shoulder	Q	abilities
R	right shoulder	R	throw weapon
Left stick click	left stick click	Left Ctrl	crouch
Right stick click	right stick click	C	first-person view
D-pad left, up, right, down	D-pad	1 2 3 4	quick-select
Plus	Start	Tab	menu, inventory
Minus	Back	M	map

Esc is unbound in the game; it opens the settings menu and releases the mouse cursor (see Mouse camera). Z and X duplicate ZL and ZR so menu pages turn with two neighbouring keys; the menu tabs (L, R) are Q and R. The mouse wheel is unbound. The bindings are the tables of input_map in runtime/input_map.c: the keys (platform-neutral key ids) and one gamepad table per layout (gamepad inputs by position); runtime/input_win.c translates Win32 virtual keys and SDL buttons.

Xbox button prompts

TOTK_PROMPTS (prompts, the Button prompts row on the Controls tab, read at start) picks the controller whose buttons the game's prompts show: nintendo (default) keeps the game's own, xbox shows an Xbox controller's.

• L, R, ZL, ZR, Plus and Minus become LB, RB, LT, RT, Menu and View, and the d-pad prompts a cross with an arrow for each direction meant. The letters on the keys are cut out in the game's own text font.
• A, B, X and Y name the label of the button the pad layout presses, so each prompt names the button to press. pad_layout = nintendo plays an Xbox pad by position: the right button, labelled B, does Switch A (interact, confirm), and the bottom one, labelled A, does Switch B (run, cancel), so the prompts swap A with B and X with Y. xbox and auto put Switch A on the button labelled A, and the letters stay.

Switch	nintendo layout	xbox or auto layout
A, B, X, Y	B, A, Y, X	A, B, X, Y
L, R	LB, RB	LB, RB
ZL, ZR	LT, RT	LT, RT
Plus, Minus	Menu, View	Menu, View
D-pad	cross	cross

The action prompt (DoCommand_00) shows its button in a diamond whose shape gives the face buttons' positions as on a Switch, with the other three letters around it. With nintendo its letters are swapped with the rest and every one names the button in that place. With xbox and auto the letters are right but the diamond keeps the Switch positions: A shows on its right, while the button labelled A is at the bottom. The sticks keep the Switch icons, and so do prompts drawn as fixed images (some tutorial animations).

The prompts are part of the game's fonts, textures and messages, so they follow the layout and not the bindings. A button remapped with a bind_ line or on the Controls tab keeps the prompt the game draws for it, which then names the wrong button. Use the Xbox prompts with the default bindings.

The game reads its UI archive and fonts once at boot, so the prompts change at the next start, also after pad_layout changes between nintendo and the others (the menu says prompts change after restart); the buttons change at once. Under that note the menu offers Restart now: after a confirmation it writes totk.ini, closes the game as Quit game does and starts the game again with the same command line, which waits until the old process is gone before it opens the log and the saves (runtime/gfx_present.c, gfx_window_closed; plat_restart and plat_restart_wait in runtime/platform/win32.c and linux.c). Progress since the last save is lost, as with Quit game; while the game writes a save, the confirmation waits. With prompts = xbox the game loads romfs-patches-xbox (pad_layout = nintendo) or romfs-patches-xbox-label (xbox, auto) next to romfs-index.bin in place of romfs-patches (runtime/romfs.c, overlay_init; runtime/input_map.c, input_prompts_folder): the same 60 fps patches, with the prompts drawn from the game's own files by tools/make_romfs_patches.py --prompts xbox or --prompts xbox-label (tools/button_icons.py, after MacNativeGames' make_button_icons.py), which the setup runs next to the plain one:

• every prompt but the button guide in play is text in the button font, scft/External.bfotf in each Font/Font*.Nin_NX_NVN.bfarc.zs: glyphs U+E040 to U+E043 (A B X Y), U+E044 to U+E047 (L R ZL ZR), U+E04B and U+E04C (Plus, Minus), U+E049 and U+E060 to U+E065 (the d-pad). fontTools writes the font again, so the archives grow and the folder also carries the resource size table (System/Resource/ResourceSizeTable.Product.<n>...rsizetable.zs) with their entries raised by as much; without that the game stops at start.
• the button guide in play draws L and ZL from the images Nt_KeyTexL_00 and Nt_KeyTexZL_00 of the Common archive's timg/__Combined.bntx, painted with the same icons. The action prompt draws its button from Nt_KeyTexA/B/X/Y_00, whose image data is swapped for nintendo, and the diamond's letters are text the game takes from LayoutMsg/DoCommand_00.msbt of each language's Mals archive (and the layout's own text panes behind it), swapped the same way.

