Mouse suddenly stopped working in Skyrim

[Darklocq]

NONE of that worked in my case. I think it had something to do with saving during combat, when I was ragdolled by a giant. Anyway, after I got control of the camera back, mouse buttons worked in menus, worked to unsheathe/sheathe, but would not swing weapon or cast spell. Ended up having to go back to an older save.

[TheRevDel]

I'm getting the same issue, however I may have found a cause, tfc was enabled through animated eating, I thought pressing esc would clear the hotkey binding, but nope. It meant that when I backed out of certain menus with esc i enabled tfc. I have changed the keybinding and now can enter tfc with my middle mouse button just fine.

[BelstoneFox]

Actually just found a solution....changed weapon to bow and back to mace and it works!

Thank you for posting this. It's such a simple solution that some people might not even bother posting it, but it really helps. I just spent over an hour, after running ReSaver on my save file, trying to figure out what to do because it seemed that nothing but movement was working- I didn't even think to trying swapping weapons because it seems unrelated to the problem of the buttons not responding, but that did it.

[Royceman95]

I have tried multiple things to solve the problem. I downloaded a bunch of mods from loverslab and some from Nexus mods. Every time I start the game, the mouse works for a bit than stops working. I’m able to go to the inventory but can’t use anything in it. Does anyone have any suggestions?

[Manneli]

I'm getting the same issue, however I may have found a cause, tfc was enabled through animated eating, I thought pressing esc would clear the hotkey binding, but nope. It meant that when I backed out of certain menus with esc i enabled tfc. I have changed the keybinding and now can enter tfc with my middle mouse button just fine.

Omg thanks, you saved my day!

[Halspawn]

Wow. The problem described in the original post has been popping up for over a decade with no real resolution, so here's another (hopefully correct!) answer.

 

Specifically for the case of the left and right mouse buttons no longer functioning for combat (or selecting items in inventory or assigning spells to buttons in the magic menu) in a new game while the mouse still works for everything else, the problem is that the mouse buttons have been remapped to something else. Thanks to TheRevDel for his comment above putting me on the right track.

 

I checked (and actually deleted just to be sure) every new configuration file I had generated for my several MCM mods, but the problem persisted, even on new games, through dozens of restarts and even one computer reset. So I knew it must be something in the game files itself. Using timestamps I tracked down a newly updated file in the main Skyrim folder (where SkyrimLauncher.exe is located) named ControlMapCustom.txt. Despite the name, this is not a text file so I could not verify what was in it, but I moved it to a different directory and restarted the game, and presto! it started working again. I assume if you've remapped any of the other keys that you will lose those settings and have to reconfigure them.

 

The odd thing is, I've never changed any of the Skyrim controls. Yet somehow, Skyrim decided to kindly remap those buttons for me. If it wasn't such an outrageous thought I would suspect there might still be bugs left in the game after all these years, but since that is inconceivable I can only conclude that the game was doing what it thought I had told it to do. Somehow. Or maybe what it thought I should have told it, or perhaps even something it has wanted to do for years and just decided the heck with it, today's the day, lets see what happens if I do this?

 

tldr:

Ensure that you have not remapped the buttons yourself in the game settings or one of your mods, and if the problem still persists, move the ControlMapCustom.txt file out of your Skyrim directory to a safe place and restart the game.

 

If your computer blows up, it's not my fault, and once you've put it back together just put that file back where it came from and nobody will ever know anything happened.

Edited December 7, 2022 by Halspawn