Mac Controller Solution!

[IceMaster1294]

I bought this game a while back for my Mac but - like many other users on here - I tried and tried to no avail to get my controller (Bluetooth, for XBox One) working. But alas - after 5-10 hours of research and trials, my efforts were rewarded! Here is what has worked for me:

-------------------------------------

Go to System Preference > Security > Accessibility. Turn ON Steam accessibility.

Open Steam in Big Picture Mode. Ensure "Enable Steam Overlay" is turned ON in Steam settings. While here, make sure your controller status is toggled to ON. If you see random XBox 360 controllers appearing here, don't fret - I provide a solution for this below.

Go to Towerfall and select Game Controller Configuration. In here, set up the controller to map to your keyboard. Start the game like normal.

Notably in my controller keybinds:
Left pad -> arrow keys with advanced setting of 0.05 ms input at 100% strength

WARNING: If you have too long of an input time with your keybinds, Steam can get confused when you exit the game and it will end up thinking you are still trying to provide input to the game. This carries over into other applications. While testing this I had to force quit steam a couple times because it ended up providing a never-ending arrow key input. From what I can tell, 0.05 ms seems to be appropriate. **This is smaller than the default**
-------------------------------------

** Random XBox 360 Controllers Appearing **

This can happen when Steam doesn't quite know how to interpret the signals it is receiving from your computer. And thanks to Apple, there's some pretty weird signalling happening under the hood. So! The solution that worked for me was blacklisting these controller signals from reaching Steam.

Open up the file config.vdf located in ~/Library/Application Support/Steam/Config

Look for the line "controller_blacklist" and add "045e/028e" to it. It's more than likely this line doesn't exist. So instead go to the very bottom of the file right before the final curly bracket } and add the following line:
"controller_blacklist" "045e/028e"

This specifies the controller vendor (Microsoft) and product type (XBox 360 controller) and stops any data from reaching Steam. As far as I can tell, these phantom controllers don't actually do anything, but they're a bit of a nuisance.

-------------------------------------

Last but not least: the hardware I'm using

I run a 2013 MacBook Pro on Catalina 10.15.7 using a 2.4 GHz Intel Core i5
My controller is an XBox One Bluetooth Controller and I connect it to my Macbook via bluetooth.

[benschock]

Do keyboard controls work?

[IceMaster1294]

Depends how you rig it up! You would need to toggle a set of controls for another person since you're just mapping keyboard controls to the controller. If you're wondering if both controller and keyboard work, the answer is yes - but they're shared controls.