STARFIELD with a JOYSTICK | Tutorial/Guide 

“This is the tool of a pc pilot. Not as clumsy or random as a mouse; an elegant tool for a more civilized age.” (Gopher-Wan Kenobi)

This vid made me think: Perhaps Kinggath will make Salvage Beacons for Starfield. "Constellation Couriers," "Starship Haulers" or something like that.

I didn't even try flying in space with mouse and keyboard, straight up switch to an xbox controller the moment i launch into space. Took me awhile but i eventually got the hang of the controls and dogfighting in space is an absolute blast now.

This changed the game for me and brought me back to XWing, Tie Fighter, and Wing Commander. Glad you found it!

I used joystick Gremlin+Steam Input. It was less intuitive and required a lot of experimentation, but it's a powerful utility and it didn't require any mods so it worked day one. Edit: yes, dual sticks is OP! And Joystick Gremlin+Steam input is the way to go. Essentially, Joystick Gremlin just takes inputs from multiple devices and maps as one, and Steam Input takes those inputs and maps them to a standard Xbox controller.

THIS IS THE WAY... Thanks, followed your guide, initially didnt work but then noted the exclamation mark on one of the tabs - turns out the program need another piece of software, self downloaded and now works perfect! Good Hunting!

I'm so happy to see Space Stiv so giddy.

Another great video. I got so use to your videos for Skyrim and Fallout. It's glad you're still doing these.

Gopher, just a heads up, the video is tagged with "Star Citizen" instead of "Starfield", Not the title, the tag, that thing that shows below the description.

I own neither Starfield nor a joystick, but I've still watched the video, just because it's Gopher 🤣

Only Gopher get's excited/upset about these things lol, you are crazy man and we love you!

Great clear tutorial as always, keep up great work, we love you for it.

Bethesda launched a space dogfighting game with the most inept space controls period! Great vid thx.

Update: Everything is working now! There was like a virtual driver thing that needed downloading in the 360 controller emulator. THANKS!!!

When you get to Perk Pilot class B and C you can just fit your ship with auto turrets and the ship will do the work for you, without much need to steer the ship..

The sticks of joy ^_^ I'm looking to buy one again, last time I used one was for Microsoft Flight Simulator, and Rayman 2.

I've been puttin goff setting up vjoy and joystick gremlin for this game since it's a far cry from being a space flight sim. Maybe it will be fun for emersion.

Thanks for this!

I play even BG3 with a HOTAS. Pretty much everything with at least HOSAM, really. Ok, HOSAS for certain corner-cases. With flightstick and throttle that are pretty much in no static device list. Pretty sure Starfield won't be a problem, although quite a bit differently. It's nice if the game has built-in support for normalized HCI events and maps them to game input events. But not everything is MW5:M. Things without sensible throttle support are indeed odd. Now what I want to try is all these games with some spacemouse thing. Got one comiing later in the week. Going to be interesting, since 6 dof in those things is really for CAD people [which I'm not]. However one solves this for one's crazy controllers of interest, it gets addictive. Great to have some tutorial vids out there for folks who are interested, thanks!

I'm very tempted to get my Thrustmaster HOTAS out of the mothballs... Especially now that my trusty old 360 Controller is starting to develop more and more drift. Edit: Wait.... people say Hottas? But it's an acronym: Hands On Throttle And Stick.

I got a left and right Vipril Constellation Alpha Prime set of sticks that I use for Star Citizen. I prefer dual stick or HOSAS when flying in space.

My X56 has loads of more buttons so I think I'll just convert those on the throttle to thruster inputs.:) I'll update when I get it working satisfactory.

Are you still using the Thrustmaster Tacticalboard? The Tacticalboard + keyboard for lesser used keys might be the ideal solution.

Set your thumbstick to be R3 + left thumbstick direction, and change thruster to R3. Or You just need redundancies: Joystick= RS with Yaw Throttle = LS Up and Down Twist Grip= LS right and left with Yaw (I'd recommend keeping it on Roll, this game requires a-lot of yawing even with thrusters) Joystick thumbstick = WASD Extra button = Left Alt, allows you to control power distribution with WASD. Another button= Thruster which will now work with your thumbstick WASD.

I almost bought a new joystick for Starfield, being unaware they're entirely unsupported, and am even more glad I did not now having seen just how much stuffing around getting it to work would have been... I get it, Starfield is NOT a "space sim", but given there's still enough space combat involved, it's a pretty poor effort on Bethesda's part not to include joystick support since many people in the PC community do already use them for other games...

