I hope I'm not gonna look like a total fool posting this but I've genuinely looked everywhere in the options menu and tried to mess with the new range settings in 7F to implement a steering deadzone for my Xbox controller, but I can't seem to find it. My controller is old and has just a little bit of annoying stick drift (and controllers these days are made so poorly that stick drift happens way too quickly anyway), so I was really excited deadzone adjustment was mentioned in the changelog for 7F - but I can't seem to find it.

I use a controller sometimes in racing sims because my crippled body hurts too much to race on a wheel some days and I'm already very familiar with racing on a controller, so I got my hopes pretty high for this feature finally being implemented. Did I misunderstand that line in the changelog somehow and it refers to something else? I don't think I've missed the option because I looked absolutely everywhere in the settings menu to try and find it, but it's entirely possible I'm just an airhead and either misunderstood the changelog, or the deadzone adjustment is just somewhere I'm not looking at.

EDIT: i'm now realizing all the other controls but the steering have always had deadzones, and that those are somehow now adjustable (which i still can't figure out) but steering does not have any deadzones at all. disappointing.

The steering axis deadzone adjustment is tricky. You should be very careful with it, as it may have an opposite effect than what you're trying to compensate.

Some older versions of lfs had "remove deadzone" setting, but I never saw that work properly, or actualy do anything as a matrer of fact. In recent versions, it's completely removed for a good reason. However, not all is lost, you can use a 3rd part software like DXtweak2 to introduce some deadzone. Note that you can't remove them if they are implemented in the firmware of gamepad.

If I understood correctly, your problem is that thumbstick doesn't go back to the center and you would like to create a deadzone around the axis center, such that a small range of values around center will be set to axis value 0. This can be done with DXtweak2. I don't recommend you to do this, it is much more effective to correct it back with your finger to 0, as in very rare occasions while driving you really need wheel at 0 pos for a long time, like on some long straight, but not even there you wouldn't just let go of steering.

A much better option is to use DXtweak2 to recalibrate the center position of the thumb stick axis. The only side effect is that you will lose some sensitivity on one side. because you'll be capping off small part of axis range at end towards direction you shift the center to. What lfs had before, was a recenter option for steering axis, which did exactly what I described above. That indeed would be nice to have back.

I use XinputPlus for deadzone adjustment on my Xbox controller with LFS: https://www.lfs.net/forum/post/1978019#post1978019

speaking of XinputPlus, how on earth do I emulate force feedback with it? It just throws this error whenever I try to.