Controller support
BeamNG’s input system recognises keyboard, mouse, Xbox-mode devices, joysticks, wheels and gamepads as separate device classes, and vehicles can add actions and bindings of their own on top. A pad is a first-class device here rather than a concession, which is worth saying because the game’s reputation — a soft-body physics sandbox played with a mouse and a rewind key — suggests otherwise.
What it does not ship is a preset for your particular device. Bindings exist for a handful of common controllers; anything else arrives unbound and does nothing until you assign it. A pad that is detected and inert is the normal first state, not a fault.
Reading your own input
The bench at the top of this page reads the controller you are holding, through the browser’s own gamepad interface. Nothing it shows is a setting and nothing it changes reaches the game. What it gives you is the one number no guide can: what your hardware reports when you are not touching it.
That number is the whole argument of this page. Every published deadzone value for this game — every “set it to 0.15” — is somebody else’s controller. A deadzone exists to ignore a control that reports movement at rest, and how much movement that is depends on the age of the sticks in your hands.
Deadzone
A deadzone is a radius. Inside it, the game treats the stick as centred no matter what the hardware says; outside it, the remaining travel is rescaled so the first live millimetre starts from zero rather than jumping.
That rescaling is why a large deadzone costs more than it looks. Set it to 0.20 and you have not merely ignored the first fifth of the stick — you have compressed the entire steering range into the remaining four fifths, so every correction you make is coarser than it was. The cost lands exactly where a driving game needs precision: the small movements near centre.
So the procedure is to measure, not to choose. Release the stick, read what it reports, set the deadzone a hair above that, and stop. A controller with no drift wants no deadzone at all.
Sensitivity and linearity
Drift is one problem; travel is the other. A stick has roughly two centimetres of movement to cover what a wheel covers over most of a turn, and mapped straight across, every small nudge is a large steering angle. This is what people mean by twitchy, and a deadzone makes it worse rather than better because it removes the fine end.
The fix is a curve. Bend it so more of the stick’s travel is spent on small corrections and less on the approach to full lock. Full input still reaches full output — the curve changes where the travel goes, not how far it reaches. The response figure on this page draws both shapes against a straight line so the difference is visible rather than described.
Triggers
Triggers are analogue and read from 0.00 to 1.00. Throttle and brake on separate triggers is the arrangement worth having, for the same reason separate pedals beat a combined axis on a wheel: two independent values let you brake and feed throttle at once, which is most of car control.
If the bench reads below 1.00 when a trigger is pressed fully, the shortfall is happening before the game. No in-game sensitivity will recover travel the hardware is not reporting — that is a calibration or a hardware mode, and it is fixed in Windows or on the device.
Shifting on a pad
Q toggles the shifter mode and it is the first thing to press on any controller. Arcade mode treats the brake as “go the other way” once the vehicle is stationary, which produces the single most-searched complaint about this game: a car that brakes properly, stops, and then accelerates backwards at full speed. That is the mode working as designed. Realistic shifting does not do it.
Once you are in a mode that wants gears, shift up and down are bound to their own actions and the clutch is a third. On a pad they usually land on the shoulder buttons, which leaves both triggers free for throttle and brake.
Recovery on a pad
The four recovery actions matter more on a controller than on a keyboard, because the keyboard defaults — Insert, Home, Ctrl + Home — have no natural pad equivalent and are left unbound. Recovering from a crash is half of playing this game; a pad with no recovery binding makes every mistake a trip to the menu.
Insert is repair and rewind, the ordinary one. Home returns the vehicle to a position you saved earlier with Ctrl + Home, and does nothing useful until you have saved one. Binding repair to a face button and leaving the saved-position pair on the keyboard is the arrangement that costs the fewest buttons.
Faults
Five complaints account for most of what goes wrong with a controller here, and three of them are settled by a number rather than by a setting. The fault finder on this page states which is which, and points at the reading on the bench that decides each case.