Makes my turbo nerd ass glad i went to HOSAS (true twin stick, not stick and throttle for those not in the know). Makes the throttle thing less of an issue, though the control scheme in this game is so weird i'll likely wind up with the one stick and keyboard like Gopher

I have some experience with this, originally discovered this and set it up for No Man's Sky. I know it can be a solid hurdle to get this working HOTTAS style with a game that doesn't have native support OR appropriate remap capabilities for controls. Again, No Man's Sky... lol The throttle is a weird but easy fix here, you could have your yaw and roll both mapped to appropriate analogue axis' and simply map your throttle to any suitable digital buttons. Also, instead of using the "roll dominant" option you could map your flight sticks pitch to the right xbox joystick axis and its roll to the left xbox joystick axis. Then map the flight stick twist (or throttle yaw) to the appropriate joystick axis. Good thing about xce is there's no limitations on what can be mapped or how many times.

The first Wing Commander game had joystick support. And that was in 1990. I'm getting slightly tired of Bethesda relying on the modding community to finish their games. What next? Are they going to hand us the new Creation Kit and say "go ahead, YOU make The Elder Scrolls 6".

Thanks. I haven't started playing because I cannot imagine dogfighting with a mouse and keyboard.

i use a gamepad in Elite and Star citizen. I'm ususally too lazy to set up my joystick. But in Starfield i never felt wrong with the mouse. I lower the dpi a bit to make it less nervous and it's fine. It's a simple control for a simple flight model and kinda slow, sluggish ships. All the challenging flight situations of other games (landing...) don't exist. So not even immersion is a motivation. The issue i see in these early episodes is not the controls. It's that you're always too fast so the ship hardly turns. But also being used to Everspace 2 which works absolutely perfectly with WASD and mouse. Strafing and all. Starfield doesn't feel optimized for either version. Maybe when mods start fancying up the flight system and possibilities i feel tempted. I hope but doubt the engine is up to eventually flying over a planet surface or anything like that. MAybe with a smaller, dedicated craft? There were (wonky) vehicle mods for Fallout 4 after all. Also they made some weird control decisions instead of -stealing- borrowing from decade old good ideas. Like adjusting power levels with going sideways and up and down instead of direct buttons or the d-pad..

My ex-wife had a HOTAS. I used it every chance I got🤣🤣🤣🤣 I know, I know but you started it

Modders doing what Todd decided gamers would not want is a perfect example of why Bethesda is creatively bankrupt.

I suspect the Azeron keypad folks may take some lessons from this as well; sent them a note about it.

X-Box controller seems the perfect input method. Feels very intuitive to me. Also analogue controlling of the walk speed is better than keyboard. You can incrementally go from inching forward to a jog. Can you not get your new fangled analogue keyboard to mimic the xbox left stick to achieve similar now that you have both input methods working at once?

I used Joy2Key to map my Warthog stick to emulate the keyboard commands. Similar results, although my setup is actually emulating keyboard commands instead of a thumbstick axis, so I still have to fly to center instead of just letting go of the stick.

I'm not finding space flight to be all that difficult. Though power management feels very awkward at times. I think my experience with flying drones has something to do with it however.

Controller emulation worked me - sort of. I found that I can fly the ship well enough, but after I do so the game seems to think that everything is being run from a controller and M/K commands go wonky.

I'm a little confused when you say thrusters, when you say thrusters I'm thinking of small little propulsion nozzles can help you move laterally within the XYZ of space without turning so it uses small micropuff movements instead of large forward and backward movements of the throttle the main drive is that what you're talking about when you say the thrusters or the main drives what you mean? I'm sorry if this seems a little much of a question I haven't played this game

I hope somone makes a mod that add proper support for hotas with rudder pedals eventually.

It says emulation can not work without virtual driver? Why it is not mentioned here? ..... or forget it. Universal Controller Re-Mapper works way better.

Have you tried using the thumbstick for thrusters instead of having your left hand on the keyboard? I.e. instead of binding the Thrustmaster’s thumbstick to the D-pad, bind it to the controller’s left thumbstick + whatever the key for engaging ‘alt control mode’ is on controller.

I didn't have to have any mod to use an Xbox 360 joystick on PC. I've been playing the entire game on joystick since it came out.

Whilst I managed to get my X-55 joystick working using this method, my game crashed twice within the space of ten minutes, which is about the number of times it's crashed in over a hundred hours of gameplay prior to this... such a shame :( Back to keyboard and mouse for me...