The Switch prompts stay, with a note under Button prompts and a RomFS overlay: ... line in the log, when the folder is missing (an install made by an older setup, or one where the setup could not prepare it and showed a warning; running the setup again on the install folder writes it), when it fails its check, with a game resolution of another shape than 16:9 (its own UI layout wins; 16:10 and 21:9), and when the romfs_mods folder replaces one of its files: romfs-patches then loads in its place, where two overlays replacing one file would stop the game. In a source build, .venv-py314\Scripts\python tools\make_romfs_patches.py --version <ver> --prompts xbox (and --prompts xbox-label) writes build\<ver>\romfs-patches-xbox (-label); it needs fontTools from tools/requirements-py314.txt. --xbox-prompts is the older name of --prompts xbox.

Window keys

Key	Gamepad	Action
F1 or Esc	Minus and Plus together	open or close the settings menu; the game gets no input while it is open
F10	L3 + R3 (both stick clicks)	performance overlay: off, frame rate, full panel
F11		borderless fullscreen on or off, saved to totk.ini

The Minus+Plus combo never reaches the game. In the menu the arrow keys, the D-pad or the left stick move, Enter or A selects, Q and E or L and R switch tabs, Esc or B goes back (Switch button names, as in the table above).

Remapping

The Controls tab of the settings menu lists, under the button layout, every Switch button and the eight stick directions the keys drive (movement and camera), each with two key cells and a controller cell. Select a cell, press A or Enter, then press the new key, mouse button or controller button; Esc or five seconds without a press cancel, and a controller button cancels a key cell. Delete, Backspace or X clears the selected cell. A key another action has moves to the new one (the description names the action it left); a controller button swaps with the one it replaces. A remapped controller button is physical: from then on the face buttons (A B X Y) stay where they are in both layouts, until the buttons are put back as the layout in use has them or Reset all buttons is chosen. F1, F8, F10, F11 and Esc cannot be bound (the menu, the flight recorder and the window keep them). Punctuation keys are named by their place on a US keyboard; the menu shows the character the keyboard layout in use puts there.

The tab writes totk.ini lines, one per Switch button or stick direction: bind_<button> = <entry>, <entry>, .... The button is A B X Y L R ZL ZR PLUS MINUS LEFT UP RIGHT DOWN LCLICK RCLICK, or a stick direction LSTICK_LEFT LSTICK_UP LSTICK_RIGHT LSTICK_DOWN (movement, W A S D by default) and RSTICK_... (camera, the arrow keys). An entry is pad:<name> or key:<name>:

• pad names: south east west north l r zl zr start back lstick rstick dpad_left dpad_up dpad_right dpad_down lpaddle1 rpaddle1 lpaddle2 rpaddle2 (zl, zr are the triggers; the paddles are the back buttons of an Xbox Elite, DualSense Edge or Steam Controller, upper pair 1, lower pair 2, and no Switch button has them by default)
• key names: a to z, 0 to 9, f2 to f7, f9, f12, num0 to num9, space tab enter backspace lshift rshift lctrl rctrl lalt capslock insert delete home end pageup pagedown up down left right, num_add num_sub num_mul num_div num_decimal, minus equals lbracket rbracket semicolon apostrophe comma period slash backslash grave, mouse_l mouse_r mouse_m mouse_x1 mouse_x2
• key:default and pad:default keep that part's defaults (pad:default is each layout's own button).
• none leaves the button unbound.

A line replaces every default of that button, pad and keyboard, so list the keys you still want or use key:default. Pad names are physical positions, so a line means the same in both layouts and replaces the layout's own button for that Switch button. Stick directions take keys only: the controller's sticks and the mouse camera always work. Buttons without a line keep the table above. Names are case-insensitive. An invalid entry logs one input: bind ... line and is skipped; a line without a valid entry changes nothing. The TOTK_BIND_<button> environment variables work like any other setting. A changed line applies at once (runtime/input_win.c builds the tables again at its next poll).

A pad that reports its face buttons swapped (A/B and X/Y, as some GuliKit models do) is fixed with:

bind_A = pad:south, key:E
bind_B = pad:east, key:lshift
bind_X = pad:west, key:space
bind_Y = pad:north, key:mouse_l

Mouse camera

Mouse motion (raw input) becomes right-stick deflection. Each presented frame takes the counts moved since the last frame, divides by the frame time and sets the deflection to counts per second * TOTK_MOUSE_SENS / 3000 of full, held for that frame, so the turn rate does not depend on the frame rate. This is not mouselook: the game's stick curve and dead zone still apply, so very slow movements do nothing and a fast flick saturates. The mouse deflection competes with the gamepad and arrow keys by the larger-deflection rule.

