How to Make SoH Obey Your Will

Aug 4, 2021

You’ve done it! You’ve made a character in Ship of Heroes. They look awesome – or at least, they would if the screen and mouse were working right! As it stands, you need help. That’s where this guide comes in.

The System Screen: How to Make the System Work for You

We’re sure we don’t need to tell you that the first thing anyone should do if they’re confused is press the escape button. You’re all savvy game players with plenty of experience. This is what you’ll see if you press “esc” while logged in to Ship of Heroes.

Note – we intend to change “Logout” to “Character Selection” in the near future.  We think that is more clear.

See how Game Menu came up?  This is the secret to accessing the game to make it work for you.  We’ll start by talking about the top button called “System”, as this has the settings for graphics and audio inside it.

This is what the System Settings look like as a default. At the top under Display you have the option of choosing whether you want to full-screen the game or window it, what resolution you want Ship of Heroes to be displayed in – we recommend not tiny – what monitor you want to display the game on, and even some fancy features like anti-aliasing and adjusting the vertical sync. Underneath Display is where you can adjust the quality of the game graphics. You can either take the easy way out and move the Graphics Quality number from one to four with four being highest and one being lowest, or you can manually change each individual graphical effect such texture quality, FX quality, or shadow quality. The choice is yours!

If you click the Auto tab, you’ll get this screen. This allows you to manually set the frame rate that you want the game to achieve while you are playing. No guarantees, of course, but the game will try to reach the target you set. The minimum, as you can see, is 10 frames per second, but it can go up to 200 frames per second.

If you click “Sounds” to the left, you’ll get this screen instead. As you can see, there are the usual sound features that every modern games has: a Master Volume slider, plus a few individual sliders for sound, music, ambience, and dialog music. But there are also some more unusual options available to the discerning players such as looping the background music and enabling reverb.

Interface: What Does That Even Mean?

Now that we’ve taken you through the wonders of the System menu, we’re going to walk you through the Interface menu. Interface, for those of you who are wondering, is the second option in the Game Menu, right underneath System. Interface sounds like a very vague term – you technically “interface” with the game every time you click a button and thus communicate with it – but it’s actually much more than it seems.

This is what the Interface Settings page looks like when you first go to it. There’s not a lot here compared to the System Menu, but each one of these options was something specifically requested by one of your fellow Ship of Heroes fans. Possibly even you! UI Scale allows you to scale the UI size to give you as minimalist or non-minimalist a UI as you want, mouse sensitivity allows you to adjust the mouse until your character no longer gets dizzy turning around, and the Invert Mouse X and Invert Mouse Y are options for, well, inverting the X and Y coordinates of your mouse. We’re not sure why you’d want to do that but someone asked for it, so now you can.

If you click “Chat”, you’ll get a single option: the option to change to font size.  Yes, we know it looks strange to be by itself like that.  However, we also know that some of you would like to actually be able to read the chat, not just squint at it and hope you understand what’s being said, so hopefully this will appeal to at least some of you. 

Keyboard Bindings: The Key to Your Success

Our final destination today is the Key Bindings option.  As you might have guessed, it’s right underneath the Interface option in the Game Menu.  This is something that most of you are likely at least somewhat familiar with, but we’ll give you a quick rundown anyway.

This is the default page for the Key Bindings page. As you might have guessed, there are the usual options, but there are also a few more unusual ones, such as Sheath/Unsheath Weapon and Toggle Autorun. Also, you have the option of assigning two different keys to each command so don’t feel you have to stick to one if a second option would be better 10% of the time. Also, in a completely unrelated note, changing the key bindings so that you try to move the character left and right at the same time will not make you move forward. You’ll just stay still.
If you click “Interface”, you get all those commands that no one remembers until they’ve played for 50 hours. Things like “Pull up my inventory” and “Where are my selectable powers?”. We also, however, have some more visual options such as toggling on or off health bars and name tags of both allies and enemies. You can even toggle on or off the framerate; we’re not afraid to show off ours!

Conclusion (AKA We’re Done Here)

So, that’s how you make Ship of Heroes do your bidding. Or at least, make it so that you’re not squinting at the screen, flying into walls, or wondering just how to make the UI take up less space. Now go out and do good – the FHS Justice needs you!

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