'Sup, Bethesda. Here's the deal. I'm left-handed. That means I play with the mouse on the left-hand side of my keyboard. This also means that WASD controls are very, very uncomfortable for me to use--too many fingers jammed up in too small of a space. (I know, I know. That's what she said.)

So, first thing I do with a new game is rebind the keys half to death. All my movement keys get dumped onto the numberpad (along with a few others), because the arrow keys are small, isolated and uncomfortable. I dislike using them about as much as I dislike WASD.

Imagine my surprise when I try to punch in my keybindings and get the "That button is reserved." error message. Especially odd, since I used this same config with Morrowind and Oblivion for entirely too many hours. To make things more surprising, I scrolled on down through the list of keys, looking for what could possibly be using the numberpad. And...nothing. So you blocked off the only key configuration I'm comfortable using because...?

I've rebound movement to IJKL for now, which let me tell you is about as smooth and instinctive as a rhino trying to pilot a blimp with all its limbs tied behind it. But in the future, for those vaguely sinister left-handed sorts like me, is there a way to magically unreserve those numberpad keys? Maybe in a future patch or an INI tweak? As it is for me now, the game's controls are either completely unintuitive and/or causing actual physical discomfort. Or, if I'm really unlucky, both!

Seriously. I'm sure it's low on the list of priorities, but at least tell me it's on the list somewhere. Or at least 'splain to me why those keys have been magically reserved by some unseen engine deity.

Lots of threads about this, and lots of angry lefties, too! I'm not a lefty, but I'm less than pleased with the current state of key mapping (and the problems that start to show up if you DO use custom key assignments). There was one response from a dev about a specific key mapping issue, and basically the response was, "Unfortunately, that's the way of it." It was both clear and unclear from his response that a patch was indeed in the works for at least *some* part of the key mapping issues, but exactly what and to what extent is unknown.

Well, good to know I'm not the only one. Sigh...this actually makes me angry. Playing a game should not cause physical discomfort, period, and I'm beyond disappointed that no one at Bethesda apparently ever thought to take left-handed gamers into account.

Do you have a link to that dev response, so I can read it for myself? Thanks.

I feel for you man and we all know why this has happened.

/me points all five fingers on his right hand at Console.
/me points all fiver fingers on his left hand at Bethesda for you know.

I'd use my toes to point, but I use them for feet.

I am left handed, but operate games right handed. However I feel for you in this regard. Bethesda games have never been good about allowing key mapping to the number pad. Not sure why, other than the Num Lock issue, if that is one. A key is a key on a key board, right?

The truly odd part is, I've never had a problem with mapping keys to the numberpad in a Bethesda game before. Morrowind and Oblivion worked perfectly with it. Now Skyrim's gone and thrown a spanner in the works.

Sigh...we won't even talk about the part where I spent 20 minutes mashing keys, trying to figure out how to drop something because the tooltips hadn't updated properly.

There is a freeware program called Autohotkey that may help. You can reassign keys to other keys temporarily. Details in the thread:

http://www.gamesas.com/index.php?/topic/1261029-keybinding-issues-2/

I was thinking Falllout. However IIRC, when Oblivion came out, it was not allowing this until a patch came out.

Does any of this help?

http://www.gamesas.com/index.php?/topic/1262967-keyboard-binding-fix/

I'm still trying to find it. The problem is there are so many threads popping up so fast, and so many with similarly named thread titles. I can't for the life of me figure out which one it was or where it's at. It was just last night that I was reading it, so it couldn't have gone back too far. Maybe I scanned one too fast and missed it. It's a red name, so you'd think it'd stand out.

If I come across it again, I'll let you know.

Well, it's a bit late at the moment, so right now all that's doing is boggling my brain slightly. I'll have to take a look at it in the morning and see if I can get it working right.


Thanks again.

I have this link myself and was re-posting it in a few other threads yesterday as part of my response to those threads then I realized I should not do that.

I can confirm this statement myself (about a patch to help with binding the key issues) but I do not want to cut and paste the link anymore because I feel now that the poor guy is trying to help and he actually may have said something that he should not have due to stress and late night mandatory overtime on "Day 0ne" to fix the game.

I do not want to contribute to getting the guy in trouble by repeating his name and statements.

But I did want to confirm this via "hearsay" for what it is worth because the game company needs to be made uncomfortable for this but this particular programmer should not. I is not up to him how much effort the company puts into the PC version of the game, it is the people at the top in management that pay his salary (not the game designers).

Otherwise you will never see another dev post anything here again (why would they risk their job to post here if one of them gets fired for his candied posts ) it will only be professorial "spokes holes" doing damage control. And I would like this forum to keep the access to the real DEV open to the users.


[

Okay, Tyraa. I couldn't find the post, but I *did* find something else you might or might not like.

http://www.gamesas.com/index.php?/topic/1263159-fix-numpad-keybinding/

I say may or may not, because it's going to require some work unfortunately, and I don't know how comfortable you are working with hex editors (assuming you even have one, which most people don't).

It's something at least. For now.

Go to skyrimnexus.com, under UI mods, grab the key remapping mod. Works like a charm.

Yeah, that's what infuriates me the most about this.

Every previous Bethesda game allowed keybinds to number pad.

Now this game doesn't, and the reason is "reserved" - but reserved for what? Nothing - they're not used at all.

The configuration of default keybinds are flat out inconsistent in multiple contexts, which makes no sense, and I've found actual bugs when trying to change them (such as different commands simply disappearing completely from the keybind list).

I'd like to bind stuff to the buttons on the side of my razor naga but that uses the numpad and seems to treat numpad as the usual 1-0 on top of the keyboard which leads me to believe the game thinks numpad1 is the same as 1, numpad2 the same as 2.

From what I noticed you're pretty much screwed if you don't use the default keys or a 360 controller in this game :\ I hope it gets fixed soon so I can assign a weapon or magic to my left hand without plugging in a 360 controller.

I may be reading what you are saying wrong, however.

Add something to favorites using F in the inventory, exit out and press Q to bring up favorites. Then hover over what you want to bind and press 1 or 2 or 3 etc while you are hovered over that item, then either right click or left click on it to put in your left hand or right hand respectively. If you want to change what it's in each hand quickly you can, for example, put a spell on 1 and a weapon on 2 and press 1 then 2. It's a bit tricky though when you want to switch stuff between hands quickly.

The problem is nothing happens when I click, most of the menu controls don't even work.