Feedback The new toolbar is terrible

And if never staff can't (or dont want) change that maybe a modder could a day ? we'll see

 

I completely agree with that. While both the new and the old both have their strength and weakness, the new one can benefits from making some non-combat related objects 2-hands into 1-hand, in particular, torchs, stairs, construction blocks, furnitures and seeds. It will certainly make non-combat activities such as building and farming much easier and pleasurable.

 

Also i must say its stupid to take both hand for 1 block , its a shame for builders...

 

I use the second hotbar for building. Don't need more than 6 shortcuts usually.

 

This is the biggest reason I am against the new bar currently, while it does have its pros, in a sandbox game the non combat aspects need to be easy and convenient to use. The new bar when first unveiled in the dev blog and on the nightly build received a lot of criticism and suggestions, because it made those aspects of the game harder and less convenient to do. As it was pretty easy to foresee the large influx of posts of both like and dislike for it if it was released in its current state. A good portion of the criticism was to try and have them work on bringing it closer to having the strengths of both.

However the changes to the hotbar hit too close to the release, and not given enough time for the generated feedback to make a difference, as by the point players could give the feedback the dev cycle was full steam ahead on final bug squashing and no more major changes would happen.

Now if this was developed as a console game and in the dark from the players, a last minute change of this magnitude to a core element would never have been known. Unfortunately that is not the case, and instead it was a bought in early access, which comes with the implication that player testing and feedback will be considered and help shape the game. And in this case, an element of the game which should have been locked down much earlier in the development process, got altered last minute with no time to apply any of the feedback received.

Now that the new bar is officially live, and the game is in full release, this hotbar that does not really fit a sandbox building style of game it will significantly color the perceptions of any new player for better or worse, as only get to make a first impression once and for a game that is its official release.

 

When you have always a heal item + light item (torch) , it already eat 2 slot /6 , 4 block slot is too light for building , and even without that , 6 is still not enought Imo

we have 10 slot on Stellar overload , 9 on minecraft , 10 on starbound , but yeah we have 2 bar so i dont cry on that ^^
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the heal item is on my first bar, if i really need it i can still switch to that but it is unlikely because i'm not fighting. It depends of your building style, but 4 different blocks is already a lot in a single build. It is better to place single decoration items like tables or lights directly from you inventory if you don't want to use a ton of them.

 

Yes but for the best i need a mod who keep in memory window position , cuz EACH time you need to drag a table for example from inv to build area you need to move 1 or 2 window and its really boring.

 

There is currently a mod that spaces the two windows out that are 'fixed' when you open a container, it does a ton to relieve that.

 

More annoying is the lack of space to put your weapons in, when one slot goes for medicine, one for torches, one for grappling tools and possibly one for blocks in case need for quick bridges there's not really much space for all those weapons. Placing food on a hotnar is a pain because you can't stack them.

Also, there's three useless tools to scroll through at the middle of the hotbar.

 

My hotbar is : 1 slot for melee weapon(s), 1 for ranged, 1 for junk blocks, 1 for healing item and the ore detector. I don't need anything else when I explore/mine planets. Torches are not useful anymore once you get the ore detector. If you are really want more light you can always press N and your matter manipulator will do like a flashlight. There are more options for light like the augment or the glowing bug pet. I never used grappling tools, i guess they can avoid some deaths in the early game but you really don't need it when you have the best gear. You want to avoid scrolling, use your keys. Matter manipulator tools are not useless. Don't use the hotbar for eating, just open the inventory, pick food and click outside the inventory. You can also do that directly from a container.

 

oooooh so play handicapped because the UI is bad. Got it.

 

? I still have 2 slots left that i don't use because i don't feel i need it, where is the handicap

 

You only have 1 melee, and 1 ranged option, which means you rely on battering down all enemies with one damage type alone, and don't make use of the variety provided by elemental weapons. If both of them are dual-wield sets, then you also discard all of the special abilities of different 2-handed weapons.