TOTK_MOUSE_SENS (0 to 10, default 1; higher turns faster, 0 turns the mouse camera and the cursor capture off). While the window is the foreground window the cursor is hidden and confined to the client area. It is released on focus loss, minimise, while F11 changes the window, during a size or move loop and while a text entry is open. Esc releases it by hand: the cursor shows, the mouse camera and mouse buttons stop, and the window can be moved, minimised or closed. A mouse click inside the client area captures it again; that click does not reach the game. Activating the window by a click on its title bar or border does not capture, so it can be dragged or closed right away; Alt+Tab or a click in the client area captures as before. TOTK_INPUT=none disables the capture too.

TOTK_STICK_DEADZONE (0 to 50, default 8) is the gamepad stick dead zone in percent of full deflection, the same for both sticks. It is round: a stick inside the circle reads centred, and the rest of its travel is scaled to start at 0 at the edge, so full deflection still reaches full. Raise it for a stick that drifts. The game's own dead zone applies after it. TOTK_LSTICK_DEADZONE and TOTK_RSTICK_DEADZONE (the Left/Right stick dead zone rows under Analog sticks on the Controls tab) set one stick each and fall back to TOTK_STICK_DEADZONE while unset, so a worn stick can get a larger zone than the other. With a gamepad connected each row shows its stick's deflection now, before the dead zone (stick now): let go of the stick and set the row a few percent above the value it rests at.

The stick direction bits (StickLLeft to StickRDown) are derived from the sticks at 50% deflection. A gamepad plugged in later is picked up within one second; with none connected the log says input: no gamepad.

Nintendo Switch 2 controllers

Windows does not present the Switch 2 Pro Controller as a gamepad SDL can open (the log says input: no gamepad), so it needs a bridge program that wakes it and creates a virtual gamepad. The DS4Windows fork by hbashton (github.com/hbashton/DS4Windows, tested with release VIIPERRC4.5.1, a pre-release) with the output set to an emulated DualSense gives buttons, rumble, gyro and accelerometer, and reads the sticks through the controller's calibration (they rest at 0 to 2%). The game reads its virtual DualSense directly; the log then shows input: gamepad "DualSense Wireless Controller" (rumble, gyro and accelerometer, ...) and input: motion sensors on. Its release notes also list Joy-Con 2 support, which is untested here.

Bridges that output a ViGEm DualShock 4 (ProCon2Windows, connectyourpro as tested) give buttons and rumble but no motion: their virtual DualShock 4 reports a gyro and an accelerometer that never change, so motion aiming and Ultrahand rotation do nothing. Run one bridge at a time; Steam Input can also claim the controller, so close Steam if the bridge does not find it.

Scripted input

TOTK_INPUT_SCRIPT=<file> replays presses. It is ORed with real input and still applies under TOTK_INPUT=none. One event per line, # starts a comment:

<frame> <button> [hold_frames]            # A B X Y L R ZL ZR PLUS MINUS LEFT UP RIGHT DOWN LCLICK RCLICK; hold defaults to 4
<frame> LSTICK|RSTICK <x> <y> [hold_frames]   # -32767..32767, up is +y
@<ms> <button> [hold_ms]                  # timed on the world clock
@<ms> LSTICK|RSTICK <x> <y> [hold_ms]

<frame> counts 60 Hz ticks of game time since the first frame (presented frames at 60 fps), so the title menus get the presses at the same game time at any frame limit. @<ms> counts milliseconds of the world clock: game time stepped since the end of the first save load (the player leaves the title screen's origin), so a timed event lands at the same game time at any frame rate and load length. A later load, such as fast travel, still shifts what follows. In a script with timed lines the untimed ones stop when the world clock starts, as the load ends at another tick in each run. Each event logs once (input: script frame N tick T: A). tools/input/load_save.txt loads the first save from the title screen.

TOTK_INPUT_RECORD=<file> (input_record in totk.ini, or Input recording in the menu) writes the merged input in the same format, one line per button press and per stick segment: events before the world clock starts by tick, the rest timed; a button or stick held when the world clock starts is cut there and goes on as a timed event. The file replays as a script, which makes it the repro to attach to a bug report.

TOTK_TEST_PAD=<lx>,<ly>,<rx>,<ry> attaches an SDL virtual gamepad at start whose sticks rest at these raw SDL axis values (-32768 to 32767, down is +y), so a drifting or held stick can be tested without a controller: the values go through the gamepad mapping and TOTK_STICK_DEADZONE like a real pad's, and TOTK_INPUT_RECORD shows what reached the game.

RenderDoc capture (blocked)

TOTK_RDOC=<frame>[,...] (runtime/rdoc_win.c; TOTK_RDOC_DIR, TOTK_RDOC_DLL) loads RenderDoc before vkCreateInstance. RenderDoc hides VK_EXT_external_memory_host, which the back end requires for guest pool imports (runtime/vk_memory.c), so device creation fails under it. A capture needs a copy-based pool fallback first.