Basic driving
Driving this game is the arrow keys. Up is throttle, Down is brake, Left and Right steer, and Space is the parking brake for as long as you hold it. P is the same brake as a latch, which is the difference the word “temporary” is doing when people describe Space.
W, A, S and D are camera movement. They are in the Camera action map alongside Page Up and Page Down, and they move the free camera or tilt the seat depending on what is active. This is the most common error about BeamNG’s controls and it is easy to see why: every other driving game on a keyboard uses that cluster, so a guide written from habit rather than from the game puts it there.
The practical consequence is worth more than the correction. The arrows sit in their own cluster away from the modifier keys, which means the hand that drives is not the hand that reaches for Insert, Home, J or Left Ctrl — and in a game where recovering from a crash is half of playing, that separation is the layout working rather than a compromise.
Transmission
X shifts up, Z shifts down, and Left Shift is the clutch. None of the three is much use until Q has put the gearbox into a mode that wants them, which is the step that trips people.
Q toggles the shifter mode, and the fault it fixes is one of the most searched things about this game: a car that brakes correctly, stops, and then accelerates backwards at full speed. That is Arcade mode doing exactly what it is designed to do — treating the brake as “go the other way” once you are stationary. Realistic mode does not, and Q is the whole fix.
Underneath sit the drivetrain toggles: Alt + S for four-wheel drive, Alt + A for the range, Alt + D for the differential mode and Ctrl + Q for stability and traction control. They are vehicle-dependent — a car without a transfer case has nothing for Alt + A to toggle.
Vehicle recovery
This is where a racing game has one button and this game has four, and where two of them are routinely swapped in published guides.
Insert is Repair / Rewind — internally recover_vehicle. It repairs the vehicle and rewinds it
out of wherever it ended up. This is the one to reach for after an ordinary crash.
Home is repair and recover to the saved position — loadHome. It puts the vehicle back where
you decided it should start, which is only useful once Ctrl + Home has recorded that place. Press
Home without having saved anything first and there is nowhere for it to take you.
Ctrl + Home is save current position — saveHome. Nothing happens to the vehicle when you
press it; it only writes down where the vehicle is. Do it at the top of the hill before the run, not
at the bottom after it.
And Ctrl + Insert is the alternate form of the repair action, for when the ordinary one leaves the vehicle somewhere unusable.
Physics controls
R restarts the current mission or vehicle — its action id is reset_physics, which is why it is
sometimes described as a physics reset. Shift + R is reset_all_physics and resets every vehicle
in the world rather than yours.
J pauses. It stops the simulation where it is, which is what people mean when they ask how to pause physics mid-crash, and the documentation files it under General rather than anywhere the word physics appears — which is why it is missing from most lists of BeamNG’s physics controls.
Alt with the arrow keys is slow motion: up or down toggles it, left and right change the rate. In a game whose whole subject is what happens during an impact, that is less a novelty than a magnifying glass.
Camera
C cycles the cameras and Shift + C toggles the free camera. The number row selects cameras one to ten directly. Inside the free camera, W, A, S and D move it, Page Up and Page Down raise and lower it, and Left Shift makes all of that faster.
The numpad is the other half: Numpad 1 looks back, 2, 4, 6 and 8 rotate, 5 centres, and 3 and 9 zoom or move the free camera vertically depending on which camera is active.
Lights and signals
N is the headlights, Alt + N adds fog lights and underglow, Shift + N is the lightbar and Alt + Shift + N changes its mode. The indicators are on the punctuation keys — , left, . right, / hazards — which puts them in a row under the right hand, roughly where a stalk would be.
H is the horn and V toggles the ignition state, which is a real control here rather than a formality: a vehicle can be off.
Remapping
Everything above can be rebound in Options > Controls. What happens underneath is worth knowing: your changes are saved as .diff files in the user folder and override the defaults rather than replacing them. The shipped inputmap stays intact underneath, which is why a reset returns to a known state rather than to whatever the last mod left behind.
The corollary is that a binding you found in a forum post from two versions ago may be describing a
default that has since moved. The action id is the part that does not move — reset_all_physics is
the same action in every build and every language, and it is what to search for when a label and a
key disagree.
Vehicle-specific bindings
Vehicles can add their own actions and their own default bindings, stored alongside the vehicle rather than in the base inputmap. That is why a control that exists on one vehicle can genuinely be absent on another, and why no complete list of this game’s controls can exist — the complete list depends on what you are driving.
No published enumeration of those per-vehicle bindings exists, so this site marks the possibility rather than inventing the contents.
