Admin console

Steel Tide carries a one-line admin console: a prompt that drops in from the top edge of the battle on the backquote key. It is the match owner's toolbox — hand a faction metal, put a knocked-out player back in the game, conjure a dozen tanks, lift the fog, change the clock, remove somebody. In a solo game it runs in your own copy of the match. In a multiplayer match only the host may type into it, and the line travels to the server, which owns the world and answers back.

Opening the prompt

` — the backquote key, left of 1 and above Tab — opens and closes the console; Esc closes it too. It is rebindable under Settings → Controls as Admin console. Type a line and press Enter to run it; the answer prints above the prompt. ↑ and ↓ walk back through the last 30 lines you typed.

While the prompt has focus the battle's hotkeys are held back, so a command with an s or an a in it does not stop or attack-move your army as you type. help (or ?) prints the command list, and players prints the factions.

Who may run them

• Single player — campaign or skirmish — every command below runs in your own match, immediately.
• Multiplayer — only the host. Anyone else gets Only the host can run commands. The host's line is not applied locally: it is sent to the server, applied to the authoritative world there, and the server's reply is what prints. That is also why reveal works at all across the wire — the server filters every frame by what a team can see, so a fog lift the server had not agreed to would show a client nothing new.
• kick is the one command with nothing to do in a local game, and it says so.

Naming a faction

Most commands take a <who>. It can be:

• the faction id — the number in front of each line of players;
• the faction's colour, in English or Chinese (red, 蓝方);
• in multiplayer, the name of the player holding that faction — something only the server knows, which is why the token travels to it as written.

Exact matches win first, then a unique prefix: respawn re finds Red, while respawn r answers with the factions it could have meant.

The commands

Command	What it does
help, ?	Print this list in the console.
players, list	One line per faction: id, colour, human or AI (with its difficulty), and whether it is alive, has no base left, or is eliminated. On a server the player's name is appended, and (disconnected) if they dropped.
respawn <who>	Give a faction that lost its base a new headquarters.
metal <who> <amount>	Set that faction's bank to <amount> — it sets, it does not add. 0 to 1,000,000, rounded.
give <who> <unit> [n]	Place n of a unit at that faction's base. 1 to 50, default 1.
heal <who>	Repair everything that faction owns, at once and for free.
reveal [on|off]	Lift the fog of war, or put it back. Bare reveal means on.
speed 0.5|1|2|4	Set the game speed.
kick <who>	Remove the player holding a faction from the match. Host only.

respawn

The faction has to actually be out of bases — one that still has somewhere to rebuild is told so. It comes back alive, with its metal topped up to the match's starting metal if it had fallen below, and a headquarters with two engineers at its original spawn, or on the nearest clear ground with room for the 4×4 footprint. Everyone sees the announcement in the activity feed. This is the host's way to let someone who lost their base in the first ten minutes keep playing rather than watch.

give

<unit> is the game's internal unit id — or any of the names that unit also answers to: give red mbt 5, give red bison 5 and give red tank 5 all place five Bison Battle Tanks. Case is ignored. Every id and alias is in the tables at the foot of this page.

Units only — a building is placed by an engineer, never conjured. They arrive fully built and free, fanned around the faction's headquarters (or any other building it holds, or a surviving unit, or its spawn if it holds nothing at all), and each one still has to find ground its own domain can stand on: give red frigate at an inland base places nothing and says so. The unit cap is recounted afterwards, so a generous give can leave a faction over its cap and unable to produce until the count comes down.

heal

Everything the faction owns, units and buildings alike, goes back to full hit points. Construction sites are deliberately left alone: a site's hit points are its build progress, so filling them would finish the building rather than mend it.

reveal

This is the match's own fog setting, not a spectator view, so it lifts for everyone at once — you see the enemy and the enemy sees you. reveal off puts the fog back where it was.

speed

The four speeds are the same ones the HUD buttons offer. In a solo game it moves your clock; in a multiplayer match the server moves everybody's, and the activity feed says who is now running at what.

kick

During a match <who> names a faction; in the lobby, where there are no factions yet, it is a seat number. The player's socket is closed with code 4001, which their client knows not to reconnect from. Their faction stays in the match, leaderless — the units keep whatever orders they were on. The host cannot be kicked, and in a local game there is nobody to remove.

Unit ids

What give will take, by domain: the canonical id, and the aliases that mean the same unit. The name links to the unit's page.

Land

Sea

Air

Buildings have ids too, and you will see them in error messages, but give refuses them — they are built by an engineer on ground you choose. See Controls for the keys around the console, and Multiplayer server for what the host owns in a match that runs on a server.