Game controls

Almost all inventory management hangs off three modifier keys, and knowing them is the difference between a tidy storage room and forty minutes of dragging.

• Shift and click moves an item straight into an open container, or straight back out of one. This is the main way anything gets stored.
• Ctrl and click sends an item to the trash, from your own inventory or from an open chest.
• Alt and click marks an item as favorited.

The trash and transfer shortcuts sit beside each other and do opposite things, which is how people lose a stack of something valuable. The Left Shift Quick Trash option in the controls menu moves trashing onto Shift instead, at the cost of breaking trashing straight out of a chest.

A favorited item gets a border and becomes immune to quick stacking, quick trashing, throwing and depositing. It is the only real protection against feeding your good pickaxe to an absent minded quick stack.

The flag does not survive equipping, though. Put a favorited accessory or piece of armor into its slot and take it back out, and the favorite is gone until you reapply it. Anyone who swaps wings between fights should recheck now and then.

• Right clicking a stack pulls one item off it. Hold the button down and it keeps going, speeding up the longer you hold.
• To place something without putting it on the hotbar, left click it in the inventory to pick it up, then click in the world to place it. Right clicking instead throws it on the ground.
• Crafting behaves the same way as splitting. Hold the right mouse button on a recipe and it repeats, accelerating as you hold, and buying from a shop works identically.

Talking to a town NPC needs you close enough for the speech bubble to appear under your cursor, then the open and activate key. The same key handles doors and chests, which is why it gets rebound so often.

Right clicking a piece of equipment anywhere in your inventory swaps it into the matching armor or accessory slot without any dragging. It works from the social slots too, so trading a vanity piece for the functional one is a single click.

Signs, tombstones and chest names read out just by hovering the cursor over them. Labeling chests and reading them from across the room beats opening each one.

In handheld mode the Switch version layers touch shortcuts over the controller scheme. Double tapping the hotbar opens the inventory, double tapping an accessory flips its visibility, and tapping the minimap opens the full map. Watch pinch to zoom, which unlike the mobile version also uses whatever item you are holding.

Since the 1.3 mobile update the interface mirrors desktop closely, split into five movable panels: inventory and housing on the left, chat, equipment and crafting on the right. The inventory holds the same fifty slots, and you choose whether the leftmost ten or the top row acts as your hotbar.

The buttons under the inventory carry the functions with no natural touch equivalent. The tools button opens the toggle panel, home to things like the Torch God's Favor and the Paint Sprayer. Research sits there too, separately from the Journey Mode panel in the pause menu, and the split button gives you a slider for dividing a stack anywhere rather than one item at a time.

• Dragging an item onto another swaps them. Dragging the inventory itself scrolls it.
• The equip button puts armor and accessories in the right slot automatically, falling back to the vanity slot when the real one is occupied.
• Hold an item over a tab and it switches after a moment, which is how things move between inventory and storage.
• Anything equippable auto-equips when crafted, bought, picked up or taken from storage, worth remembering before you buy a second set of armor.
• Selling is a drag onto the shop tab. The Goblin Tinkerer gets an extra strip above his shop where you drop an item to reforge it.

The 3DS version puts a ten slot quick inventory on the touch screen alongside the map, the housing menu and a quick stack button that grays out when no chest is near. Its best addition is Building Mode, a zoomed in view that sorts tools down the left and building materials down the right. Materials keep inventory order. Tools sort into a fixed sequence: weapon, pickaxe, axe, hammer, wrench and wire cutter, then fishing gear. Left and right only do anything in the tool column when a slot has variants, such as a Terra Blade that flips to a Paladin's Hammer because both count as weapons.

Chests behave differently enough there to be dangerous. You cannot split or trash items straight out of one, the loot all button empties the whole thing in a press, and the deposit button sits near the trash without sharing its shortcut. Selling has a safety net the other versions lack: sold items land in five re-buy slots, and leaving the shop does not clear them. They only empty when you save and quit.