Steam Deck

edit sorry to write a book, no pressure to read it lol

There are definitely community made control schemes for the deck that get you most of the way there. Controller based shooters have been around for long enough that it feels like there are established norms, it’s mainly a question of what you do with the two trackpads (I don’t use them for aiming, I don’t need them for aiming because I I use joysticks + gyro) and four back buttons.

For more tactical shooters (which DayZ certainly fits the bill in terms of mechanics even if it doesn’t sell itself as one) it often makes sense to make two of the back buttons dedicated lean buttons.

Then you have your steady aim button, which I normally map to full pull on the left trigger in a game like battlebit, but DayZ requires a button to raise your weapon, so then the obvious choice there is to bind soft pull to raise weapon and full pull to ADS. This means that one of the unused back buttons needs to be bound to steady aim. If you are planning on jumping a lot the other back button clearly should be jump, though in DayZ that jumping/mantling can just go on the A button.

One trackpad becomes your top row numbers and the other can be whatever else you need. There are different choices to be made I guess, but this general pattern pretty much follows in any shooter.

As a cherry on top, steam allows you to set a command to be sent when a joystick is pushed to its maximum extent, it takes adjustment to fit your comfort but this allows you to never have to click a thumb stick to sprint again by setting the outer command as sprint.

I don’t use touchscreen for inventory management, I just muscle through it with joysticks, you can really tweak your joysticks on steam to be very responsive but yeah it’s still annoying. If I was playing a game like apex where very fast looting/inventory management is an absolute core requirement of gameplay I would fiddle with things more.

Final note, I recommend buying a pack of rubber thumbstick caps that fit over the joysticks of the steamdeck (really I recommend them for all joysticks), you can get a pack of different height ones for like $12 and try out different heights until you find one you like. I use a tall one on my right joystick and a stubby short one on my left joystick. These massively improve fine aim adjustment control on joysticks since the sensation of needing to overcome a real or perceived dead zone before input begins to be received by the game goes away almost completely. Get rounded top ones, not concave ones. They will randomly shoot off your joysticks and attempt to hide in annoying places like under your couch or somehow all the way across the room from where you were sitting so get extras, you will lose them.