Accessibility

Shellfall is a calm game about careful work, and it should be calm for everyone who plays it. These options are part of the design from the start. Like the rest of the game, they are planned, and the details may change as it is built and tested.

Time when you need it

• Pause anywhere. P, or Start on a gamepad, stops the war at any moment.
• Half speed. Shift runs the whole war at half speed. The war clock shows ½ while it is on, and a paused war is the one amber state on the clock, so it is never missed.
• Relaxed warnings. On the relaxed setting, a threatened story operation gives you 4 war hours (16 real minutes) to get there instead of 2 war hours (8 real minutes). See Operations and requests.

Telling the armies apart

Colour-blind faction patterns add stripes, dots or chevrons to the helmets and flags on the battlefield. In the interface, a faction is never shown by colour alone. It always comes with its name or its shape.

The three colours are also chosen to differ in lightness, not just hue: in greyscale they must differ in value by at least 10%. Every screen is checked in greyscale. Warnings use amber with an icon or a countdown, never red, because red means the Rustcoats. The state of each operation, request and letter has its own small glyph, so it reads without colour too. See The three armies.

Every word on the radio

Subtitles are on by default for every radio line and every crew line. They sit at the bottom of both views in reversed colours, so they read over any part of the world. When a message starts to come in, a small "Receiving" signal shows before the words arrive.

Help with the arithmetic

The gunner's notebook can do as much or as little of the paperwork as you like. Difficulty settings decide how much it fills in, from "suggests the full solution" to "blank page". The Gunner's assist option fills in the whole firing solution, so you can enjoy the battlefield without the maths. See Ballistics and the firing table and The shot.

Light, dark and motion

The interface comes in two themes. Day is paper, the map table by daylight, and is the default. Night is the lamplit table, with light ink on a dark ground.

Motion follows the world and never bounces. The bearing needle turns at the gun's real speed and never jumps. With reduced motion on, fog-of-war reveals become a plain fade, the cloud dive between the The map table and the gun yard becomes a cut, and the radio signal and the "developing" plate stop moving. Keyboard focus is always shown as a solid outline. For every key and button, see Controls.