bevy-input-actions

Bevy 0.19 — input actions

When to use this skill

• Gameplay needs device-neutral, persisted, rebindable actions and prompts.
• Controllers can hot-plug/reorder or multiple players/devices share input.
• Mouse capture, focus loss, Steam Deck, or adaptive hardware needs one policy.
• Frame-scoped edges/motion must drive deterministic FixedUpdate simulation.

Gameplay consumes logical actions, never raw keys or a hard-coded controller entity. Translate Bevy's frame input into an action state once, then feed presentation and fixed simulation from that state.

Canonical pattern

Bevy updates raw input in PreUpdate inside InputSystems. Run the translator after that set so ButtonInput, Gamepad, input messages, and accumulated mouse motion represent the current frame:

use bevy::{input::InputSystems, prelude::*};

fn install_input(app: &mut App) {
    app.init_resource::<ActionBuffer>().add_systems(
        PreUpdate,
        translate_physical_input.after(InputSystems),
    );
}

#[derive(Resource, Default)]
struct ActionBuffer;

fn translate_physical_input(mut _actions: ResMut<ActionBuffer>) {}

keyboard / mouse / touch / Gamepad entities / Steam Input
                     |
                     v
        physical bindings + device calibration
                     |
                     v
       active action set/context + conflict policy
                     |
                     v
       frame action state + ordered transition queue
              |                         |
        Update/UI consumers      fixed-tick bridge

Use stable serialized action IDs such as gameplay.jump, menu.confirm, and camera.look. Bindings, labels, prompts, save data, and analytics refer to those IDs; Rust enum discriminants and catalog order are not persistence contracts.

For an edge whose precise per-device-stream order matters, translate the underlying keyboard, mouse, or gamepad messages into an ordered queue. A single just_pressed boolean cannot represent two transitions or their order. Held state and filtered axes may be stored as the latest values.