Everyone on this grid is jacked in. The Neural Link is the cybernetic interface wired straight into your head, and it is how you do almost everything: check your body, talk to people, read the job feed, move your money, find your car, pull up the map. One implant, one hotkey, one holographic interface that projects across your vision.
You will not fumble through six different menus. You open the Link and everything you need is one tab away. Press F1 to bring it up. Press it again, or ESC, to drop it.
The Link is split in two. There is the passive HUD, the thin always-on layer at the edges of your vision (health, ammo, location, who is talking). And there is the full interface, the holographic panel you pull up with F1 when you actually want to do something. The passive layer is always there. The big interface only when you call it.
The whole interface runs off the keyboard. You do not need a mouse for most of it, though clicking works fine too.
| Key | Does |
|---|---|
| F1 | Open or close the Neural Link. |
| TAB | Cycle to the next tab while the Link is open. Hold Shift to go back. |
| 1 to 0 | Jump straight to a tab by its number. |
| ESC / Q | Close the Link. |
| B | Seatbelt, while you are in a vehicle. |
| F2 | Your inventory hotbar (the quick item slots). |
F1 belongs to the Link now. If you came off another server, the muscle memory of F1 doing something else is gone here. F1 is your brain. Get used to it fast, because you will hit it a thousand times a night.
Even with the interface closed, the Link feeds you the constant stuff at the edges of your screen so you are never flying blind:
All of it is yours to tune. The SETTINGS tab lets you turn individual pieces off, change the opacity, scale the whole thing up or down, and pick which corner the big interface anchors to.
There is no chat box on this grid. No wall of text scrolling up the corner, no blinking input bar. When someone talks in text near you or on a channel you are on, a faint line fades in at the bottom left and fades back out on its own. If nothing is being said, there is nothing on your screen.
To actually type a reply, you open the Link and use the COMMS tab. That is the only place a chat bar exists. The point is simple: this is a voice-first world. You talk with your mouth. Text is for the things voice cannot do (a quiet DM, a crew note, a number nobody should overhear), and it lives behind F1 where it belongs.
Everything the Link does is organized into tabs along the bottom of the interface, with matching icons down the left rail. Here is what each one is for.
Your at-a-glance dashboard. Health, location, wanted level, your credit standing, your humanity, and anything currently affecting you. Quick action tiles jump you to the things you reach for most. Start here, branch out from here.
Your body, read honestly. A scan shows your real condition by zone (head, torso, arms, legs), your wound state, and your vitals. The second panel is your chrome: every piece of cyberware installed, its grade and condition, and your humanity. The more chrome you carry, the less human you are. Drop your humanity too low and your body starts fighting back: below thirty percent you risk blackouts with no warning, mid firefight, mid drive, mid sentence. Watch that gauge.
Messages, contacts and radio. Channels are Global (the whole grid), Local (only people near you, never stored), Crew (your gang) and Direct (one person). Save contacts by standing next to someone and hitting the button, or by trading reference codes. The radio panel links you to a frequency for push-to-talk voice. This tab is also where you read the System feed and answer anything that came in on the ticker.
Your full skill list, the way you actually grow on this grid. Every skill has a live value out of 100 and milestone marks at 25, 50, 75 and 100. You earn skill by doing, not by spending points. Each skill has a gain lock you can cycle: UP to keep training it, DOWN to let it fall as you raise others, or LOCKED to freeze it. There is a hard ceiling of 700 total points across everything, so you cannot master it all. Some raw physical stats are marked FREE: those train naturally and do not eat your cap. The full rules live on the Skill Matrix.
The public board where work gets handed out. Fixers post jobs, you throw your hat in the ring, and the desk picks its crew. The desk always pays out on settle, even when a job goes sideways, so the credits are guaranteed once you are hired. Track your open applications and the crew jobs you have landed right here. This is how a nobody starts building a name.
A live readout of everything you are carrying: items, weights, weapons with their ammo and condition. It mirrors what is actually on you in real time. Hit the button to open the full inventory and start moving things around.
What you own: vehicles, properties, businesses. Your fleet shows fuel, condition and where each car is right now, with the buttons to locate or call it. Properties and businesses plug in here as you acquire them. Cars are a whole system of their own; read the Vehicle Grid for parking, theft, transponders and recovery.
Your money, and there is no such thing as cash here, only credits. You have three pools:
| Pool | What it is |
|---|---|
| ACCOUNT | Clean credits on the grid. Safe in the bank, used for wires, bills and shared accounts from anywhere. |
| CREDSTICK | Clean credits on your person. Spendable, but if someone robs you and takes the stick, they take the credits. |
| TRACKED CREDSTICK | Stolen credits with a history. SecuroServ scans light up on it and ATMs refuse it. You need a fence to wash it into clean credits, at a cut. |
Moving credits between your account and your credstick is a physical act: you have to be at an ATM. The Bank tab tells you when a terminal is in reach and greys the buttons out when it is not. Wires, bills and joint accounts work from anywhere over the Link.
Opens the real city map so you can drop a GPS waypoint right where you want it. Save your own named markers (a stash spot, a meet) and recall them later. This tab is also where you call an Autocab, the driverless taxi that drives your set route and bills you per mile straight off your account while you ride.
A datapad for whatever you need to remember: RP journals, intel, plans, a phone number. Personal notes are yours alone. Crew notes are a shared board your gang can read. Pin a note and it can float on your passive HUD so it is always in front of you.
Every animation on the grid in one searchable grid: emotes, dances, props, two-person shared bits, walk styles and facial moods. Favorite the ones you use, and they are a click away. You can also fire them with /e followed by the emote name, and stop with /e stop.
Tune the whole interface: opacity, scale, which corner it anchors to, and which passive pieces show. Accessibility options cover font size, high contrast and colorblind modes. There is a layout edit mode for arranging the passive elements, a character dossier, and the button to open the appearance suite and change how you look.
The SecuroServ TITAN terminal. This tab only appears if you work corporate security or the DOJ. It is the law's side of the grid: subject records, incidents, BOLOs, dispatch. If you are not on the badge, you will never see it.