Vehicle systems lab
Controls, bindings and interactive input tools for BeamNG.drive. Driving here is the arrow keys — W, A, S and D move the camera — and the same key means different things in different action maps, which is why published lists of this game appear to contradict each other.
Keyboard · Gamepad · Wheel
Choose your control system
Essential controls
acceleratebrakesteer_left · steer_rightrecover_vehiclepause Insert repairs and rewinds; it does not recover to a saved position.
That is Home, and it only works once
Ctrl + Home has recorded somewhere to
go back to. The two are swapped in most published guides for this game, including the design
brief these pages were built from — which is why every row on this site carries the action id
the game uses internally rather than a label somebody typed.
Control → physics
Hold an arrow key. The chain below is what happens between the key and the car.
Waiting for a key
The first two stages are read from your keyboard. The three below them describe what the game does and are not measured here — this site does not model a steering rack, and a diagram that pretended to would be the one thing a page about a physics engine must not do.
What makes BeamNG inputs different
Digital input
A keyboard gives steering three states and throttle two. The game smooths what arrives, which is why it is drivable, but no setting turns two states into a range.
Analog input
A stick reports a position and a trigger reports a value. The game publishes no default gamepad table, so every pad starts from either a premade configuration or nothing.
Force feedback
Supported on PC-compatible wheels and on the first axis of a joystick. 62 of the 112 tested devices have it; 103 arrive with controls already assigned. Those are two different facts.
Vehicle-specific bindings
Vehicles add their own actions and inputmaps on top of the defaults, so a control that exists in one vehicle can genuinely not exist in another. No complete list is published.
A key is not an action here.
The game groups its 160 default bindings into 11 action maps, and 18 keys appear in more than one of them. The arrow keys steer a car, pan the big map, seek a replay and move a selection in the editor. The documentation says so in a single line at the foot of the page; every published control list prints the collisions as duplicate rows and explains none of them.
See every collision →
I answer from this site only — the 28 browser tests, the controls library for 46 games, the sensitivity converters and the two games. I can tell you which page to open, how a tool works and what its result means.
I will not guess. If something is not on the site, I will say so.
Answers come from this site's pages.