I think most peo­ple are aware of the basic key­board short­cuts in LotRO. K for skills, L for your quest log, I for inven­tory and so forth. There are oth­ers that are a lit­tle less obvi­ous, likely only used by those who bother to look at the in-game key map­ping menus. I thought it would be nice to cover some of the most use­ful ones here. Obvi­ously these are using the default key mappings.

Auto Loot

Auto Loot auto­mat­i­cally takes all items from a corpse, assum­ing you have room. This can be enabled by default in the UI Set­tings menu, but if you’d rather leave it off you can use Shift+Left Click to do it as you wish. Use­ful when you have tons of inven­tory space and don’t want to waste time. Slayer Deeds come to mind.

Detach Tooltip

Hov­er­ing over almost any­thing in-game dis­plays a rel­e­vant tool tip. If, for some rea­son, you don’t want that tool tip to go away, you can press H. This detaches the tool tip and con­verts it to a nor­mal box. You can move it around as you please.

Autoat­tack Toggle

I’m sure every­one knows that the num­ber keys han­dle the skills you’ve placed in your quick­slots. What about your nor­mal attack? Just hit ~ (tilde) to ini­ti­ate it. This was some­thing I didn’t real­ize until I was in the game for a few weeks. Quite use­ful. If you have a ranged attack and are far enough away (assum­ing you don’t have “run to tar­get on attack” enabled in the Options), this will ini­ti­ate that as well.

Show/Hide Names

Press N at any time to enable/disable float­ing names. You can con­trol which ones appear in the UI Set­tings tab. I strongly sug­gest turn­ing on item names, as this can be quite help­ful with quests that require gath­er­ing items.

Show/Hide UI

If you want to show or hide the user inter­face, just press F12. This is mostly use­ful when you want an espe­cially nice screen shot. This does not hide names or over­head icons.

Link an Item in Chat

If you want an item link to show up prop­erly in chat, just use Ctrl+ right click. The link will appear right away. Very use­ful for list­ing items in the trade chat chan­nel or show­ing off how awe­some you are.

Autoat­tack Toggle

I’m sure every­one knows that the num­ber keys han­dle the skills you’ve placed in your quick­slots. What about your nor­mal attack? Just hit ~ (tilde) to ini­ti­ate it. This was some­thing I didn’t real­ize until I was in the game for a few weeks. Quite useful.

Deed Log

L shows your nor­mal Quest Log. Shift + L shows your Deed Log. I open this from time to time to check my progress.

Item Advance­ment Panel

This is for all you high level play­ers: Shift + I shows and hides your Leg­endary Item advance­ment panel.

Assists

Assist is incred­i­bly use­ful and some­thing I think non-raiders are often not aware. Assist tar­gets your tar­gets tar­get. I know that’s a lot of “tar­gets”, haha. Let’s say you’re wor­ried about your War­den friend, but you don’t know who he’s focus­ing on because there’s 10 gob­lins on your butt. Select him, hit assist and you’ll tar­get whomever he’s cur­rently attacking.

This is a big help when you want to focus your atten­tion on the same tar­get. It can be espe­cially use­ful if a Lore–mas­ter (etc) have stunned an enemy and every­one wants to focus on one that’s still active.

Hit F to assist your target.

Fel­low Selections

There’s quite a few options for select­ing the mem­bers of your Fel­low­ship. This can be essen­tial in the more hec­tic bat­tles, where click­ing on things isn’t always quick enough.

• Select Near­est Fel­low: F8
• Select Fel­low 1: F1
• Select Fel­low 2: F2
• Select Fel­low 3: F3
• Select Fel­low 4: F4
• Assist Fel­low 5: F5
• Assist Fel­low 6: F6
• Assist Fel­low 1: Shift + F1
• Assist Fel­low 2: Shift + F2
• Assist Fel­low 3: Shift + F3
• Assist Fel­low 4: Shift + F4
• Assist Fel­low 5: Shift + F5
• Assist Fel­low 6: Shift + F6

Player Selec­tions

If you’re not teamed up with some­one in a Fel­low­ship, you can still quickly select them with these com­mands. You likely won’t use these too reg­u­larly, but I like to heal strangers that are in trou­ble when I can.

• Select Near­est Player: Ctrl+Tab or F9
• Select Next Player: Shift + F9
• Select Pre­vi­ous Player: Ctrl + F9

NPC Selec­tions

This isn’t all too use­ful in towns, but it’s extremely use­ful dur­ing quests involv­ing NPC helpers. Often these char­ac­ters have way less morale than would be con­ve­nient. If you’re able to quickly select them, it can mean all the dif­fer­ence in the world. If you’re a healer, you know what to do. If you’re not, select the near­est NPC and then use assist to go after their tar­get. More than likely you’ll put out way more DPS than your NPC friend, tak­ing the atten­tion of their tar­get and giv­ing them a break.

• Select Near­est NPC: F10
• Select Next NPC: Shift + F10
• Select Pre­vi­ous NPC: Ctrl + 10

Item Selec­tions

Delete selects the near­est item. This is a huge help with item gath­er­ing quests, as often it’s hard to see where the next one hap­pens to be. Turn on item names in the UI set­tings and you’re good to go. I use this one constantly.

Some tips on using items on the field: Some­times if you don’t click it just right, your char­ac­ter won’t use the item. This hap­pens to me a lot with skinny plants, in par­tic­u­lar. There’s two ways to make this eas­ier: right click on the item’s name as opposed to the object itself or press the U key. The U key is the default “use” command.

Enemy Selec­tions

I think it’s obvi­ous how use­ful it can be to cycle through ene­mies. This comes into play to a heav­ier degree if you’re capa­ble of stun­ning. Stun one guy and go to the next with a sim­ple key­board command!

• Select Near­est Enemy: Backspace
• Select Next Enemy: Tab
• Select Pre­vi­ous Enemy: Shift+Tab

Walking/Running/Automatic

Most MMORPGs have an autorun fea­ture. LotRO offers two meth­ods: Num­lock is the most obvi­ous one and arguably the most use­ful. This stays in effect until you try mov­ing in another direc­tion or press Num­lock again.

You can also hold down your left and right mouse but­tons at the same time to run forward.

If you wish to tog­gle between walk­ing and run­ning, press Insert. I’m not aware of any use­ful func­tion of this beyond per­haps role-playing. I do not believe that it affects stealth, but I could be wrong. Any ideas?

Advanced Usage

Obvi­ously you can adjust each of these key defaults as you wish. I have a Log­itech MX mouse, which comes with more but­tons than you’d really need for most sit­u­a­tions; how­ever, in LotRO it’s quite a won­der­ful device. I’ve mapped the sec­ond mouse wheel to cycle between nearby ene­mies. I have another set of but­tons to cycle between my fel­low­ship mem­bers. Press­ing Shift+F9 (or what­ever) isn’t always com­fort­able or con­ve­nient. If you come up with some­thing that is eas­ier for you and makes more sense, do it.

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