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Controls and Interface

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The cold and the creatures leave no time to fumble with the controls: the faster your hands memorize the basic commands, the longer your character lives. Below is how to move, look around the world, fight, and switch screens in Last Frontier.

Three control schemes

The game supports three input schemes and switches between them automatically — based on whatever you’re using right now:

  • Mouse and keyboard — the main scheme for PC.
  • Gamepad — sticks and the D-pad handle movement and aiming.
  • Touchscreen — taps and gestures for tablets and phones.

Just nudge the mouse, press a key, move a stick, or touch the screen — the controls reconfigure themselves to that input method, so you can freely alternate between them within a single session.

Movement

Your character walks on a hexagonal grid, but you don’t need to keep that in mind while playing.

  • The WASD keys set the direction: W — up, S — down, A — left, D — right. Their combinations give eight directions, which the game itself maps onto the hexes.
  • A left click on the map sends your character to the point or object under the cursor. It’s also the main “do an action” command.
  • Switching between running and walking. Holding Shift (the left bumper on a gamepad) toggles run mode; the character will actually run if running is available to them at that moment.
  • Gamepad: movement is set by the left stick or the D-pad.

If you can’t move (a condition or an obstacle is in the way), the game briefly tells you that your character can’t move, instead of “silently” stalling. A separate utility command — F5 — asks the server to re-sync your character’s position if the picture and the real position have drifted apart.

Looking around and facing direction

While your character is standing still, they turn to face the cursor (or the selected target) — that’s “where I’m looking.” Hovering the cursor over a creature or item highlights it with an outline, so you can immediately see what you can interact with and whom you can attack.

  • A yellow outline — a target for peaceful interaction (talk, use, pick up, search).
  • A red outline — a hostile target ready to be attacked with your active weapon.

Actions and the radial menu

That same left click on an object performs the “obvious” action depending on what’s under the cursor and what you’re holding: approach, talk, use, search, pick up an item, or attack.

When there are several options, the radial action menu comes in handy: a ring of buttons opens around the cursor, filtered for that specific target. With the mouse, it’s called up by a right click on the selected object (which also resets a non-standard cursor back to normal). And holding the right button while dragging scrolls the map — to look around without moving your character.

The cursor and combat mode

The cursor hints at what will happen on click, and it has three states: normal, weapon attack, and item use.

  • Entering combat automatically sets the weapon cursor, and leaving combat returns the normal one.
  • An attack triggers only if the target is within weapon range; otherwise the character closes the distance first.
  • Auto-attack in melee. If it’s enabled in the settings, the character “locks onto” the target and keeps hitting it while it stays reachable — without a click for every blow.
  • Gamepad in combat: the right stick aims and locks the target.

Touch controls

On a touchscreen, the basic gestures mirror the mouse logic:

  • A single tap — the main action (like a left click): move, interact, attack.
  • A double tap on a target opens the radial action menu (like a right click).
  • Dragging across the map scrolls the view, and a two-finger “pinch” gesture changes the zoom, if map zooming is allowed.

Main screens

The main screen is the in-game HUD over the map: it holds combat information and buttons to access the other windows. The key screens open with a click on the panel buttons:

  • Inventory — your character’s belongings; weight is tracked constantly, and when overloaded some item actions are blocked.
  • Character — stats, skills, and abilities. Combat previews are also shown here: the chance to hit an adjacent target with your active weapon and the damage per minute.
  • PDA — errands, quests, notes, statistics, factions, and the encyclopedia.

There are also separate windows for specific situations: dialogue with an NPC, barter, crafting, the vehicle garage, the elevator, the minimap, and choosing an entry point at a public location. When you hover over a target, the cursor shows the hit chance as a percentage — accounting for the enemy’s evasion, even before the server rolls.

The exact keys for opening the inventory, the character screen, and the PDA are best checked in the game itself: in the current version these windows are opened by buttons on the HUD, not by a fixed hotkey.