Playing this with a Thrustmaster T.1600M FCS joystick and there's a pretty big deadzone that makes fine aiming more difficult than it ought to. The ingame configuration has sensitivity bar but no apparent setting for deadzone. Deadzone is set to 0% in Thrustmaster's software. Got any tips?

This is not a joystick friendly game, that's for sure. I gave up trying to use my Extreme 3D Pro.I can't hit the broad side of a tank.

If you are using Windows you should be able to find in your user folder the AppData\Local\MW5Mercs\Saved\SavedHOTAS folder structure. In SavedHOTAS is a HOTASMappings.Remap file. Within this text file you want to look for lines like:

AXIS: InAxis=HOTAS_XAxis, OutAxis=Throttle_Axis1, Invert=FALSE, Offset=-0.5, DeadZoneMin=-0.08, DeadZoneMax=0.08, MapToDeadZone=TRUE

This is where you can edit the deadzone for your joysticks on a per axis basis. You can find more information about joystick modification if you go to the Mechwarrior discord server: https://discord.gg/9gMKaDYs and look in their joysticks-and-hotas channel. They have documentation and links pinned for helping configure joysticks.

Respectfully disagree. Joystick worked fine with Mechwarrior 4 Vengeance, Black Knight, ,*MW3, *Pirate's moon, and, MW2 Ghost Bear, Mercenaries,. Jade falcon. games. *except MS Sidewinder bug.

I don't know what you disagree with... the fact that my joystick is working fine and is [in effect] the same model as the op?
anyway @Tsudico has already posted where the game control settings are stored so he should be able to find his way now

I'm kind of necroing this post, I wanted to share what I found with my issue of the very large deadzone. It looks like on some machines MechWarrior 5 doesn't pull the correct PID number(product ID) of the joystick. Check the HOTUSmapping file at the top and compare with what pulls up on the site linked below if they are different change the HOTUSmapping PID to the PID from the link below it instantly fixed my sons Logitech X52 H.O.T.U.S massive deadzone..

Site wont let me post links for some reason. Use the appropriate link punctuation below and it will take you to the site.
https html5gamepad com