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For the longest time, I did not think that screen hotkeys were an extremely necessary part of playing efficiently. I was content using only the minimap as well as hotkeyed nexuses, structures and units to move the camera. Then I watched MC's personal cam at the MLG arena event, and realized just how wrong I was. It literally looked like he was playing a different game.
The majority of his actions centered around the same three camera screens, and those exact camera screens were where his camera was centered for almost the entirety of the game. There might be space in between his bases where stuff was going on, and areas on the map where his units were moving through, but he spent a very small portion of time actually looking at those areas simply because he did not need to.
Even if you have separate hotkeys for each of your nexi/hatceries/CC's, efficient use of screen hotkeys will tremendously improve your play in a very small amount of time. Hotkeying the screen with each base centered unlocks a lot of previously wasted motion, focus, and especially time.
The most important resource at your disposal is time, not minerals, not gas, not supply. Edge-scrolling is an enormous drain of this precious resource, and investing time in doing it hampers your ability to tell your story through your actions.
For instance, say you send a worker to your natural to build an expansion, and then send it back to your main to mine. Even with the fastest mouse scrolling sensitivity, you will spend 1-2 seconds of game time edge scrolling. When you edge scroll, you are not actually doing anything. You aren't training units; you aren't adding infrastructure. You're not executing any commands. You are simply wasting time by moving a camera.
1-2 seconds of game time per instance might not sound like a tremendous amount of wasted time, but it certainly adds up. You might commit this error of inefficiency dozens of times throughout a game, potentially adding up to entire minutes of time wasted.
Just a few advantages of making a habit of this practice include:
1. More efficient maynarding: Instead of edge-scrolling to the 'From' base, boxing workers, edge-scrolling to the 'To' base, and then finally sending them to mine, you are suddenly happening upon the 'From' base instantly, boxing workers, instantly happening upon the 'To' base, and then executing the mine command. Depending on where your camera was when you decided to execute this sequence of actions, you can effectively cut out 3+ game seconds of wasted time that is more useful spent elsewhere.
2. Responding to drops/harassment: We've all been there. You are chilling, and suddenly you see 2 red blips on the minimap. You either click on the minimap and send your hotkeyed units to assist, or worse, you grab a bunch of shit and then edge-scroll to the location and do your best to fend it off. In this case, the screen hotkeys save you time even if you were previously using the minimap to a-move your units, or to left click the minimap to gain vision of the harassment and then subsequently warp-in units (if you are protoss), or use whatever you have on the spot to defend. These are precious seconds of effective response time that could save workers (you can maynard away much faster as previously mentioned) or structures, as you will be able to get into a position to defend game seconds more quickly.
3. Infrastructure management: If you are in a battle or paying attention elsewhere but know that now is an appropriate time to add tech or addition unit-producing structures, screen hotkeys will allow you to save time in edge-scrolling or spamming multiple keys to center your main (and if you have all your nexi/hatches/CC's on the same hotkey, this won't always land you at your main depending on where your camera was originally), screen hotkeys will allow you to instantly view the area you need to, cutting out game seconds of wasted time. This is also very valuable for actions you cannot do remotely with normal hotkeys, such as chronoboosting and (at least for me when I play zerg) injects. When I play zerg, I find screen hotkeys especially invaluable as they gives you a great amount of control. Backspacing includes a degree of randomness, so it's probable that you will spend time carrying out redundant or entirely vain mechanical actions. Your mouse is also centered after the first inject, so you can inject multiple hatches without even moving your wrist. Baller.
+ Show Spoiler +Inject 1 ![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/ULeuU.jpg) Inject 2 ![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/0I8W5.jpg) Inject 3 ![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/khhN2.jpg) Inject 4 ![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/RzCQ5.jpg)
Take a minute to look at this screencap:
![[image loading]](http://i1138.photobucket.com/albums/n536/alej15/Untitled-2.jpg)
Note that by hitting the screen hotkey for my main nexus, I am in a position chronoboost 2 forges, a robo, a robo support bay, a twilight, and 10 gateways after a click of a single key, and without wasting any time at all.
