[Solace]

STO Keybinds Guide 2020

Preface:
Greetings members, this short guide will help in learning how to use the STO Keybinds tool which you can download by clicking HERE. This is a very useful program as it will make creating keybinds even easier than having to figure out how to write them manually because this program does that for you!

Step One - Navigating the program

To get things started once you open the program after download you will be presented with a GUI like in the screenshot above. You will notice on the left hand side of the program there is a column called "Keybinds" this is where we add and create keybind sets that we can use, it is similar to loadouts in Star Trek Online, you can create as many "loadouts" as you like that all serve different functions but for the purpose of this tutorial we will stick to using only one.

Step Two - Creating the bind

First you'll want to click "Add key" and this will create a new keybind set under "Master set", at first it will say "None" but don't worry that's because we haven't assigned a key to it yet! In the centre column you will notice a drop down box next to the word "Key" this is where we will assign which button we want to use for our bind actions. Everything in this list is ordered alphabetically and we can use a small short to navigate the list by hitting the key that we need in this case S.


Once we have chosen our key we want use in this case spacebar we need to assign some actions to it. We can do this by clicking the small blue plus icon under the drop down box in the centre column. This will create an entry in the box below this button labelled "Actions:" and a new entry called "No Activity".

To assign an action to our chosen key navigate to the right hand side column and click on the drop down box for "Activity", this will drop down a massive list of possible actions we can assign to our keys. In this case we want our spacebar to activate powers on our powertray.

To do this we need to find "Execute Partial Tray" from the list and select it.

Once thats done you'll notice the action has now changed to from "None" to "Execute Partial Tray [Tray 1] [From 1 to 1]"


If you click on your action in the actions list you'll notice on the right hand side you'll see a couple options for tray and which slots you want to use. This represents our powertray in STO, there are 10 trays we can choose from and up to 10 slots on each tray we use. This option will allow to us to directly select which tray we want our keybind button to use and where on the tray our powers are located.

In the screenshot above you'll notice I have the options set to Tray 1 from slot 1 to slot 10. This means that on tray 1 whatever power or ability is slotted there will be activated in sequence with each push of the spacebar from slot 1 to slot 10. If nothing is slotted the keybind won’t do anything.

If you want to activate certain powers located elsewhere on tray one or you only wanted to activate a certain number of powers on tray you can change which slots are activated. For example:

Lets imagine I have the following powers on tray one in slots 1 to 3

• Emergency Power to Weapons 1
• Kemocite-Laced Weaponry 1
• Torpedo Spread 3

We simply change the which slots are activated when press the spacebar as shown in the image below:


My weapons won't fire how do I fix this?
There is something fundamentally wrong with our current keybind setup here and that is by default "Fire all Weapons" is bound to spacebar and if we loaded the bind file in its current state we wouldn't be able to fire our weapons. We can fix this by clicking the plus icon again to add another action. Click and select our new action which will be called "None" and select the drop down list on the right hand side.


This time in the list we want to find "Fire all Weapons" we can use our little shortcut to find all the options beginning with F by hitting F on our keyboard, once you've found the option, select it. However we're not quite done yet, because STO uses an interpreter for its keybinds (this means it reads it line by line) the order of our actions is important.

So we need to move our "Fire all Weapons" action to the top of the list so it is executed first. We do this by clicking and selecting our action for fire all weapons and hitting the green arrow pointing upwards. Thats it we're done! Now its time to save and load our bind file.


Saving and creating the bind file
Once you've created the actions you want in your binds we can go ahead and save it now. At the top of the program hit the big blue save file button and save it wherever you like. Personally I recommend somewhere in your STO installation folder in a new folder called "Keybinds".


Now there are two ways we can load our bind file, we can do it manually or have the program generate the command to load our new bind file. I prefer the latter.

So to load the keybind manually by typing the following command into the chat box "/Bind_Load_File FILENAME".

OR

As shown in the screenshot below we can hit the orange button called "Create Bind File" and that will generate a command we can copy past in the textbox below the button.


I hope you found this guide helpful!

[WelshAvenger]

Nice work Solace. 10/10 for helpfulness as I've always relied on the Execute full tray. Now I can see the potential to map all my space magic, healing and damage powers to different buttons on my mouse using the partial tray command.

[Solace]

Nice work Solace. 10/10 for helpfulness as I've always relied on the Execute full tray. Now I can see the potential to map all my space magic, healing and damage powers to different buttons on my mouse using the partial tray command.

Exactly, on my binds I have several different cylces bound to different keys, minor buffs, team buffs and OMGALLTHEDMGBUFFS.EXE

[Sunfire]

Nice work Solace. 10/10 for helpfulness as I've always relied on the Execute full tray. Now I can see the potential to map all my space magic, healing and damage powers to different buttons on my mouse using the partial tray command.

Same here. I always used the "execute full tray" command and only have rotational abilities (EPtX, TT, PO, A2SIF) on that bar. Everything else get pressed manually and I can probably optimize that further

[Palechimera]

Nice work Solace. 10/10 for helpfulness as I've always relied on the Execute full tray. Now I can see the potential to map all my space magic, healing and damage powers to different buttons on my mouse using the partial tray command.

