I'm playing the campaign of X: Rebirth and I am using a Thrustmaster T-Flight HOTAS X. I'm still in the process of learning the controls and figuring everything out.

I've reached the first space station and can see the landing pad lit up. It's covered with a force field and no matter how carefully I try to land, it won't let me land.

Do I need to get docking permission somehow? What do I do?

I've read elsewhere that you just need to press the interact button twice.

If I look at the docking port and press interact, I see a "dock" option, but pressing it twice does nothing.

I can't seem to highlight the dock option with the mouse or joystick and pressing other random buttons hasn't seemed to help.

I figured it out. There's a docking button that is separate from the interact button. The other places where I read people were using interact to dock were wrong.

IMO this is also bad UI design. Too many buttons for too many things, when you could just target and press interact to do the vast majority of stuff. There's limited real estate on my HOTAS for buttons and now the dock button is relegated to the keyboard. This is just inconvenient.

I was glad to see you posted all the way through this frustration :)

This is a fairly common complaint about the X series. X Rebirth actually has far fewer (way way fewer) necessary key commands than X3 did. I've tried playing both X3 and Rebirth with a keyboard and mouse as well as stick, throttle, and pedals—and in the case of Rebirth, head tracking (TrackIR) as well. And I have to say, while I might prefer the stick in most flight sims, I prefer the keyboard for the X series—though head tracking is pretty great.

But everyone plays the games differently. I prefer playing as a trader and builder, and I avoid dogfights like the plague. Combat oriented players often prefer the stick. But ALL of the key commands are necessary for an experienced player. In Rebirth I found that I particularly disliked having to switch back to the mouse for station walks, but I just wasn't comfortable walking with the stick.

In any case, everyone ends up at the same place—they map a bunch of stuff to the keyboard. A flight stick just doesn't have enough inputs, even if you have one with a multi-map switch. So my best recommendation is to save yourself the trouble and get used to using the stick and keyboard together. It's going to be a struggle until you do and it will keep you from being comfortable and enjoying the game.

And, while I'm sorry to beat a dead horse... if you find you like X Rebirth, I (and nearly everyone else) can't recommend enough going back and picking up X3: Terran War Pack. TC and AP are just better games—notably with the ability to fly hundreds of different ships. But the controls are far more complex, and in that regard (contrary to popular belief) I actually think Rebirth is a decent entry into the series without such a high learning curve.

Thank you for the thoughtful response, but I have to disagree with the input complexity. A space sim can still be a wonderful and engrossing space sim without the need for 900 buttons that each do one thing.

Do you remember Ocarina of Time on the N64 and the tutorial on Z-targeting and the action button? It's like all these new space sims never got the memo. What is a docking hatch going to do other than dock? You don't need a dock button if you already have a targeting button and an interaction button. They understood back then that the majority of game objects only have one use - so one multipurpose button was all you needed. But X Rebirth isn't the only space sim with button sprawl and I don't understand why.

I think that the majority of these inputs could be simplified into target - interact. Anything left over could be condensed into an action wheel. They already have an ability wheel, so they're obviously familiar with the concept. I'm just shocked there's so many inputs.

I'm coming into this from Elite Dangerous. I thought Elite had too many inputs. But I can still play 90% of Elite with just my HOTAS. One big reason why is they have a left-hand and right-hand interaction panel in Elite with menus for a lot of the keyboard buttons. So I just bind the panels to my HOTAS and use those to do stuff like dock, targeting, inventory management, repair, what have you. It's a nice concept that helps people with controllers.

I strongly disagree on this... "condensated" and overly context-sensitive commands are not a good choice for games like this.

The main reason is that you lose all kind of control over your input preferences: the "action wheels" and stuff like that means you are completely dependant on the game UI, and less free to customize your physical inputs

Elite Dangerous control scheme is actually extremely well done because not only it has a nice re-binding interface (which even shows actual HOTAS buttons, the only game I know that does that) but mostly because by having every single function directly accessible, you have a much finer control on what and how you will map to that... it makes it extremely easy to reate non-conventional control schemes like combining multiple devices like HOTAS, voice commands, touch-screen panels, external keypads and so on.

The main thing to keep in mind is that when input are isolated and offered with dedicated keybinds, you can always do "condensation" and re-group into less shortcut by virtue of profiling software, macros and so on (for example, the Steam gamepad configurator, which works with any device other than Steam's own controller *AND* also for non-Steam games, among other things can create customized action wheels); on the other hand, when the controls are aggregated at the source, there's not much you can do other than accept the game's layout, since you have no "hooks" to base your custom profiles on.

One of many critics of the original release of Rebirth was exactly this, so much so that they later put back a new interface more similar to the X3 series... it was pretty obvious that they were aiming less at actual joystick users and more at gamepad users (which, BTW, is what the HOTAS X product is in reality: was born as a stick for PS3, so it has exactly the same inputs as a Dual Shock pad, disguised into a a flightstick case... not that it's a bad stick in itself, but it has much less buttons than a proper HOTAS because of its console roots)

I get that simple wheel interaction menus are more user-friendly for new players, and conceptually a lot of things may seem like they only have one obvious purpose. But therein lies a key difference between simulators and arcade shooters.

X Rebirth had a simplified control scheme and far fewer menus (but also less granular control) because too many players noted that the steep learning curve kept all but the hardcore sim/sandbox players away. The simplification turned a lot of existing X players off of the game, though. If you look at the most popular mods for Rebirth, most of them try to make it more like X3—eliminating station walks, allowing full station discovery, better mining control, etc.— but none of them really make the control scheme more complicated, so it would seem that the players that really enjoy Rebirth prefer the simpler control scheme.

X3 is the exact opposite, though. The Bonus Pack aside, the most commonly used mod is probably MARS Fire Control, which, off the top of my head, adds something like 10-15 additional key bindings... and every single one of them is useful, time sensitive, and impossible to differentiate via a simple target-interact model—and a wheel would be too slow for my tastes. But controls aside, it alters the use of collection bays to double as drone release/retrieval. Then there are a number of mods that alter station and docking port interaction with additional command keys for communication/trade, plus there's ordering other ships in your fleet to dock, as you didn't only have one ship in the previous games (a feature that's returning for X4).

All that is to say that in a simulator, there are a lot of potential, non-obvious, secondary purposes for nearly all game objects aside from basic flight/shooting/landing/docking, and I think the EgoSoft team was smart to consider that the modding community may want to repurpose game elements in ways they might not have expected. That's part of what's so great about sandbox games.

As an aside, if you look in any real cockpit, there's a lot more to it than a stick , throttle, and pedals—buttons and switches galore. For me, getting comfortable with a large array of insta-touch commands feels more authentic. It's not arcadey at all, and certainly not for everyone, but there's a gratifying feeling that comes with the commands becoming second nature.

Regardless of your play style, the X series has a lot to offer, so I really hope you can find a control scheme you like.

Where do I get a complete users guide for X Rebirth 4.3? I cannot find any significan resources on this game. Have you figured out the early problems for a new user? I am new also; but, I have learned a lot already. Would you like to chat about this game? I could sure use some healp and maybe I can help you. I will say that I am not using a joystick and I am glad. The mouse and keyboard are great. I also have the Thrustmaster T-Flight HOTAS X; but, I have no intention of using it.

Let's compare notes, if you are still in this game. I have a long way to go, since I am still early into the game.