If you construct your base so that you have as many important structures as possible on a single screen, your base becomes less of a jumble of randomly placed structures and suddenly appears to have been constructed with some semblance of reason. Of course, you would want to emphasize the parts of your base's layout--depending on the map--to place structures more densely where drop harassment is less common, so placing a great amount of structures on a single screen is not always feasible (On many maps. placing overflow infrastructure at your natural is a smart move, anyway). Either way, you are still cutting out wasted time.
Easier worker counting: It is extremely easy to check the saturation at each of your bases and takes significantly less time if you can queue up the appropriate camera views instantly.
I know former BW players are probably already familiar with the advantages of this technique and (hopefully) use them to their greatest potential, but I personally do not come from a background of seasoned SC gosuness so I had to start from scratch. And it really only a took a day or so before it became second nature. Edge-scrolling between bases suddenly felt extremely clunky and foreign.
How to practice this
Play against the very easy computer a couple of times. Do not let yourself edge-scroll! Disable edge-scrolling in the options if you have to. At the start of the game, set screen hotkeys for your main, natural and 3rd. Once you have started constructing your base structure at each base, center by double tapping the hotkey and overwrite your previous screen hotkey with the new, centralized one. Here's a short VOD of me completing this exercise. For some reason the quality is really low.. sorry in advance 
http://www.twitch.tv/alej691/b/316381194
Note: Configure your screen hotkeys in the hotkeys menu before hand and find a setup that is comfortable for you. They are located in the Camera subsection and are Create location 1/Jump to location 1 and so forth. My mouse has a couple extra buttons on it so I use those, but you might find it easier to use the F keys as is standard.
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United States8476 Posts
Do all pros use this? Can you go into your MLG arena vods and check which of the pros do it? That might convince me to start trying it out.
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On April 28 2012 11:46 NrGmonk wrote:
Do all pros use this? Can you go into your MLG arena vods and check which of the pros do it? That might convince me to start trying it out.
I remember noting that HuK sets his at the start of the game but doesn't always use them to jump around efficiently. Whether or not all of them do it, I think it's the right move to start practicing this asap. I only started emphasizing them 2-3 days ago and I feel sooooo much more comfortable in game moving around.
Checking now, anywho^^
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Coming from a hardcore BW background, screen hotkeys are a MUST for efficient play.
F1 for main cc/nexus/hatchery, F2 for natural, F3 for rally point/ramps, F4 for enemy base then F5-f8 for additional expansions.
I'm pretty sure SC2gears registers screen hotkeys usage towards your APM, because I only average about 120APM (sc2 time) in SC2 but usually over 260APM in SC2gears.
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yup! can't believe some people have no idea about screen hotkeys yet, i use them to inject as zerg and they help me defend drops and allow me to multitask efficiently.
i've been bugging my protoss friend to implement them in his game to improve his basic mechanics and his multitasking.
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I asked Slayers_CoCa on his stream if he used the camera hotkeys, and he said no. Since Zergs don't have to shift-queue+right-click on mineral patches the entire game after build commands, it makes sense why they're not absolutely necessary for them (although still useful).
But they're absolutely necessary for macroing and/or mineral walking workers on 3+ bases as Protoss or Terran. Anyone who says otherwise simply wouldn't know if they've never made a serious attempt at mastering them, and are thus (imo) severely limiting their multi-tasking potential. And yes, nearly every pro terran and protoss I've observed use them, and I've seen A LOT.
TIP: if you're having trouble reaching your function keys, try to raise your palm off of your desk or keyboard and cup your fingers as if you're playing the piano while playing (I learned this from watching MarineKing in person); this allows for wider range of movement without having to stretch your fingers. If after a long time (at least 100 games) this still feels odd, you can do like me and bind them to some homerow keys (though this requires modifying many other hotkeys).
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Have been thinking about doing this for a while, but been too lazy up till now to actually do it. This is good enough impetus to start practicing with it, hopefully I can find it as helpful as you do. Thanks ^^
Also - do you have the screen hotkeys set to default (starting at F5), or did you change them to something different? One reason I've been hesitant to use these till now was how off-centered my hand felt moving up there. I've been thinking about changing it to start at F1 and go from there.
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Some other things to consider:
Protoss: Camera save your proxy pylons... don't give it a control group. That way, you can hit 'w', 'camera save key', spam units.
Zerg: Camera save creep tumors. it makes the process take so much less time in the mid-game as to be silly.
