Monk Took Book Settings and Accessibility

Monk Took Book ships with a blunt promise on the store page: if you detest danger, you may disable it. The same options menu also holds arachnophobia mode, camera comfort, full rebinds, mic levels, monk names, and the F1 feedback key that fed a month of 0.5.x hotfixes. This page is a tour of those levers in the order you should touch them on a new save — difficulty first, comfort second, input third, social fourth. It is not a screenshot atlas. Menus move; the verbs stay.

Set these before you invent a shelf language. A night that is too loud will teach you the wrong lesson about how to organize. A night that is too dark will teach you the wrong lesson about the monastery map. Change one cluster at a time so you know which slider saved the folio.

Difficulty: enemies, pests, fires, books

Four independent controls matter more than any “easy” preset:

• Enemies — skeletons, Viking ghosts (Grunt, Raider, Berserker), rabbit archers, poltergeists, the Book Thief, Lord Fluffy’s appearances. Reduce, increase, or disable.
• Pests — rats and spiders. 0.5.x both fixed their AI and allowed them to appear in daytime. A quiet morning is a setting, not a promise.
• Fires — torch embers, fire arrows (50% ember chance after 0.6.3.7), spreading combustion. Disable if you want zero chance a stack becomes a bonfire.
• Book rate — how hard the barge works. Lower it for a chill cataloguing shift; raise it if the memory test feels thin.

Disabling enemies does not disable the checkout. Scribes still want the lightning-bolt folio you shelved at dawn. Disabling fires does not disable physics; you can still crush a volume under a bad stack. The review and getting started both treat these sliders as first-class. Use them.

If you keep fires on, invest in the Torch Perk shrine so ember chance can fall as far as 0%, and learn the pail. That is a combat skill and a settings choice at once. Four-player nights already run at about 55% of solo time; adding max enemies on a quartet is how you get a comedy wipe. Read solo versus co-op before you crank every slider up for a “real” run.

Arachnophobia mode

0.6.3.7 added arachnophobia mode after players asked, in public Steam threads, for spiders they could live with. The mode replaces spider models with a non-creature stand-in (text, not a jump-scare mesh). Turn it on before the first night if you even suspect you need it. Do not “see how it goes” in a dark bay. Pests can still exist as a gameplay pressure when the model is gone; if the idea of a pest is the problem, reduce or disable pests as well.

This is an accessibility option, not a joke difficulty. Pair it with camera shake scale if sudden motion is the other trigger. The rest of the haunt — draugr, thieves, Lord Fluffy — is unchanged. You can fight those on combat with a clean view of the floor.

Camera, display, and comfort

Comfort cluster:

• FoV — widen if the hall feels like a tunnel; know that a wider cone draws more shelves and costs a little GPU. See system requirements.
• Headbob — lower or zero if you read covers for a living. You do.
• Gamma — lift for the crypt and night stacks; do not blind the daylight barge.
• Camera shake scale — Perfect Parry, fires, and thrown piles all punch the camera. Scale it down if you play for memory, not for hits.
• Invert Y — 0.6.3.7 fixed double-selecting this option. Set it once.
• Window or fullscreen — plus widescreen support. 0.5.5.3 fixed HUD pieces that slid off 16:10 panels; if your Deck or monitor is 16:10, you are the reason that hotfix exists.
• Max Shadows — first quality drop when the hall hitchs. A hotfix-era tip, still the right tip.

First- versus third-person is a camera philosophy as much as a bind. Third-person helps you seat a high shelf; first-person helps you read a cover in torchlight. Swap when the job changes, not once per save. Details on controls.

Rebinds, run toggle, and F1

Full key rebinding shipped at demo launch and got better in 0.6.3.7: the controls HUD updates during play if you remap mid-night, menus hot-swap between d-pad, keyboard, and mouse, and a virtual cursor appears on the left stick. Deck and controller monks should enable the auto-run toggle rather than holding a stick up the hill from the dock. Partial controller support remains the store tag; the live menus are more complete than that tag reads.

Keep F1 bound. SquarePlay asked for it in almost every 0.5.x post. Ladder drops, shelf prices (start at 4 Blessings, not a flat 6), HUD, and AI were filed that way. Discord is for chat; F1 is for a repro. If a rebind eats F1, put it back.

Hotbar pickup now fills an empty slot automatically. That is a settings-adjacent habit: leave a free slot when you expect to grab a stolen book or a pail. How to play covers the verbs; this page is the reminder to not fill every slot with trophies.

Voice, names, and the player list

Proximity voice, text chat, public and private lobbies, Steam invites, and copy-paste codes are all live. 0.6.3.7 rebuilt the player list: mic volumes, lobby code, fonts, spacing. Set volumes before the barge, not during a thief chase. Show monk names is the accessibility option for a four-wide night on a 55% clock — you cannot afford “who said fish?” when the scribes want fish.

Proximity voice means a monk in the crypt will not hear a callout from the dock. That is a feature. Agree a shout-back point in the main hall, or use text for island-wide facts (“thief on west bay”). Co-op has the role split; the memory planner has the callout grammar. Mute yourself when you put the controller down. The mic option exists because a rustling headset sounds like a rat.

Manual and autosave both exist. Manual-save after a clean daylight organise, before you ring the belfry, if you are about to experiment with enemy density. Cloud will sync a supported PC; it will not save you from an iGPU. Tutorial popups no longer pause the world — they queue — so a settings change mid-tutorial will not freeze the barge. That is why you can pause in the real menu and still see paused versus unpaused correctly in solo and multiplayer (another 0.6.3.7 fix).

A sane first-night preset

If you do not want to think:

1. Enemies reduced, pests reduced, fires on if you can stand embers, otherwise off.
2. Book rate default or one step down.
3. Arachnophobia on if spiders are a problem; do not test yourself.
4. Headbob low, shake low, gamma slightly up, Max Shadows medium until the hall proves it.
5. Auto-run on for stick, invert Y as your muscle memory already is.
6. Monk names on, mics set, F1 untouched.
7. Then go play getting started and one loop of how to play.

Raise enemies after you trust your shelf language. Raise book rate after you trust how to organize. Read patch notes if a slider name does not match a March memory. Launch news will not help you here; this menu is the live build talking.

Leave F1 bound even after you love the abbey. SquarePlay still reads those reports, and a missing ladder drop is how 0.5.x got fixed — not by a silent forum thread you forgot to screenshot.