Two ways out of a crash
A racing game has one reset button because there is one thing to undo. This game has two families of answer, and choosing the wrong one costs you the run rather than the crash.
Recover repairs the vehicle and puts it somewhere usable. The world carries on as it was, the traffic is where it was, the time of day has not moved. Reset starts something again — the mission, or the physics state of every vehicle in the world — and what you were in the middle of does not survive it.
Both are correct actions. They answer different questions, and almost every list of this game’s controls prints them in the same block as though they were alternatives.
Recover, repair and home
Three of the four are routinely swapped in published guides, so here they are with their internal action ids, which are the part that does not move between versions or languages.
Insert is Repair / Rewind, internally recover_vehicle. It repairs and rewinds the vehicle out
of wherever it ended up. This is the ordinary one.
Home is repair and recover to the saved position, internally loadHome. It returns the vehicle
to a place you chose. Press it without having chosen one and there is nowhere for it to take you,
which is why it is so often described as broken.
Ctrl + Home is save current position, internally saveHome. Nothing happens to the vehicle
when you press it — it only writes down where the vehicle is. Press it at the top of the hill
before the run, not at the bottom after it.
Ctrl + Insert is the alternate repair, for when the ordinary one leaves the vehicle somewhere unusable.
Reset and pause
R restarts the current mission or vehicle. Its action id is reset_physics, which is why it gets
described as a physics reset, and Shift + R is reset_all_physics — every vehicle in the world
rather than yours.
J pauses. It stops the simulation where it is, which is exactly what people mean when they ask how to pause physics mid-crash. The documentation files it under General rather than under anything with the word physics in it, and that single filing decision is why it is missing from most published lists of this game’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 entire subject is what happens during an impact, that is a magnifying glass rather than a novelty.
The node grabber
Hold Left Ctrl and every node on the vehicle under your cursor is drawn as a sphere. Hold the left mouse button and you have one. The wheel changes how hard you are pulling, and the number appears on the on-screen label.
Then the part worth the section. The middle mouse button does three different things:
- Over empty space, it pins the node in mid-air.
- Over another node, it attaches the two.
- On a node that is already attached, it detaches it.
Nothing about the button says which. The label on screen does, by changing colour. This is the same shape as the arrow keys meaning five different things depending on which action map is listening — in this game the input is not the instruction, the context is. The figure above lets you drag a node around and watch the answer change without touching the game.
That is what makes trailers, tow ropes and improvised attachments possible without any of it being a feature with a name.
Couplers
A coupler joins two nodes so they hold a position relative to each other and answer to the same
forces: a node carrying a couplerTag joins a node whose Tag matches it. That is the mechanism
behind every trailer hitch and every fifth wheel in the game.
L toggles couplers, Shift + L locks all of them, Alt + L unlocks all. Three keys for a system that most players meet as “the trailer came off”, and one of the clearest cases on this site of a control whose name explains nothing and whose mechanism explains everything.
What each one actually does
Recover moves a vehicle to a recoverable position. Reset reinitialises simulation state. Pause stops the physics simulation. The node grabber manipulates nodes and objects directly.
Those four sentences are the whole distinction, and the reason the cards on this page carry what each action is not alongside what it is. Two of these are swapped in most published guides for this game — including in 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.
