Play Minecraft with One Hand

By | December 31, 2017
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I recently broke my finger and had limited use of my left hand for several weeks. Priority one in in this type of situation is obviously to figure out how to play Minecraft with one hand.  Obviously.

My wife, very thoughtfully, got me a mouse (Razer Mamba TE … the TE is no longer available, but the Razer Mamba Elite is basically the same thing) with extra buttons to see if I could manage a one-handed Minecraft setup. Here’s what I came up with for playing in survival mode (I would change it slightly for creative).

I am using the Razer Synapse software to configure the mouse so my button numbers are the Razer button numbers . Any mouse with 9 configurable mouse buttons and a scroll wheel will work for this setup. Leave a comment if you get this working with a different mouse. Also, I didn’t change any of the controls settings in Minecraft because I will return to normal keyboard play. Instead, I mapped the keyboard keys to the mouse buttons.

Button mapping

Included controls:

  • Attack/Destroy (button 1 – normal left click)
  • Use item/place block (button 2 – normal right click)
  • Walk forwards (button 10 – front side button)
  • Walk backwards (button 11 – back side button)
  • Strafe left (button 8 – left push on scroll wheel)
  • Strafe right (button 9 – right push on scroll wheel)
  • Jump (button 3 – push scroll wheel)
  • Scroll up (leave as default)
  • Scroll down (leave as default)
  • Inventory (button 5 – behind scroll wheel)
  • Elytra takeoff macro (button 4 – behind scroll wheel), probably put shift here instead if you are playing in creative mode.

Omitted controls

  • Drop item
  • Shift (sneak, fly down)
  • Pick block (middle mouse)

Razer mouse config for one handed Minecraft top viewRazer side view config for one handed Minecraft

Elytra Takeoff Macro

This is the “triple tap the space bar and use the firework rocket” maneuver to initiate Elytra flight from the ground. It’s a little tricky under the best circumstances, and difficult/impossible (or really painful and totally not worth it) with a broken hand. Luckily we can make a macro.

  1. Select “Default Delay” and set the delay to 0.100 sec.
  2. Hit the record button.
  3. Press space 3 times.
  4. Press right click.
  5. Stop recording.
  6. Select the delay between the last “Space” and the “Right Button Down”.
  7. Click the edit button(the little pencil at the top) and change the delay to 0.005 sec.

Razer takeoff macro for Minecraft elytra

Limitations

  • I found that pushing the scroll wheel button to jump stops the “walk forwards” action of button 10 making it impossible to jump up onto something (this is obviously a problem). I don’t know why this happens and I didn’t spend much time looking into it. Instead I just jump while strafing (sideways on the scroll wheel in my configuration) to get up onto things. If works well enough for my purposes (although I probably won’t be doing any parkour or PVP like this).
  • There is no “Shift” in my configuration. This makes it difficult to do the high wire, building-at-the-edge-of-a-cliff kind of stuff. This hasn’t been a big problem for me but if I really need to, I can use my left hand a little to hit Shift. Shift is pretty necessary for flight in creative mode, but in that case I would just replace the “Elytra takeoff macro” with “Shift” since Elytra flight isn’t really necessary in creative mode.

Share your experience

If this worked for you, leave a comment and let me know. If you came up with something you like better than my configuration or if you used a different mouse, leave a comment and I will try to share it with others. You can leave a comment here or on twitter.

Video

I made a video demonstrating this setup.

Mouse options

Any mouse with 9 configurable buttons and a scroll wheel will work for this. If you can get a mouse with more than 9 buttons, you’ll probably be able to do even better than this. Here are some mouses you could use:

The following links to Amazon.com are affiliate links which means I get a small commission (at no additional cost to you) if you buy something after clicking my link. If you are going to buy a mouse to try this out, it would be really helpful to me (to help maintain this site) if you do so through one of my links.