How to Easily Change the Lift-Off Distance of the Finalmouse Starlight-12

How to Easily Change the Lift-Off Distance of the Finalmouse Starlight-12

If you own a Finalmouse Starlight-12 Phantom, Achilles, Hades, Ares, Zeus or Pegasus, you may want to try and test this trick to change lift-off distance.

Also, there's a good chance that you don't even need to update firmware for this trick to work. It worked straight out of the box with a Starlight-12 Phantom for me.

Before we get into it, it's important to understand exactly what L.O.D. / Lift-off distance is for a gaming mouse. It's the distance in which the mouse intentionally no longer responds to tracking input.

L.O.D. is often confused with sensor/tracking accuracy. In reality, most modern sensors can track accurately from a range of about 2mm, but the higher end of the spectrum will result in slightly lower sensitivity (which can be compensated for in Windows/game settings).

That being said, I found the default L.O.D of the Starlight-12 Phantom to be a bit low, coming from an Ultralight 2. The effect that this has is it feels as if the mouse "cuts out" easily. However, do understand that there are plenty of benefits to a short L.O.D. (literally less effort to lift-off and create more space and also recentering your position on the mousepad more easily). 

For users of SAPPHIRESKATES, this may be worth trying since our skates are just a touch thicker than most (but it should also work fine on the default settings).

How to Change Lift-off-Distance on Starlight-12:

  1. Using the switch at the bottom of the Starlight-12, TURN OFF the mouse.
  2. You can keep the Micro-USB extension cord/Finalmouse Wireless Receiver either plugged in or unplugged for this, it doesn't matter (I tested and it works both ways).
  3. Hold the left and right click buttons at the same time, PLUS one of the following options:
    1. For standard (default short LOD), additionally hold the browser forward button.
    2. For longer LOD, additionally hold the browser back button. 
  4. While holding one of the combinations above, TURN ON the mouse. It will flash blue to represent the default setting and will flash purple for the alternative longer LOD setting. You can easily switch between the two by repeating this process.

If you encounter any troubles, you can try to update the firmware following the instructions in this video by YouTuber Nimmy.