Mouse and keyboard input

A large percentage of Roblox sessions are played on devices with a mouse and keyboard, so it's important to support these inputs when designing an experience for a wide audience.

To simplify cross‑platform inputs, including mouse/keyboard, Roblox provides the Input Action System to define actions such as "jump," "sprint," or "shoot" and set up bindings for multiple hardware inputs to drive those actions.

Roblox also supports general mouse/keyboard input through UserInputService events like InputBegan and InputEnded and methods like IsKeyDown() to check if a particular key is pressed on a keyboard.

Input type detection

In cross‑platform development, it's important that you determine and respond to the PreferredInput type a player is using, normally to ensure that UI elements like on-screen buttons and menus work elegantly and support interaction across devices.

For example, a PC or laptop assumes mouse/keyboard is the default input, but a player may choose to connect a bluetooth gamepad. In this case, mouse/keyboard remains a valid input, but you can assume the player wants to switch to the connected gamepad as the primary input type.

See input type detection for more information.

Generic mouse/key input

Beyond the Input Action System, you can capture mouse and keyboard inputs using UserInputService. The following LocalScript, when placed in StarterPlayerScripts, captures the began and ended phases of key and mouse clicks and prints the result to the Output window.

LocalScript - Output Key/Mouse Began and Ended
local UserInputService = game:GetService("UserInputService")

local function onInputBegan(inputObject, processedEvent)
	-- Return if another script has already processed the input
	if processedEvent then return end
	
	print(inputObject.KeyCode.Name, "began!", inputObject.Position)
end

local function onInputEnded(inputObject, processedEvent)
	-- Return if another script has already processed the input
	if processedEvent then return end
	
	print(inputObject.KeyCode.Name, "ended!", inputObject.Position)
end

UserInputService.InputBegan:Connect(onInputBegan)
UserInputService.InputEnded:Connect(onInputEnded)

Mouse icon

You can customize the appearance and behavior of a player's mouse icon within your experience to create a cohesive style across all of your UI elements. This includes temporarily changing the player's mouse icon in specific circumstances, such as hovering over a button.

You can change the player's mouse icon in a LocalScript by setting the MouseIcon property in UserInputService to a custom Roblox asset ID. For example, the following LocalScript changes the player's default mouse icon to a circle with a blue dot in the middle.

local UserInputService = game:GetService("UserInputService")

UserInputService.MouseIcon = "rbxassetid://3400146391"