Slow Roads Controls: Every Key and What It Does

Updated 2026-09-21 · All guides

Slow Roads keeps its control list behind a hover. Put the cursor on the keyboard icon at the bottom of the splash screen and a panel of seven hints appears — reset vehicle, toggle autodrive, handbrake, change camera, prev/next weather, toggle headlights, toggle UI — and it vanishes again when you move away. Even that panel is only part of the list. What follows was read out of the binding table in the build running on this site, so it also covers the keys the game never mentions, the ones mapped but wired to nothing, and an entire camera mode with no interface entry at all.

The game is right here; open it in another tab and try each key as you read.

Driving

W / ↑	Accelerate.
S / ↓	Brake. Once you are stopped, the same key reverses.
A D / ← →	Steer. Steering authority is scaled down as speed rises, so the car does not snap at 120mph.
Left Shift	Boost. Held, not toggled.
Space	Handbrake. Does nothing at all on the Bike.
R	Reset the car onto the nearest road node, pointing the right way.
F	Toggle autodrive.

View and interface

C	Cycle the camera through three modes.
U	Hide or show the entire on-screen interface.
H or L	Headlights. Both keys are registered to the same handler.
M	Mute.
P	Pause.
Esc	Pause and bring up the overlay with settings, records and the changelog.
Scroll wheel	While cruise control is active, adjusts the target speed. No other use in normal driving.

World and scene

Q / E	Previous / next weather, rolling over into the neighbouring season. Explained properly below.
N	Prints the road node your car currently occupies to the browser console.
` (backquote)	Switches to a free camera and disables all car input. Completely undocumented.
Page Up / Page Down	Hop the car forward or back one road node. The branch is guarded by an isDev value in localStorage, so on a normal visit they do nothing.
=, B, X	Named in the binding table as Auto, SwitchDrive and Ackermann. Nothing in the shipped code ever reads them. NextSkin, NextTopo and Reload are stranded the same way.

The three keys nobody finds

U — hide the interface

It is the last tile in the hover panel, labelled "toggle UI" — about the least prominent place a feature can live. One press removes the speedometer, the distance counter, the vehicle picker, the settings icons and the cruise widget, leaving nothing but road. If you came for the calm rather than the numbers, it is the most valuable key in the game. Press again to restore.

F — autodrive

Autodrive is not a cheat, it is the intended way to watch the generator work. The AI holds the line, obeys cruise control if you have set a target, and hands control back the moment you touch W, S, A or D. A guard in the code stops a held F from flickering the state on and off; it fires only on a fresh press. Combined with U and the far chase camera it turns the game into a screensaver, which is how a good number of people use it.

Q and E — the weather cycle

Most guides call these "change season". That is wrong in a way that matters: it makes people think there are four states to cycle through when there are twenty.

What Q and E actually do

The game stores seasons as "skins", and each skin owns an ordered list of five weathers. E increments the weather index inside the current season; only when the index runs past the end of that list does it reset to zero and advance the season. Q mirrors it, and when it drops below zero it steps back a season and lands on that season's last weather, which is always night.

Laid out, the Hills scene contains:

spring	spring sunrise → clear spring → spring rain → autumn sunset → night
summer	sunrise → clear → rain → sunset → night
autumn	autumn sunrise → clear autumn → autumn rain → twilight → night
winter	winter sunrise → clear snow → snow → winter sunset → night

Four seasons, five weathers each, twenty distinct states. Twenty presses of E returns you exactly where you started. The game's own hover panel gets this right, incidentally: it labels the pair "prev/next weather". Everyone else copied the wrong description from each other.

Two consequences worth knowing. A fresh game starts you in summer at weather index 1, the plain clear daytime state, not at sunrise. And snow exists only in winter, as the clearSnow and snow entries, so from that default start falling snow is eleven presses of E away, or nine of Q in the other direction — not the two or three that a four-state season cycle would imply. And every season terminates in night, which means Q from any season's sunrise drops you straight into darkness — handy, since that is also when the headlight key becomes interesting. The scenes and seasons guide goes through what each state actually looks like, including the off-world variants, where the weather counts are much smaller.

Boost, and the 150-millisecond double tap

Left Shift held together with W applies the vehicle's boost acceleration figure instead of its normal one. That much is on the splash screen.

The second way in is not. A setting called double-tap to boost ships on by default: release W and press it again within 0.15 seconds and the game treats the second press as a boost, no modifier needed. The window is genuinely that tight, which is why players trigger it by accident on bumpy ground and never work out what happened.

Once engaged, a tap-boost holds as long as you keep accelerating or cruise control is holding a target for you. Lift off and it drops. If the car surges unpredictably, the option lives in the settings panel under Esc, and switching it off restores pure Left Shift behaviour. Boost figures differ sharply between the three vehicles; the vehicle comparison covers that.

The handbrake does nothing on the Bike

This is not a bug report, it is the literal code: the handbrake input is computed as "not a bike, and Space is down". On the Bike the first half is false, so the input is always zero. No rear-wheel lock, no slide, nothing.

