---
title: "Block-game first-person controls"
package: "@phaser-ae/rig-minecraft"
tier: Free
version: 3.0.0-4
released: 2026-10-14
updated: 2026-10-20
description: "The first-person controls block-game players already know, with mouse look, walking, sprinting, jumping, flying, breaking, placing and a hotbar, on keyboard and mouse or touch."
url: https://phaser.io/packs/rig-minecraft
site: Phaser - https://phaser.io
---

# Block-game first-person controls

The first-person controls for a block-building game: look, walk, sprint, jump, fly, break, place and pick from a
hotbar, in the scheme players know from Minecraft. It turns keyboard, mouse or touch into intent, and you decide what
that intent moves.

## What it does

On a computer, a click locks the pointer and the mouse then looks freely until Esc releases it. WASD or the arrows
move relative to the view, a double-tap of W or a held Ctrl sprints, Space jumps when walking and rises when flying,
and Shift sneaks or sinks. A double-tap of Space toggles flying when the game allows it. The left and right buttons
break and place while held, and the number keys and the wheel pick a hotbar slot. The buttons only report while the
pointer is locked, so the click that grabs the pointer never also punches a hole in the world.

On a touch screen the same rig switches scheme by itself, the moment a touch arrives or the device reports a coarse
pointer. The left half of the screen is a floating joystick whose base is wherever the thumb lands; the right half
drags to look; a quick, still tap places, and a still finger held a moment breaks and keeps breaking. Jump and sneak
buttons and a hotbar strip complete it. A finger's role is fixed where it lands, so sliding off the joystick never
starts looking, and moving the look finger cancels a pending tap, so looking around never places a block.

The rig owns only the look and the intent, and never moves anything itself. `walkStep` applies the intent to a body,
choosing the speed from sneak and sprint; `flyStep` applies it to a free camera; `firstPerson` puts the camera in a
body's eyes; and `mining`, `placing` and `forward()` are what a block editor reads. That separation is what lets one
rig drive a creative flyer and a survival walker with no branch in your code.

## Features

- **The keyboard and mouse scheme** — pointer-locked look, WASD and arrows, sprint, jump, sneak and a fly toggle.
- **Break and place while held** — each switchable with `canBreak` and `canPlace`.
- **A hotbar** — the number keys and the wheel pick a slot, from as many slots as you set.
- **Touch, automatically** — a floating joystick, drag-to-look, tap to place, hold to break, jump and sneak buttons
  and a tappable hotbar, with no second code path.
- **Controls you draw yourself** — `layout` gives every control's geometry in screen pixels and `stick` the live
  joystick, laid out from the smaller screen dimension so it fits portrait and landscape.
- **Intent, not effect** — forward, strafe and vertical axes and the button states, applied by `walkStep`,
  `flyStep` and `firstPerson`.
- **Walk speeds** — sneak, walk and sprint in blocks a second, with defaults you can override per call.
- **Fair diagonals** — the move vector is normalised, so moving diagonally is no faster than moving straight.

## Good for

- **Survival block games** — walking and jumping, with breaking and placing on.
- **Creative building modes** — flying by default, with a double-tap of Space to land and take off again when
  `canFly` allows it.
- **Mining games** — breaking held down, placing left off.
- **Block games on phones and tablets** — the touch scheme with no extra input code.
- **Fly-throughs of block worlds** — a free camera with breaking and placing both turned off.

## Make it yours

The options set the starting look, what Space and Shift mean (`jump` for walking or `fly` for creative), whether a
double-tap of Space may switch between them, whether breaking and placing are enabled, how many hotbar slots there
are, and the mouse sensitivity, which stays live for a settings menu. Flying and the selected slot are live too.

Two quite different games from the same rig: a survival walker with `vertical: 'jump'`, flying disallowed and
placing turned on, its intent applied to a voxel body with `walkStep` and the camera in the body's eyes; and a
creative builder that starts flying, may toggle to walking, moves a free eye with `flyStep`, and has a short hotbar of
five slots.

## Works with

- `voxels-3d` — the block world and the character body that `walkStep` moves.
- `voxel-edit-3d` — reads the break and place buttons and the look direction to change the block in view.
- `vector-2d` — draws the touch controls on screen, about one line per control.
- `rig-fps` — the general first-person rig, for a 3D game that is not a block game.

## Good to know

- It draws no HUD: the hotbar is a number and the touch controls are geometry, for the game to draw in its own art.
- The touch scheme never touches the page: it reads the engine's pointers, so there are no listeners or gesture
  libraries involved.
- Pitch stops just short of straight up and down, where yaw would stop meaning anything.
- On a computer the mouse buttons only work while the pointer is locked; touch has no such gate, and its layout keeps
  the buttons apart from the world instead.

---

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