How to play
Two things to learn: tilting the lift vector is how you manoeuvre, and the boosters are how you cover ground. Everything else on this page is a key.
Controls and keybinds
These are the defaults, read straight out of the game's own binding table. All of them are rebindable in the settings panel (P).
| Key | What it does |
|---|---|
| W / ↑ | Pitch the nose down — this is how you go forward |
| S / ↓ | Pitch the nose up |
| A / ← | Bank left to translate left |
| D / → | Bank right to translate right |
| Q | Yaw left on the spot |
| E | Yaw right on the spot |
| Shift / R-Shift / R | Throttle up — a held setting, not a momentary one |
| Ctrl / R-Ctrl | Throttle down |
| H | Trim straight to the hover throttle for the current mass |
| Space | Aft boosters — hold to cover ground, and watch the fuel |
| X / Z | Retro-thrusters — back off a pad, or scrub speed on approach |
| G / Enter | Hand the approach to the autopilot, within 50 m of a pad |
| Key | What it does |
|---|---|
| C | Cycle the camera |
| 1 | Chase camera |
| 2 | Cockpit camera |
| 3 | Landing camera — looks down past the belly at the pad |
| 4 | Free orbit |
| L | Floodlights |
| M | The world chart |
| V | Toggle the HUD markers |
| F | Fullscreen |
| Key | What it does |
|---|---|
| Tab | Open the mission list |
| J | Take the job |
| N | Say where the current objective is |
| K | The ledger — what you have earned and spent |
| U | The workshop — shut down on the paint of a base pad |
| O | The tables, at The Lucky Strike |
| T | Take on fuel, where fuel is sold |
| B | Turn in for eight hours — at base, on the ground |
| Key | What it does |
|---|---|
| Y | Get out of the ship, and back in |
| Space | Jump |
| Shift / R-Shift | Run rather than walk |
| Key | What it does |
|---|---|
| Esc | Pause, or close whatever is open |
| P | Settings, seed and key bindings |
Flying the hauler
The ship has one engine arrangement and it always points along the hull. Tilt the hull and you tilt the thrust: that is your only way of going sideways, and it is why nose-down is forward. Tilt alone settles at about 85 m/s. The boosters take that well past 300 and burn fuel in proportion — pinned boost empties a full tank in roughly six minutes.
The retro-thrusters are the other half of that axis, rated at about half the boosters' thrust, because a cargo hauler is not meant to be good at going backwards. They exist so you can take speed off an approach without pitching the nose up and losing sight of the pad. Holding both means neither.
The throttle is a held setting, not a momentary one, so most of flying is choosing a number and then making small attitude corrections around it. H trims straight to the hover throttle for whatever the ship currently weighs, which changes as you load ore and burn fuel.
The four conditions. The landing indicator is not decoration — it is a checklist. PAD means you are over the paint, SINK means you are coming down slowly enough, LEVEL means the skids will meet the ground together, and DRIFT means you have killed your sideways motion. All four, or the hull pays. The landing guide works through each one.
Common questions
Is Miners of Mars: Space Cowboy free?
Yes. It is free to play in the browser, with no account, no purchases and no ads inside the game.
Do I need to download or install anything?
No. The whole game is a web page. Open it and it generates a world in a few seconds. It needs a browser with WebGL, which means any current version of Chrome, Firefox, Edge or Safari.
Does it work on a phone or tablet?
It is built for desktop. The controls are a keyboard or a gamepad, and hovering a heavy ship needs finer input than a touchscreen gives you. The rest of this site reads fine on a phone.
Can I use a controller?
Yes, and it suits the game better than a keyboard does. Sticks fly, triggers are the boosters and retros, and A auto-lands. A gamepad merges with the keyboard rather than replacing it: a deflected stick takes control, a centred one hands it back.
How do I land without crashing?
Come in slow, get over the pad, level the ship and kill your sideways drift. The HUD names the one condition you are failing — PAD, SINK, LEVEL or DRIFT — so fix that one. The landing camera looks down past the belly at the pad and is far easier to judge from than the view from behind.
Is my progress saved?
Yes. The game saves to your browser on the machine you played on, and it autosaves as you go. Clearing site data for the page clears the save.
How long is the campaign?
Sixteen missions, flown in order. After that the job board opens and generates contract work indefinitely — hauls, medevacs, surveys, and the occasional rematch with Cassidy.
What is the seed for?
Every world is generated from a seed. The seed is on the loading screen and in the address bar, so a world you liked can be written down, reloaded or sent to somebody else and it will be the same Mars.