Skip to content
SpringFall Wiki

Selecting & Giving Orders

Overview

Everything you do to the colony starts with selecting something and telling it what to do — a colonist to put to work, a rock to mine, a bandit to fight. The same handful of clicks work on every kind of colonist, building, resource, item and creature in the world.

How it works

  • Left-click a colonist to select them. Their details show up in the character panel.
  • Shift+left-click another colonist to add them to the current selection, so you can command a group at once.
  • Left-click and drag an empty patch of ground to box-select every colonist inside the rectangle.
  • Right-click a target to issue an order to whoever’s selected — move to a spot, attack a hostile, harvest a resource node, and so on. What exactly happens depends on what you right-click and who’s selected.
  • Shift+right-click anything — a prop, a building, an item, a creature, a resource node, a colonist — to open its Inspector panel. This works on every entity in the world, not just colonists, and it’s always available even if there’s nothing else you can do with that thing yet.

Playing with it

  • The Inspector panel is your reference point for “what is this and what can I do with it” — it shows the entity’s details, and any actions available for it (harvest, repair, assign, trade, and so on) appear as buttons along the bottom of the panel.
  • It sits in the bottom-right corner and keeps the things worth knowing at a glance — the name, what it is, and its most important readings — pinned at the top, with the rest grouped into sections. The section that matters most for that kind of thing opens by itself, and the others sit closed underneath until you want them: a bed opens on what it’s for, a wall on how it’s built, a colonist on how they are.
  • Anything you can change about a thing — a bed’s designation, who it’s assigned to — sits as a row just above the buttons at the bottom, where it stays put instead of scrolling away with the readings.
  • Drag the title bar to move it, use the chevron beside the close button to minimise it down to a title tab when you want the corner back without losing your place, and drag the small tab in its top-left corner to resize it — useful when you’re reading a long list and want more of it on screen at once.
  • Selecting a group and right-clicking a job (say, a stand of trees) sends the whole group to work it together, rather than one colonist at a time.
  • A click prefers things over places. A colonist, prop or resource node always wins the click over the zone, room or building they’re standing in — however far away they are and however much of the screen the room takes up — so you never have to aim around the floor to select what’s on it.
  • If a click doesn’t hit what you meant, it’s almost never your aim: it means that particular object isn’t set up to be clicked yet. Try its Inspector with Shift+right-click, and if nothing opens, it’s a gap rather than a miss.

Good to know

  • Box-select only picks up colonists — it won’t sweep up buildings or resources, so you can safely drag a selection box across a busy scene without accidentally grabbing the wrong thing.
  • Inspecting something never interrupts what it’s doing — it’s purely informational, so open it as often as you like.
  • If you want to mark a whole area of trees or rocks for harvesting at once instead of clicking each one, that’s the Orders bar’s job.
  • Jobs & Work — how a colonist decides what to actually do once they’re free
  • Camera Controls — getting the camera where you need it before you select