I mapped my 3 lines of trays to my right mouse button

[Polie]

I mapped my 3 lines of trays to my right mouse button

Double check that bind, 2x full trays, distribute shield, fire all weps is usually just about the max. Definitely not able to do 3x trays with that anymore.

I also suggest to use distribute shield with all movement keys and a "Oh Sh!t" button for all heals. You can also setup 1-4 for teams and dump heals on them. So....team member 3 is going down, start mashing the 3 key and dump heals on them. Pug01 from FES years ago made that tool.

[Dark]

Unless they've changed it, Distribute Shields interrupts firing cycles. It's not recommended to be something spammed, Tactical Team takes care of redistribution anyway.

[Solace]

Unless they've changed it, Distribute Shields interrupts firing cycles. It's not recommended to be something spammed, Tactical Team takes care of redistribution anyway.

It still does, personally I run EP2W, Kemocite and Torp Spread on my spacebar.

[Polie]

It didnt used too...... and tac team is not always enough, or again it used to not be.

[Dark]

It didnt used too...... and tac team is not always enough, or again it used to not be.

It has interrupted firing cycles since before my keybinds guide from 2013.

[KickKat]

Sorry for the late reply, but I have started seeing some confusion on this topic cause misinformation to begin to spread, including this particular problem being attributed to Tac Team now too, so I try to explain in more detail whenever I see it come up.

The problem with Distribute Shields is that it does not obey the cycle order in the activation of a chain of tray slots. Distribute Shields always activates the instant it is available, making fitting it in a "rotation" extremely difficult, if not impossible. It jumps ahead of any tray slot activation and even the "Fire" commands. If it comes off cool down while you are in the middle of a chain, it introduces about one second of lag before the next ability can go. Even worse, Fire All (and its variants) will wait on it. Even worse still, it potentially resets your chain activation starting point to somewhere in the middle of the chain throwing the entire thing out of whack until you can stop and let everything reset itself. Worst of all, sometimes the reset never happens.

Best not to try to automate it and save it for situational use instead.

[Draco]

Does anyone have (a link to) a guide on keybinds for dummies? Not so much HOW to do it (guides like these are very helpful), but what to bind when you are starting from absolute zero? My DPS sucks despite having decent equipment and at least part of that is because I am still mashing keys like a drunk monkey.

But every time I want to set up something basic to start improving, I get lost in the abbreviations for skills and stuff like 'don't map x with y because it interrupts your firing cycle', and 'never map fireall to something you spam often because XYZ will come to your house and kick you in your oompa loompas' (Or something like that anyway).

So maybe to rephrase the question: if you could just make one or two simple keybinds to give you a bit of a boost in the game, what would they be? And if there is some specific way to use it 'properly' (other than jumping up and down on the key as fast as you can), what is that?

[Jestersmith]

Does anyone have (a link to) a guide on keybinds for dummies? Not so much HOW to do it (guides like these are very helpful), but what to bind when you are starting from absolute zero? My DPS sucks despite having decent equipment and at least part of that is because I am still mashing keys like a drunk monkey.

But every time I want to set up something basic to start improving, I get lost in the abbreviations for skills and stuff like 'don't map x with y because it interrupts your firing cycle', and 'never map fireall to something you spam often because XYZ will come to your house and kick you in your oompa loompas' (Or something like that anyway).

So maybe to rephrase the question: if you could just make one or two simple keybinds to give you a bit of a boost in the game, what would they be? And if there is some specific way to use it 'properly' (other than jumping up and down on the key as fast as you can), what is that?

Can just use STO Keybinds app

https://sourceforge.net/projects/sto-keybind/

[Solace]

Does anyone have (a link to) a guide on keybinds for dummies? Not so much HOW to do it (guides like these are very helpful), but what to bind when you are starting from absolute zero? My DPS sucks despite having decent equipment and at least part of that is because I am still mashing keys like a drunk monkey.

But every time I want to set up something basic to start improving, I get lost in the abbreviations for skills and stuff like 'don't map x with y because it interrupts your firing cycle', and 'never map fireall to something you spam often because XYZ will come to your house and kick you in your oompa loompas' (Or something like that anyway).

So maybe to rephrase the question: if you could just make one or two simple keybinds to give you a bit of a boost in the game, what would they be? And if there is some specific way to use it 'properly' (other than jumping up and down on the key as fast as you can), what is that?

The program Jester linked above is the same program used in this guide. If you like I’m happy to hop on teamspeak with you to help and answer any questions you might have

[Draco]

Can just use STO Keybinds app

https://sourceforge.net/projects/sto-keybind/

The program Jester linked above is the same program used in this guide. If you like I’m happy to hop on teamspeak with you to help and answer any questions you might have

Thanks guys its not so much HOW to keybind (the guide above / app are pretty clear) but more WHAT to bind... Especially since Im not looking to wring every last bit of DPS out of it, just looking for something that will give a bit of an improvement compared to my click random buffs while tapdancing on the space bar - approach. Like do I just bind all my cannon / torp boosting buffs and aux to bat, together with fireall and mash the key? Because a lot of the technical stuff says don't do 'this', because it interrupts 'that' or resets so-and-so cooldown...

Anyway, I appreciate the teamspeak suggestion! I'll take you up on that sometime - gotta run errands this afternoon, but whenever I catch you (and you have the time), would love a few minutes of your time.