Binding Crouch to M4/5 – The Best Thing I Ever Did in Warframe

In Warframe, you bullet jump a lot. And I mean a lot. In fact, you bullet jump so much that a daily Nightwave task is to bullet jump 150 times. That Nightwave task can be done in about 3-4 missions. Or, if you’re doing missions on Jupiter, even less. But bullet jumping can be awkward. While jumping normally is done with space, a bullet jump requires crouching and then jumping. There’s a lot of busy finger work when it comes to bullet jumping.

It’s easy to get tired fingers.

After all, whether you have crouch bound to Shift, Ctrl or even C/V, you’ll be pressing those buttons constantly, alongside your normal WASD and jumping. And unfortunately, I have tiny fingers, so constantly pressing Ctrl all the time is awkward. The way I have my hands sit on my keyboard, hitting Ctrl means really bending my pinky finger, which then constraints the movement on my ring finger that’s resting on the A key.

I normally have either Sprint or Crouch bound to Alt or Shift respectively because Ctrl just feels too far away. But using Alt means using my thumb to press the key. And that means I can’t use Alt and Space at the same time. So it’s basically use Shift for crouch or go home.

That’s where the Mouse5 button comes in.

The Mouse5 button is generally a thumb button on the side of your mouse. It’s sitting just there, underneath a thumb that normally doesn’t do much. Well, it’s called Mouse5 on my mouse, but sometimes it’s Mouse4. It depends on how many buttons your mouse has, with Mouse3 generally being a click on the scroll wheel.

Anyway, normally, your thumb’s not doing anything when you’re using a mouse. So having a button there is both comfortable and easy to access. More importantly, it’s also very easy to press repeatedly, without getting in the way of other button presses. I can have my thumb on the button all the time, making for more accurate timing.

So I bound M5 to Crouch.

And Warframe has been easier to play ever since. I’ve got Mouse5 bound to toggle crouch, since it’s easier to tap the button than to hold it. When it comes to bullet jumping, you stop crouching immediately, but tapping is just all-round easier.

With crouching taken care of, I actually have more freedom with my keyboard-resting fingers. Sprint can be bound to Shift nice and easily, so I don’t have to sacrifice being able to sprint and jump at the same time. This also theoretically frees up CTRL for something else, but I don’t really have a use for it. After all, my tiny fingers barely reach it anyway.

I also started binding Mouse5 to other things in other games. It became my Shout key in Skyrim for some reason. But in Team Fortress 2, Mouse5 was always my bind for voice chat. I do have a Mouse4 key above my Mouse5 key that I can now use for push-to-talk,however, these days, most of my voice chatting is done via Discord, and often with Open Mic, which I mute when I need to.

The downside is, I can’t go back.

Now I’ve been playing Warframe for a while, the muscle memory is built in. Which means that, if you give me a mouse without thumb buttons, I start struggling.

Of course, I’ll adapt, but still, the repetitive button pressing on Mouse5 rather than struggling to press Ctrl makes life so much easier.