How to customize controls on the Steam Deck

Your Steam Deck is the beating heart of your everyday gameplay. It’s fast, powerful, and is packed with features and customizations. Regarding the latter, did you know that you’re actually able to customize your Steam Deck’s controls? Doing so isn’t overly difficult, but a little know-how goes a long way.

To that end, we’ve put together this guide to teach you how to re-map and re-tool your Steam Deck controls as quickly and easily as possible.

Difficulty

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What You Need

• Steam Deck

How to customize the controls on Steam Deck

Steam Deck’s controller settings, officially called Steam Input, can be accessed in-game at any time. Since Valve is still pushing updates to add new features, including Steam Input features, it’s a good idea to connect your Steam Deck to your network and see if it has any updates to apply before beginning.

Step 1: In a game, press the Steam button, which is located on the left side of the Steam Deck, opposite the Quick Access Menu button on the right. Move to the right using a joystick or D-Pad, and the screen should switch to a layout of controls for the game. At the bottom, you’ll see a button that says Controller settings. Select it.

Step 2: You’ll see that you have a lot of options here. Let’s start with Quick settings first. Here, you will find basic options to make key changes to how the controls work. You can enable or disable the back grip buttons as you please, invert different axes to match your playstyle, turn the gyro sensor on or off, and more. These are important controller settings that you can find in many games, and they’ll allow you to fix blatant issues.

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Step 3: If you have more in-depth customization in mind, look at the section called Current layout. Here, you will see the name of the current layout, and you can choose View layout to examine it more closely.