Controls
What to press, click, drag or hold in each scene — cutting, the mannequin, sewing, accessories and the photo camera. Everything here says where it came from, because not all of it is equally certain.
Controls reviewed through Build 410, checked 28 września 2026.
The four players ask about most
Start here if you are stuck
Pick the thing that is not working and get the short answer. Two of these are known friction points rather than missing labels, and this page says so instead of offering a shortcut that may not work.
Controls by scene
Dressmaker changes what the mouse does depending on where you are, so this is grouped by scene rather than by key. Pick the scene you are in.
Where the design is chosen before any fabric is cut.
Click the arrows beside a component to cycle through the options.
Drag fabric onto the sketchbook page to see how the design and the fabric suit the client.
Use the pencil on the sketchbook page.
Click Draft Pattern once you are happy with the design.
Fabric and haberdashery samples can be saved in the sketchbook.
Where pattern pieces are placed on the fabric and cut out. Build 410 changed how the mouse wheel behaves here.
Click the fabric you want in the sidebar.
In the gameSelect
Switch to the patterns tab in the sidebar.
Drag a piece from the sidebar onto the fabric.
Use the rotation knob so the piece lines up with the horizontal grain line. Aligned grain means a higher-quality garment, so it is worth doing before the cut.
In the gameRotate
Select the scissors, then click the pattern piece.
Right-click the cut piece, or drag it back into the inventory.
In the gameSend to inventory
Use the discard fabric button, or hold the scissors at the top or bottom edge of the roll and click it. Either one frees the space for more pieces.
Where the cut panels are assembled, and where the mannequin itself is opened and reassembled.
Drag a cut piece from your inventory onto the matching spot on the mannequin.
Click the sew button once the panels sit where you want them.
Drag the panel back to your inventory. From there you can take it to the cutting room and cut it again.
No method is published for the current build. Player answers disagree with each other, so this row hands off rather than instructing.
Where a seam is actually sewn. Two of these are keyboard and mouse basics, and one changed in Build 410.
Press space.
In the gameSew
Drag the mouse left and right.
In the gameRotate
Use the Change Speed control in the sewing scene.
In the gameChange Speed
Click a thread spool. New in Build 410 — this interaction did not exist before that build.
Where trims, bows and jewels are put on the finished dress, one at a time or several at once.
Open the accessories tab.
Click the piece to select it, then click where it goes on the dress.
In the gamePlace
Switch to Place Multiple and keep placing. It repeats the kind of piece you selected rather than making you pick it again.
In the gamePlace Multiple
Drag it to move. The accessory gizmo rotates it, resizes it, and raises or lowers it.
Use Remove Item, or drag the piece back to your inventory.
In the gameRemove Item
Use Finish Placement. Until you do, the piece stays selected.
In the gameFinish Placement
Add points to build the path, then finish it. This is for the pieces that follow a curve rather than sitting at a single spot.
In the gameAdd PointFinish
Where the dress is photographed — a different camera from the one you used to make it.
Use the Camera Controls.
Use the environmental controls.
Click Take Photo when you are happy with the shot.
Camera
There are two cameras in this game and they get mixed up constantly: one for making the dress, one for photographing it. Only the second one is named in the tutorial.
The camera you move around the mannequin, the panels and the accessories while building the garment. The extracted game data does not attach a control to it — the hint labels exist without a stated binding — so this page describes what it is for and not which input moves it.
The camera in photo mode, which the tutorial does name: you adjust its angle with the Camera Controls and the surroundings with the environmental controls. It is a separate camera from the one above, which is why a control that works while photographing may do nothing while sewing.
What the game's own strings call these
In the gameZoomZoom out/orbit (hold)Pan Camera
These three labels are quoted from the game's own text. Note what they are: the words shown beside an action, with no key, no button and no modifier attached — which is exactly why this page can tell you what the game calls something but not always what to press.
Players on desktop and on the Steam Deck report the same thing: the camera hint is visible, and the interaction that happens is not the one it describes. That makes it a troubleshooting problem rather than a missing label, and it belongs on its own page.
Keybinds
We cannot answer this yet, and we would rather say so than guess. Nothing in the extracted game data or in either public patch note describes a way to rebind a control — but that is not the same as knowing you cannot, and a page that answered either way would be inventing it.
What the evidence does and does not show
Status
Needs build check
Not yet verified on the current build
One check in the game on Build 410 settles this, and the pair of sentences above would collapse into a single clear answer. Until then it stays open.
Steam Deck
The short version, because the handheld has its own page: Dressmaker is a mouse-oriented game and the Deck does not change that.
The developers have said proper controller support is still being worked on.
This is not a controller layout and will not become one. The game ships no default button mapping, so a list of buttons here would be a guess presented as documentation. On the Deck, the trackpad stands in for the mouse — and zoom is the interaction players report struggling with, which is the one thing on this page that is genuinely worse on a handheld than on a desktop.
Questions
About this page
Controls are the part of Dressmaker that moves fastest between patches, so this page is stamped rather than dated. The current public build is Build 410, and the game data behind this site was extracted from an earlier one — which matters for numbers, and matters more here, because a patch can change what the mouse does without touching a single value in the export. Build 410 did exactly that, twice.
What would change this page