Minecraft Wiki
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Minecraft uses the standard control scheme of mouse and keyboard controls as input. The game cannot be played using only a mouse or only a keyboard.

Default Controls

Mouse Controls Function
Left Button Destroy blocks (Hold down); Attack (Click once); Toggle Switches/Doors (Click once).
Wheel Scroll Scrolls through the quick-bar.
Wheel Click Switch to the block currently looked at, as long as it is in the quickbar
Right Button Place blocks; Toggle Switches; Fire Bow; Use special blocks like Chests and Crafting Tables.
Movement Turning; Aiming; Third person camera movement.
Key Function
W Move forward.
A Strafe left.
S Move backward.
D Strafe right.
Spacebar Jump.
Left Shift Sneak.
1-9 Selects the appropriate quick-bar item.
E Open up the Inventory. Before Beta 1.4, this function was bound to "I" by default.
Q Drop a held item.
F Toggle Fog, identical to Render distance in Options menu. If Shift is held while pressing F, the fog will be toggled in reverse. (Fog gets further away, instead of closer)
T Chat (Multiplayer only). Server commands.
Esc Open up the menu and give back cursor control. Pauses Singleplayer games.

Function Keys

There are some keys that are not changeable via Options that perform special functions within the stand alone client. To make these work for mac go to the apple icon, press System preferences-Keyboard and mouse-And check the use F1, F2 etc as normal keys

Key Function
F1 Toggles GUI hiding. This was added in the Halloween Update to make taking scene screenshots easier. (F1 + F2 will take a screenshot without the GUI.)
F2 As of Beta 1.2 simply pressing this key will take a screenshot and place it in %appdata%\.minecraft\screenshots on Windows, ~/Library/Application Support/minecraft/screenshots in OSX, or ~/.minecraft/screenshots in Linux.
Shift + F2 Since Beta 1.2_02, this calls an unfinished function that attempts to generate a "huge" TGA format screenshot.

Pressing this key combination will cause Minecraft to either freeze for a while, displaying a strange view of the world or crash, depending on your amount of available RAM. During this time it will attempt to generate a file at least 1 GB in size. Use with caution.

F3 Pressing this key will toggle the showing of extra debug information on the top of the screen along side the Minecraft version, such as FPS (frames per second), chunk updates, available memory, and a performance graph. Before version 1.3 F3 had to be held down to show this info.

Pressing S while holding F3 will reload all web-loaded client resources.

F5 Toggles between first and third person. Third person is not advised for playing since your cursor is always on your head.
F8 Toggles mouse smoothing. Looking around becomes a slow, smooth and more cinematic motion.
F10 Gives cursor control back to Windows and freezes the game until it is clicked. However, the cursor is trapped inside the game's window, making this useless.
F11 Toggles full-screen mode in the Windows, OSX, and Linux clients.

Some people are experiencing a bug while exiting from full-screen mode that causes an inescapable black screen. When that's the case, use ALT+TAB to switch out of Minecraft AND switch it back to windowed mode.

Also note that this may not respect multiple monitors and Minecraft may occupy all screens instead of the one it is active on.

Old Keys

Below are the list of keys which are no longer usable in the current version of the game.[1]

Key Function
B Brings up the list of usable blocks in Creative Classic.
Enter Sets Spawn Point in Creative Classic.
R Respawn at spawn point in Creative Classic.
F5 Toggles rain in Creative Classic.
G Used to spawn a Human in Creative.
Y Used to invert mouse in Creative.
N Used to generate a new map in Creative.


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