UI: Character tools/ weapons

Mercure shared this feedback ago

Not Enough Votes

So ehm.. i am new to this game and upgraded the tools by inserting my old tools into the forge.

Retrieved the new tools and wanted to equip them.

???

so there is this character screen with consumables in the bottom but nowhere to equip them. By default this is the classic approach how to equip weapons/tools/armor from inventory.

yet i had to look on the internet that it was under the build menu to equip the stuff from inventory. Which is ehm.. strange.

I like this feedback

Replies (3)

4Peace ●

It is basically the same as in Minecraft. The original game works the same way. Yes, other games might have dedicated slots for weapons and tools, but Space Engineers has chosen this approach, and there are some good reasons for it.

It gives you the freedom to decide what goes into each slot. It can be a block, a weapon, a tool, an emote, or an action. You can also carry more than one type of the same tool at different tiers. For example, you might not always prefer high-speed grinding in situations where you only want to recover a few components from a block, try to hack it (not in SE2 yet), or preserve components you cannot craft.

We have already confirmed at least two types of hand welders: the normal welder and the area welder. Then there are modded tools, or completely new tools that might be added to the vanilla game in the future or introduced via mods.

There are some issues with this system for sure, like what happen after you die, I have proposed a solution in this related topic, basically, automatically equip last tools/weapons/consumables upon respawning if you have them available.

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Mercure ●

i dont understand the 'freedom' part here. All i am saying is that tools/weapons/armor can be inserted onto a hotbar from the character screen.. where also the inventory is enabled so you can drag/drop your stuff onto the hotbar. cause right now you need to press build planner to equip tools that you have in inventory.

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4Peace ●

Oh, interesting, being able to drag items into hotbar from character inventory is not a bad idea actually. It would only work for things like tools, weapons and consumables while components and ores would not be possible to “equip” into a hotbar. You know what , I actually wonder why this was never considered before, we all kinda used to the original game and never really questioned about this possibility. Giving you my upvote now.

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Xorloth ●

Yeah dragging tools from the inventory into the hotbar would be an improvement. This would decrease the confusion after having upgraded to mk2 tools and you wonder why you can't use the selected tool in the hotbar anymore.

It's probably really confusing for new players when they have to search for the upgraded tool from the build menu and replace the existing tool icon in the hotbar with it. Personally this is the reason why I think tools and weapons should be separate or have their own hotbar.

It's not the same as in Minecraft and 7 Days to die. There the hotbar is an extension to the inventory and each item actually exists only there and not in the inventory. Space Engineers use links in the hotbar which complicates things when upgrading and having multiple versions of one type of tool in the inventory.

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4Peace ●

@Zefirth

Interesting analogy for other games. Indeed, we have unlimited inventory slots in SE and limited volume capacity. Toolbar slots are complicated actually. They can be links to tools or consumables, blocks to build, actions to perform, emoji etc. and we have 90 slots for that. It is indeed different from many other games but I don’t think it is bad. Some more visual clues and clarity would be nice to have. Like better (custom) icons and labels. Some information about state of the functional block actions. And maybe show different types of “actions” in some way.

Multiple tool tiers problem can be solved in many different ways. I like auto equip better tool when added to character’s inventory, and you can replace it back to different one later if you want. Or instead of tier1 to tier4 tools, I’d like to have a basic one and multiple advanced ones with different advantages and drawbacks. For example, basic welder can be upgraded to “long reach” one or to “faster speed” one, also give them a proper name.

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Xorloth ●

It doesn't make sense for the grinder, drill and welder to have different hotbar icons for each version. Maybe have only one icon for them that automatically uses the best one.

Factorio also uses links on the multiple hotbars. But there the hotbar items currently not found in the inventory gets grayed out, so it's clearly marked to the player which one is avaliable.

Personally I think the hotbar should only be used for tools and consumables. Building blocks should have a UI-pie overlay instead with multiple layers. Hold one button to open overlay and point the mouse to a pie piece. Scroll while holding the same button and you move between pie overlays.

Layers would work the same as those multiple hotbars, just more accessible and faster to reach than pressing multiple buttons on the keyboard. This would also work great for consoles.

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Xorloth ●

Used wrong reply..

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Waterlimon ●

Yes, to implement randomly generated tools/weapons, you need to be able to equip directly from inventory, not from the Character Gear section, since that section can presumably only contain predefined tools, not randomly generated ones you find in the world!

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