To say that Star Citizen has a lot of keybindings is in understatement. On top of which, the default settings might not feel intuitive for your personal tastes. Good news is that we can customize the settings to our liking for the keyboard, mouse, gamepad and joystick.
To Access Keybindings:
- Press [Esc] to access the Main Menu
- Choose Options
- On the Options Menu choose Keybindings
- Click [Advanced Controls Customizations]
If you do customize the settings, it’s essential for your mental health that you make use of the export feature to save a copy of your configuration to an external file. You should also copy the XML file that is created, to a location outside of the Star Citizen game folders. This will allow you to copy it back into the appropriate location after a new patch, which suggests deleting the USER folder, which would in turn delete your custom keybindings.
The other reason I recommend exporting/saving your custom keybindings, is that it allows you to experiment with variations. Using sensible naming conventions, you can try different settings until you find the one that works best for you, without having to muck with the keybindings back and forth.
I use very specific keybindings for character movement. I personally find that the QWERTY keys suit me better than WASD + modifiers to strafe and/or turn. As the behavior of features have changed, I’ve had to re-prioritize which actions are buttons on my HOTAS. Having different versions of keybindings I can test and retrieve at will, has been extremely useful.
With the continued refinement of the default keybindings, I’ve reverted to only changing the keybindings that are must haves for me. Things I can’t function without being set to my liking. Being able to import these back in after a patch is a huge time saver and a feature that all players should be aware exists. Here’s a link to the image in the video you can keep as a reminder of the steps.
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