Terran: Camera save your RALLY POINTS. When you need to go grab your units during a battle or after, just hit your camera key and box all those new units.
Using this just for your main bases where you already have buildings keyed is not really the most beneficial way to take advantage of camera saves.
As a BW player, I had to rebind the hotkeys for the camera state saves to F1-F4 so as to mimic BW functionality.
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using screen hotkeys helps me SO MUCH defending against harrass as a zerg. i definitely recommend putting all your hatches on one hotkey and just using screen hotkeys for moving between bases.
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I've only been able to use three of the hotkeys since the range of my hand is limited. But having three location hotkeys to cover three main bases has been more than enough. Subconsciously I had arranged my base so that a lot of the buildings that I want to chronoboost was in view of a location hotkey. Now that I'm aware of it, I'm going to try and align the buildings better for more efficient usage.
For anyone who hasn't used screen hotkeys yet, I highly suggest you do! This is a great guide that explains how beneficial they can be. Well done!
On April 28 2012 12:00 BoondockSnake wrote:
Also - do you have the screen hotkeys set to default (starting at F5), or did you change them to something different? One reason I've been hesitant to use these till now was how off-centered my hand felt moving up there. I've been thinking about changing it to start at F1 and go from there.
I changed around my screen hotkeys to start at F1-F4, moving the idle worker to the `/~ key. Much easier to hit for me.
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HerO and MMA use screen hotkeys a lot, when you look at their replays they'll often snap back and forth between their main and their ramp without clicking on the minimap or any other hotkeys. I'm not entirely sure about this, but I believe MMA also screen hotkeys potential drop locations in his TvZ games. In some replays when he's dropping two places at once he'll switch back and forth very quickly between his two drop locations while also clicking around with his main army.
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On April 28 2012 12:12 Whatson wrote:
HerO and MMA use screen hotkeys a lot, when you look at their replays they'll often snap back and forth between their main and their ramp without clicking on the minimap or any other hotkeys. I'm not entirely sure about this, but I believe MMA also screen hotkeys potential drop locations in his TvZ games. In some replays when he's dropping two places at once he'll switch back and forth very quickly between his two drop locations while also clicking around with his main army.
Your favorite players list is nearly identical to mine :D. You're only missing Jaedong, Bisu and Flash from BW!
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Anyone who doesn't use screen hotkeys is not reaching their full potential
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If tournaments, such as MLG, relaxed their rules on customized hotkey setups, I imagine more people would use camera hotkeys and the level of play would increase.
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I've been advocating this for months and months 
I just recently put a twist on this though, and here's my current screen key setup:
F1 main
F2 natural
F3 third
F4 fourth
F5 fifth
F6 sixth
F7 seventh
space rally point
Since I wasn't using the space bar for "most recent action", I changed control+space to set a new screen location, and space bar jumps to it.
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I agree, screen hotkeys are amazing. They really allow you to play really quickly. For example, i find the multitasking-challenge in early game TvZ doing a 1/1/1 pressure with no reactor on the rax/fact to be pretty easy to overcome now, since I can go back to my base, macro, and get back so quickly. Without location hotkeys, scrolling would make it hard to pull this off since you need to pay a lot of attention to your army and try to spend as much time micro'ing it as possible.
I only use 4 though, for my 4 bases. I don't have a special hotkey layout, but I wonder why pros don't use special layouts more to have a super optimized system? For example, slayers min plays with exactly the same as default except for a couple location camera keys are switched, he doesn't even remap the backspace button. Players like boxer seem to have decently customized settings (attack on Control, and other stuff), but it still doesn't seem as extreme as the grid layouts shared here on TL.
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Screen location hotkeys are an absolute necessity ^^
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I remember when I was watching a replay from MMA from a certain MLG, (I don't remember, it was a long time ago, maybe 5-6 months ago). If I remember well, MMA had like 2-3 hotkeys for his main/drops etc, and sometimes he was pulling multiple drops during the game, 3-4 attacks at different places. He also rarely hotkeyed his drops/main army but was able to take care of his multiple drops very easily. So I was guessing it's all about the screen capture/save thingy.
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I certainly know lastshadow does it if you watch his stream. He really good.
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Sure, not everyone does it, but I thought this was common sense O____o why the need to make a guide on it.
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EPT
