Keyboard & mouse
Every key and mouse gesture iCity 2 registers, in one table. The status bar inside the iCity 2 workspace already shows the subset that applies right now; this is the whole set, including the gestures you only meet with a tool armed or an element picked.
The status bar already answers this
Inside the iCity 2 workspace, iCity takes over Blender's input hints at the bottom of the window and answers one question continuously: what can you press right now. It draws the same way Blender does, an icon and a two-word label per action, and it leaves the reports banner, the running-job progress and the scene statistics where Blender put them.
Four layers feed that strip, and the highest one that applies wins: a running gesture (a draw stroke, a hold-drag, a carried prop), then an armed tool, then whatever is selected, then the resting hint for the mode. The boxed caption on the left names the mode and the Alt number that reaches it, so the strip teaches the mode keys while you work.
The full status bar strip at the bottom of the Blender window, in the iCity 2 workspace, Draft, Roads mode, engine running, nothing selected and Select armed. The boxed caption must read "Roads (Alt 2)" and the items D Draw Road, LMB Select, Shift+LMB Extend, drag Box Select, A Select All must all be legible. Crop to the left two thirds of the bar.
Arm a draw tool and the whole tool's vocabulary appears at once, before the first click, so it can be read before you commit to a stroke. Pick an element instead and the strip names what the handles now on screen actually do.
The status bar strip during a Draw Road stroke with three points placed. The boxed caption must read "Draw Road: 3 Points" and the items Enter Confirm, Esc End Stroke, LMB Add Point, RMB Draw Elsewhere, D Exit Tool must be legible. Crop to the left two thirds of the bar.
The strip goes back to Blender's own in three cases: while the engine is not running, in Graph and Scatter (neither has selection gizmos or a draw tool), and whenever the selection gizmos are hidden. In Design it shows only left click, Select, because the editing keys below are Draft-only.
Blender’s click is not iCity’s click
Roads, regions, lots and buildings are picked by iCity's own gizmos, not by Blender's object selection. Clicking a road mesh in the outliner, or box-selecting it with Blender's own tool, leaves iCity with nothing selected and every card empty. Selecting and editing covers that in full.
The bindings on this page live in the addon's own keymaps, and every one of them is gated. When the gate does not pass the key is not consumed, so it falls straight through to Blender's own binding. That is why A, X and Ctrl+Z still behave like Blender keys in a scene with no city in it, and why Ctrl+Z only rewinds the city when the last thing you did was an iCity edit.
One more Blender-side condition: the edit handles, the road width bars, the corner squares, the edge bars and the floors arrow, only draw while one of Blender's select tools is active (Tweak, Box, Circle or Lasso). Choose Move or Rotate in Blender's own toolbar and every handle disappears, along with every drag hint the status bar was showing.
Every binding
Grouped by where it applies. Everything marked Draft is gated on the Draft module and on the engine running; Design has its own short list at the end.
X appears twice on purpose. With an element selected and no move running it deletes; once a move is running the move owns the key and it locks the X axis instead.
The four mouse verbs
Press selects. Hold-drag moves: the same press becomes a move once the cursor travels past about four pixels, so there is no separate move tool to reach for. Drags run on the ground plane, release commits, and Esc puts everything back. Lifting or sloping in Z is the job of G and the axis arrows, which run the same pipeline.
The 3D viewport in Draft, Lots mode, engine running, one lot selected with its corner squares and edge bars visible, and one corner square being dragged with X pressed so the red axis line runs through the pivot. The status bar must be visible at the bottom with the caption "Move: X Axis" and the items LMB Confirm, Esc Cancel, X/Y/Z Axis.
Right click on a selected element opens its popup, which carries the verbs the status bar was advertising: Subdivide and Straighten on roads, Dissolve Node on a curve point, the Intersection row (Bare / Traffic / Roundabout) on a junction, Type on a lot or a building, Merge Lots, Floors, and a Delete named for what it deletes — Delete Node, Delete Segment, Delete Lot, Delete Building. The popup also carries a block Split row, which nothing can reach in this build: Blocks mode is pinned to picking regions, so a block is never the selected element. In Draft right click is the only way in, because the same controls also sit inline in the iCity Editor column. It does not open while a draw tool is armed.
The 3D viewport in Draft, Roads mode, with a junction node selected (status caption "Junction") and the element popup open beside it at the cursor, showing its title and the Intersection buttons Bare / Traffic / Roundabout and Delete.
The pen is every draw tool: click points or corners, Enter confirms. Draw Road is the one that behaves differently on the way out, because it streams each click to the engine as it lands, so Esc reads End Stroke and keeps what is drawn. The polygon tools build nothing until you confirm, so their Esc reads Cancel.
When a key does nothing
Nothing here reports an error, because a key that does not apply is not consumed at all. If a binding seems dead, one of these is why.
- —The engine is not running. Every Draft edit is dispatched to the engine, and with it down the selection gizmos are gone too. The status bar hands the strip back to Blender rather than advertise dead keys.
- —Select is switched off. Select is a tool, and re-clicking the lit Select button in the rail turns selection off entirely: clicks stop picking, right click stops opening the popup, A and Ctrl+I stop firing. Only the unlit button says so. Click it again to bring selection back.
- —Gizmos are hidden for this mode. The rail's ⋮ menu carries “Hide gizmos in <mode>”, which has the same effect one mode at a time.
- —You are in Design. D, Del, G and the move handles are all Draft-gated. Design is dressing; a click there picks the element the cards act on and that is the whole vocabulary.
- —The mode has no draw tool. D does nothing in Graph, whose rail carries no draw tool for it to arm.
- —A Blender transform tool is active. The width bars, corner squares, edge bars and floors arrow only draw under Blender's Tweak, Box, Circle or Lasso select tool.
- —The pointer is not over the 3D viewport. These bindings are installed in the viewport's Object Mode and 3D View keymaps; over the iCity Editor panel they are not reached.
Two hints that point elsewhere
Holding the Draw Footprint button opens a picker that ends with the line “Height is in the tool header”. There is no tool header: iCity does not register its tools with Blender's toolbar, so no tool settings row is ever drawn. The Height field for a drawn footprint is in the iCity Editor's Massing column, shown with nothing selected, alongside Type. It starts at 9 m.
The iCity Editor area in Draft, Massing mode, with the Draw Type popup open over it after holding the Draw Footprint rail button: the title "What do you want to draw?", the three buttons Residential / Mixed Use / Terraced, and the grey hint line beneath them. The Massing column's Type and Height fields must be visible in the same frame.
Alt+6 is bound to Scatter in every mode, but Scatter is a Design mode and the Draft rail does not offer it. Pressing it in Draft leaves you in a mode with no lit tab, no tools and no gizmos, over a panel that says why: Scatter lives in Design — switch modules to place props. Alt+1 to Alt+5 get you back out.
The status bar strip in Draft, Roads mode, engine running, with exactly one road segment selected. The boxed caption must read "Road" and the items drag Move/Resize, RMB Subdivide, Ctrl+I Invert, Del Delete must be legible. Crop to the left two thirds of the bar.
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