So my experience with xboxce is not good. For whatever reason. The program just doesn't work right for me. Whenever I open it the program doesn't display correctly its all scrunched up. Whatever I do to try to fix it doesn't work. So since then I have used Joy2key. So far it has been 100 % successful with my joystick. I use the T flight hotas one. I have successfully mapped all my controls to the hotas including my throttle. But I do have the same issue with the throttle but I guess that's the way they designed the game. But everything works. I do have yaw bound to twist, in addition the the throttle has a rocker that I can use for yaw if I want. Currently I set my throttle, then use the stick to fly, and use the keyboard to scan, dock, etc. I have thrusters set to space bar. I tested my setup and holding space bar all the thruster axis works using the hotas. I even can use the throttle to control up/down while in thruster mode. For me personally Joy2key, has no issues, and seems much simpler to setup and use. I may try x360ce again going by your tutorial. And there is a fabulous mod that I can no longer fly without. While flying it auto centers the reticle. without it I would have to manually correct the flight path constantly. You can even adjust the ini with different parameters of sensitivity. I have mine set to instant basically. That way I release the stick and the reticle snaps back to center and corrects the flight path. I'm currently adjusting the sensitivity in the game and in joy2key to find the best control for the hotas. It is quite twitchy with sudden changes. But overall works very well. But check out that mod on nexus. It called flight controls auto align. Like I said I can't fly without it. Keep up the great videos. Your tutorials have allowed me to finally understand and start using mods. However (probably me) but I prefer manually downloading and installing mods. For whatever reason vortex acts wonky. I have watched your tutorials several times but vortex just doesn't jive with me lol. Cheers!

Getting this to work might actually make me buy the game on steam ... i tried it on game pass and the ship controls lost me. 12+ hours and i meh.... plus the ship combat was way out of sink with the main difficulty , on hard ship combat was like extreme , and normal it was still extreme. the other ships was doing some crazy maneuvers, and the keyboard was just to freaking slow.. maybe this will make the game more enjoyable.

@Gopher, doesn‘t the TM 16000 Joystick have a twistable stick for rudder (=yaw) and an analogue slider for throttle? Can‘t you assign its axises to yaw (stick turn) and throttle (slider)? Thus you‘d have at least all basic steering surface controls in your right hand…. Thanks for the video! 👍♥️ Edit: throttle using the joystick slider nit really working as it should, rudder (yaw) by twisting the stick functions quite well!

Any bearing on when someone will get headtracking into the game for first person flying?

This game is getting too complicated to use. :) Thank you and have a great day.

the problem is in "thrusters mode" it repurposes the throttle axis (or roll axis? ) as the thrusters, so it reallt doesn't work with a proper hotas set-up. Is that fixed in your way of doing it?

I'll have to test that out. I'm shit with controller but maybe that'll work better than Keyboard + Mouse

Such a stupid problem to have considering that now most(all?) games seamlessly support Pad\KbM switch w\o any issues as soon as you touched controller, and I cant even remember when was the last time you had to check for joy stick support if it was appropriate in this specific game.

I Watch all your stuff. At this point it feels like we're old friends. It'd be rude to not watch.

Yeah, but can you do the Bessel run in 12 parsecs now?????

I actually use Dual TM.16000 sticks. this requires Joystick gremlin and the virtual joystick, that then maps to the X360 emulator. with a modifier key I even mapped the Thruster mode to different axis than forward (z rotation) HOWEVER: Absolute input mode Mod When?!

People are always making fun of vegans, but I don’t get it. I have never had a beef with one.

You wouldn't roll to turn in space, yaw to turn is more realistic. I know Starfield isn't great for Newtonian physics space flight, but roll to turn in space flight games (and movies like Star Wars) always seems ludicrously ridiculous to me. Yaw to turn in space games like Wing Commander and TIE Fighter/X-Wing, roll to turn in atmosphere in flight sims.

14:42 Couldn't you just remap the keys? To make it work for you.

why i don't understand as i can use a controller in game ??????

Or you can use a controller

I’m honestly kind of glad that my computer absolutely cannot run Starfield at all (the game looks like it’s from the original Xbox and worse than, say, vanilla Oblivion on console). The space flight controls would have driven me mad, and life is too short to spend time on games you have to fight with to get them to become enjoyable. Also I’m not good at anything with shooter elements and no VATS-like system to pause the combat a bit (this is just my own problem, it’s not for me and that’s fine by me).

jesus so many videos for a worst game ever , when ur life is around bethesda games i guess u have to gobble it up