Settings
The Settings window is reached from the main menu or the pause menu. Change what you want, then press Apply to try it or Save to keep it; Cancel throws your changes away. Hover over a setting to see what it does.
Detect Best Settings
On a fresh install, TeamSpec checks your PC (graphics card, processor, memory and screen), runs a short benchmark, and suggests settings that keep the game at your screen's refresh rate. Run it again any time with Detect Best Settings at the bottom of the Settings window.
The benchmark plays a recorded fight between 20 players on Soulhouse, so it measures how hard a big fight works your processor as well as your graphics card. Started during a match, it first asks you to leave the server, then measures and returns you to the main menu.
Every suggestion is shown as its own card: change it, keep your current value, or discard them all. It never turns on anti-aliasing, it only lowers Render Scale as a last resort, and it keeps 3D Audio on unless your processor needs the help.
General
- Show Hints: the popups that explain something the first time you meet it, such as each game mode the first time you join one. Reset Hints shows them all again.
- Embed the server browser, console, performance monitor and chat window inside the game, or untick to give each its own window (useful on a second monitor).
- Steam Cloud: sync your settings, and separately your custom classes, between computers.
- Who can join your party: open to friends, or invite only. See Parties.
Sound
- Master volume and output device.
- 3D Audio: hear where every sound comes from: above you, behind you, around a corner or through a wall, with the echo of the place you stand in. Off plays sounds the simple way, louder near and quieter far and panned only between left and right, which saves a slow processor some work. With it off, the headphones, echo, wall and ambience settings below it do nothing.
- Headphones (HRTF): for headphones, every sound is heard as your head would hear it, so you can tell front from back. Untick for speakers.
- Room Echo & Reverb, Wall Muffling and Ambience Room Effect: how much the place you stand in colors what you hear, how much a wall muffles a sound behind it, and how much walking into a cave or a building dulls the map's ambience.
- Volumes for footsteps, the map's ambience, your own and everyone else's bullet impacts (and how far away an impact can be heard), voice lines and your god's whispers.
- Hit sound (with a separate headshot sound), hurt sound and heal sound, each with an on/off switch and its own volume, and how far gunfire dips while a hit sound plays. The heal sound plinks as the player you heal fills up and chimes when they are full.
Graphics
- Display: display mode (windowed, borderless windowed or exclusive fullscreen), field of view, viewmodel field of view, draw viewmodel, own shadow. Borderless windowed fills the screen as a window with no edges: tabbing in and out is instant, and other programs can appear on top of it. Exclusive fullscreen takes the whole screen for itself, keeps the game's tool windows (console, chat) inside it, and minimizes when you tab away; because it covers the screen exactly, it can feel a little more responsive than borderless. At your desktop resolution neither mode is slower than the other. Exclusive fullscreen can also run your screen at a different resolution, aspect ratio and refresh rate: a lower resolution looks blockier but can raise your frame rate on a slow graphics card, and the screen goes black for a moment when it switches and each time you tab out and back in. Press F11 at any time, in a match, a replay or the menus, to switch between windowed and borderless windowed (from exclusive fullscreen it goes to windowed); the choice is saved as your display mode.
- Photo mode: choose what the photo mode key hides (HUD, viewmodel, legs, own shadow).
- Environment effects: reflections, ambient occlusion, indirect lighting, global illumination and volumetric fog. These are permissions: unticking always turns an effect off, ticking only allows it where the map uses it.
- Quality:
- Render Scale and Upscaling: draw the 3D world with fewer pixels and stretch it to fill your screen. It is the biggest speed-up there is for a slow or built-in graphics card: 75% draws about half the pixels, 50% a quarter. FSR 1.0 keeps the picture closest to full resolution. The HUD, menus and text always stay sharp.
- Shadow Detail (Off to Ultra): how sharp shadows are and what casts them. Low keeps only the sun's shadow. Off turns off every shadow, the sun's too, which makes it harder to tell where someone is standing, so pick it only when everything else is already low; the lighting baked into the map stays.
- Effect Lights: whether fire, rockets, explosions and other weapon effects light up the world around them. Off keeps the effects and drops only their glow.
- Model Detail (Lowest to Ultra): how soon characters, weapons and props switch to their simpler versions as they get farther away, and how many bodies stay on the ground at once (4 to 12). Lowest draws everything at its simplest version, even right in front of you.
- Shader Detail (Low, Medium or High): draws the most expensive surfaces a cheaper way. Medium draws water without the bent view of what is under it. Low also draws water as an opaque surface; ground, leaves, glass, frost and ice more plainly; bullet holes without their 3D depth; fire, smoke, flames, explosions and the heal beam with fewer layers; and the Thermal Void, the Bauble of Condensed Air, the view underwater and a scope's view without their lens effects. Characters look the same at every level.
- Shadow Quality (how soft shadow edges are), occlusion culling and texture compression.
- Anti-aliasing: MSAA 2x, 4x or 8x, plus an FXAA or TAA pass.
- Combat effects:
- Impact particles, muzzle flash, particle detail, and the decal limit (bullet holes, scorch marks and blood).
- Gore: bodies coming apart and blood on bodies and walls. Off, every body falls whole.
- Physics Effects: things thrown about just for show: bodies falling limp as they die, bodies and buildings blown to pieces, hair and coats swinging, and rings and wakes on the water. Off, a body lies down where it died in the pose it died in and stays put, a destroyed building goes in a puff of smoke, and the water stays calm. It saves your processor work in big fights, changes only your own screen, and takes effect from the next death or explosion.
- Performance: V-Sync (off, on or adaptive), max FPS, threaded rendering and graphics API (Vulkan or Direct3D 12), the last two after a restart. To pick these for one launch without opening the game, see Launch options.
Crosshair
Pick a default, circle or cross crosshair, set its size, gap and color, and see it in a preview. You can also set the hit marker's duration and color, and turn damage numbers on or off, with how long they stay and whether they combine.
Controls
Mouse sensitivity, raw mouse input, and every key binding. Each action takes two bindings, and a search box finds an action or a key. The default keys are listed on Controls.
The bindings are grouped by tab:
- Movement, Combat and Weapons: moving, firing and switching weapons.
- Interface: loadout, team change, scoreboard, HUD, photo mode, screenshots, replay recording, Open Console, Open Chat, Chat: Next Channel and Toggle Borderless Window.
- Replay: the keys used while watching a replay: Spectate View, the free camera's Up, Down, Fast (hold) and Look (hold), Previous Player and Next Player, and Skip Kill Cam for the kill cam. The free camera moves with your Movement keys, so a custom layout works there too.
- Voice: push to talk.
Hints on screen name the keys you have bound and change as soon as you rebind: the chat box's "Press Enter to chat" prompt and the controls line in a replay.
Chat: Next Channel also works while you are typing in the chat box, which is how Tab switches channel there. Bound to a letter, that letter switches channel instead of typing. Esc always backs out of the chat box, a replay and the pause menu, and cannot be rebound.
Keys can also be bound to console commands with bind; see Developer console#Key binds.
A few settings have console variables too, such as viewmodel_fov and cl_drawviewmodel. See Developer console.
Voice
See Voice chat.
Weapon Specific
- Hold to heal chooses whether the Mender needs the trigger held.
- Always Show Charge keeps the Zappinator's and the L.E.B.'s charge percent under the crosshair whenever the weapon is out, not only while it charges.