Logitech F310 controller drift: easy fix

[_kickpuncher_]

TLDR: Switch the mode on the underside from X to D.

It's not exactly everyone's go-to hardware choice, but I'm playing Stray with a Logitech F310 controller and the right joystick was drifting up, so the POV constantly wanders up and points at the sky. Or artificial sky dome or whatever.

I searched all over and saw all kinds of solutions at Reddit and Quora and YouTube, mostly pointing to the Windows joystick calibrator utility, or else saying I need to de-solder the rheostats and I dunno hack in a flux capacitor or something. Or buy an XBox One controller. I could see plainly in the Windows 11 joy.cpl calibration with "display raw data" checked that the X axis was going from 0 to 64k as expected, but the value wasn't centering on 32k; it always centered on 16k; hence the drift.

Logitech's F310 info does mention the existence of the X-D mode switch, merely saying that the D mode might work better on older games, whatever 'older' means. It appears that one of the differences is that the axis range is 0 to 255 instead of 0 to 64,0000. So not quite so fine grained.

Whatever. I didn't have to replace the F310 (yet) or re-engineer it with a soldering station. Try flipping the mode switch on the underside of the controller first, from X to D or vice versa, depending.

[Illusion of Progress]

I haven't had any issues with drift on mine (I also just played through Stray on it recently).

The only issue I ever had was the left analog stick suddenly stopped working in two directions (it was either right and left, or right and up or down, and I forget which) and no matter of changing anything fixed it. Then one day it just... worked again.

The switch you're referring to on the gamepad is just a toggle between DIrectInput (older PC input method) and XInput (Microsoft's new Xbox controller input method). The F series gamepads are pretty much just the older "RumblePad" series updated with that switch. That's why the information states the D selection might work better on older games, as they might only detect the older DirectInput method and not the newer one.

I personally lose track of what mine is set on and only change it if I need to because it's almost always detected by everything regardless, but I think there were some times I had to change it.