How do I configure a plasmid to a keyboard key?

Question

I just got the Electro Bolt 3 plasmid and would like to set it to F1 (my previous Electro Bolt plasmids were set to F1), along with my other plasmids which set keys I also want to reconfigure. When I got it, the game by default, set the Electro Bolt 3 plasmid to F4.

I went to a Gene Bank to ensure that it is in the first slot, thinking that that will set it to F1:

However, the game still sets the Electro Bolt 3's keyboard key as F4, and the other plasmids aren't in order too:

How do I configure or "force" a plasmid to a specified keyboard key? Is there a workaround here?

Note: I'm using the default keyboard configuration.

Answer 1

I ran into this problem on my first playthrough as well: the game adds the plasmids to a soft list ( I think ) - to move a plasmid further left, you must remove those plasmids ahead of it. Not sure that's entirely clear.

In this instance, you will have to remove Incinerate!, Security Command 2, and Scout (switch them around with something you know you'll take back out anyways) and then put them back in. You may have to play around with it for a bit, the mechanics of it are a little wonky.

Answer 2

I consider this a bug in both Bioshock 1 & 2. But there is a workaround which seems to work --- at least it worked so far for me in Bioshock 2 (which I haven't completed, yet). It was my experience in Bioshock 1 that the workaround stopped working reliably when you had too many plasmid slots, so YMMV.

You need at least one plasmid (call it X) more than you have slots. Assuming you want to move plasmid A from slot i to j, replace A with X and leave the Genebank. Now enter the Genebank again and replace the plasmid (say D) in slot j with A. Finally, move D to i.

Example:

(j)   (i)
 D B C A E _
 D B C X E _
 (leave Genebank)
 A B C X E _
 A B C D E _

Again, it seemed to work less and less towards the end of Bioshock 1, but so far it works reliably on Bioshock 2.

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Now, if your in-game mapping doesn't reflect the selection in the Genebank, I suspect you can fix this in the same fashion, just swap the same slot back and forth.