I recently purchased Minecraft PE for Android to join my kids who play on PC. I paired a bluetooth keyboard and mouse and though I was disappointed with the lack of true mouselook, it worked well enough. Yesterday however when I tried to play the keyboard no longer seemed to register all the keys. The "W", "A", "S", and "D" keys no longer work to move, yet "E" still opens the inventory. Worse, attempting to remap any of the keys in the settings doesn't seem to work either. The arrow keys seem to work for movement, but they are too far from other keys to be practical. Curiously, holding the control key to run and pressing any of the "W", "A", "S", or "D" keys causes the player to run continuously in that direction, even after the key is released. In reviewing old bug reports (MCPE-10353) it seems like this exact issue was present in earlier builds, but the bug reports indicate these issues were fixed long ago. I'm not sure why these issues suddenly manifested again, but I am wondering if the recent update from 1.8 where things were working to 1.8.1 has reintroduced this bug.
Linked issues
Comments 6
That thought occurred to me as well so I used an adapter cable to plug in a wired USB keyboard. Unfortunately, the issue persists, so it would seem to impact all keyboards, not just Bluetooth ones.
I find it particularly strange that the keyboard worked as expected during the initial days after I installed the game, which was only about a week ago now. I’ve also tried uninstalling the game and reinstalling it, even going so far as to use a file explorer to locate the games files on my phone and manually deleting them.
Edit: I've edited the title of this issue since it is not limited to bluetooth keyboards.
I'm not sure I understand your question correctly, but if you are asking if the keys work in other apps, then yes, they work as expected in other apps. I can launch any other app, such as Chrome in Android and use the external keyboard to type and the "W", "A", "S", and "D" keys all function normally. In fact, I've found that in the game, I can push "T" and then use all the keys, "W", "A", "S", and "D" to type out messages. It seems that they specifically don't work to move the player character anymore, but otherwise are detected and present in the game.
The issue with reassigning keys is being tracked at MCPE-20594.
Cleaning up old tickets: This ticket has not been updated recently so is being closed as Cannot Reproduce. If you feel this is still a valid issue then please comment, or create a new ticket following the Issue Guidelines.
Also, we'd recommend making use of the search feature before writing a new bug report, as it's very likely that the issue has been mentioned already, and you can add a vote and any new information to the main ticket.
For any queries with your account or billing, you will need to contact Mojang Customer Support directly.
For feature requests or feedback, please head over to the Minecraft Feedback Site where you can search and vote for existing topics, or add a new thread if necessary.
Quick Links:
📓 Issue Guidelines – 💬 Mojang Support – 📧 Suggestions – 📖 Minecraft Wiki
Does it happen with other keyboards? (specially wired ones)
It might be a connection issue with the keyboard, or the keyboard itself. Cheap BT keyboards are know to break in just days of use