If you switch from the Roadster to the Bike and your usual corner-entry flick stops working, this is why. The Bike is not broken and you are not imagining it — Space is simply not connected on that vehicle.

One related detail on R: after a reset the car is placed on the road with the handbrake held, so it cannot roll away while you get your bearings — unless cruise control is armed, in which case the handbrake is skipped and you set off immediately.

Cruise control has no key at all

People search for the cruise control key constantly. There isn't one. It is a padlock icon on the interface, and you click it. Everything about it is mouse-driven:

• Click the padlock to arm it. The default target is 90mph, or 150km/h if you have switched units. Those are two separate constants in the code, not a conversion of one another, so the metric default is the faster of the two.
• Two small arrows appear above and below the number. Each click moves the target by exactly five, in whatever unit you are displaying.
• With cruise armed, the scroll wheel does the same thing — wheel up adds five, wheel down subtracts five. This is not documented anywhere in the game.
• The target is clamped to the vehicle's top speed and re-snapped to a multiple of five whenever you change vehicle or units. Set 65mph, switch to km/h, and you get 105, not 104.6.
• It survives a reload, written to localStorage under cruise-control, alongside your seed and scene settings.

The splash screen offers three input modes — keyboard, mouse and autodrive — and they are separate code paths, not presets. Picking mouse arms cruise control for you, because there the left button is the throttle and holding it for an hour is unpleasant. In that mode steering comes from how far the cursor sits left or right of centre, across a band 640 pixels wide or half the window width, whichever is larger — so the wider your window, the more cursor travel a full lock takes. The right button brakes and then reverses at three-quarters of the vehicle's acceleration figure. Input only counts while the cursor is above the marker bar near the bottom of the screen; let it drop into that lower strip and the car simply coasts. Switch back to keyboard and cruise disarms again, unless you had armed it yourself first.

Cameras: three in the cycle, two more in the code

C steps through exactly three modes, in this order:

Near Chase	Default. 3.5 units back, drifting to 4.5 as you approach 45m/s.
Far Chase	Higher and wider, 7 units back stretching to 10. The one for scenery.
First Person	0.75 units, tight to the driver, and it rolls with the chassis, so the horizon tilts when you do.

A fourth camera named Bonnet is defined in the source but left out of the cycle, and its definition carries no pitch, range or smoothing values, so it would not work even if you reached it. A Debug camera sitting 10 to 20 units overhead is similarly stranded. Neither has a key. If you have seen a list claiming Slow Roads has a bumper cam, that list was generated rather than played.

Your camera choice is remembered between sessions.

The free camera nobody documented

Press `, the backquote key left of 1, and the game tears down the chase camera and builds a different controller entirely. Car input is disabled while it runs, and the keys are remapped:

W A S D	Fly the camera horizontally through the world, on the axis it is facing.
Left / right mouse button	Climb and descend. Held, like the horizontal keys.
Left Shift	Doubles the fly speed — the boost key, reused.
Scroll wheel	Zoom, clamped at both ends.
T	Lock the view onto the car's front axle; press again to release and level off.
G	Reset the camera position. This is the only context in which G does anything.
C	Push the far clip plane to 10,000 units, so distant terrain stops being culled.
N	Log the nearest road node and its distance to the console.
The sticky-steer key	Toggles "match speed": the camera drifts along at whatever the car is doing instead of coasting to a stop.

This is developer tooling that shipped by accident: no menu entry, no prompt, no guard rails. The camera flies straight through hillsides, and Q and E are explicitly ignored while it is active. Press ` again to get your car back; nothing is saved, so the worst case is a reload.

It is the best way to look properly at a landscape before you note down its seed.

Why AZERTY needs no remapping

There is no rebinding screen in this build, which normally leaves non-QWERTY players stuck. They are not, because of one implementation choice: the key handler stores event.code, not event.key.

code identifies the physical position of a key, not the character it produces. MDN puts it plainly: the value "isn't altered by keyboard layout", and the same KeyQ covers Q on QWERTY, A on AZERTY and the apostrophe on Dvorak. So when the binding table says KeyW, an AZERTY player presses Z, the key in that same position, and the game accepts it. ZQSD works exactly like WASD with nothing to configure.

That is the change behind the terse line in this build's own changelog, visible on the pause overlay: "AZERTY keyboards now supported". Three words in a release note, one property in the code. The one thing it cannot fix is IntlBackslash, the sticky-steer toggle, which some layouts have no physical key for.

All of it runs on three.js, and input is read every frame. So if the controls feel mushy rather than unresponsive, the cause is frame rate, not the bindings; the performance guide covers the settings that matter.

A note on which build this is

Everything above was read out of version 1.0.1, the build captured in late 2022 and hosted here. Slow Roads is made by anslo, and the official version at slowroads.io has moved on since; it has features this snapshot does not, so if a key you read about elsewhere does nothing here, that is the likely reason. Play the current one too, it deserves the traffic. Why this copy exists is set out on the about page.

Play Slow Roads → Free in your browser. Desktop or laptop with a keyboard.