blep!
thank you for your thoughts and your speedrun strats! regarding the control setting, I had trouble getting input reading from the save file to work with the Input library, so I unfortunately had to scrap it, which from an accessibility point of view is very frustrating. as you found out though, you can use external programs to rebind controls, so it's not all too bad
some other notes:
the levels on GameBanana were made with an older version of Forever, and won't load correctly unless you patch their mod.json as outlined here. I agree with how annoying it is that there isn't a lot of user content for the game - that was one of my main goals for it's longevity past beating the main campaign, alongside multiplayer, which doesn't seem to get a lot of use at the moment either. but time will tell!
the game should be saving chat logs on your end in the game's folder. the game does this both ways for both the client and the server. the crash you mentioned when joining your own server seems to be a simple oversight and should be patched soon. (given that barely anybody hosts on the master server it's no wonder we became aware of this bug just now) EDIT: patch 1.1.0.2 has fixed this issue!
unfortunately the chat window is unscrollable. creating scrollable UI components in GameMaker by code (which is still essentially how you do it) is pain and I'd rather use Godot.
thank you again for your review!