 

As i said i could use 2 more slots if i wanted to use more weapons. In survival starbound it is absolutely unnecessary, the volium blade 1/2/3 hit(s) kills most mobs, same with the sniper rifle nuru gives you. There is probably better weapons in the game. Using different weapons would only be for the sake of having fun with the animations, not being more effective. I don't play pvp so i could not tell if it would be an issue in this context.

(Not very confident with my english here, as you may notice i'm not a native speaker at all).

 

I think you, and a lot of people really, misunderstood that particular point. The new hotbar does indeed need to be scrapped, but not because some people don't like it. It's because there are very few things it does well, those few things could easily be adapted into a version of the old hotbar, and there are quite a lot of people who not only like the old hotbar, but would also not mind seeing a hybrid of the two instead of either.

 

If you think about it it's not really all that bad. Is it worse than the old bar? Most certainly. Does it have anything in it whatsoever that the old bar lacked?... kinda... but not really.
That's about the best defense I can make for it. Is it worse than the old bar. Yes. Does it have additional functionality that the old bar lacked. No, at least not really.

So what am I defending? An afterthought made by a game company mere weeks before going live with their 3+ year long pre-release/beta which changes basically nothing in terms of functionality and just serves to make the user interface "simpler" albeit with a VERY negative side effect of making the user interface more clunky and harder to use FOR THOSE OF IS THAT HAVE BEEN USING THE OLD BAR FOR OVER A YEAR. I'm some cases more than 3 years. And at the very last possible second, they changed it.

Of course someone who never knew or understood the old bar wouldn't have a problem with the new one. It is impossible to miss what you never had.

I have very mixed feelings on this subject. No it doesn't stop me from playing. But I genuinely liked the old bar.

I do not genuinely like this new bar they have given us. It functions, but that's about it. It doesn't do anything new or intuitive. It's just the same old bar with a facelift and they accidentally removed half the face.

So now we put chuckle fish in a strange position. Who knows exactly how long it took to make this new bar. The fact remains they had to take a lot of time to make a completely new user interface. They put their stamp of approval on it and they shipped it out. And now you have half of the people to play their game at least half that's on the forums either not very impressed by the bar or outright hating it.

So do you really expect them to admit they were completely and totally wrong and just wasted however long that just took to make them that new bar and just completely switch back to the old one?

We don't know if one person worked on it, we don't know if the whole team worked on this. We have very little in the way of actual knowledge about the subject were talking about. It could be there was a massive bug with the old interface that no one ever really found out about, and they had to change it because of that.

All the playerbase really knows is, that they waited until the last possible second to change up arguably the most important thing in a game with zero communication with the playerbase about that change. Of course that's going to upset and piss off people.

Let's look at this from another angle. If they hadn't changed the user interface in any way whatsoever, how many threads do you think would be up on this forum about people not liking the current interface. I think there might be one, maybe. But nowhere near what we're seeing right now.

I honestly feel (and this is coming from a place of love) that this was a very stupid mistake. If they had rolled this change out with glad giraffe (which I'm pretty sure was the combat update back in December.) It would have both given the playerbase time to adjust and the development team time to tweak and make any changes that they might not have noticed or thought of. And I think it would have been a much better way to go about it rather than waiting until it was far too late to do anything about it.

But there's not a whole lot we can do about it right now,other than gripe and complain, which is causing all of this ridiculousness on the forums.

Just my thoughts on the matter.

*Edited for reading comprehension. The microphone on my new phone leaves a lot to be desired.*

 

An adapted bar would be great. I just don't want to see a straight-up reversion to the old one.

 

There are things about the new hotbar that are indeed better than the old hotbar.

Being able to free your hands without needing to clear out two slots and then "equip" these empty slots is great even if absolutely unneeded from a combat perspective, but it's nice to now have the option to easily run around in your colony without constantly shoving your broadsword or rifle up your tenants faces.

It's also a nice option to be able to set whenever picked up items jump into free slots in the hotbar or not, this was often enough annoying and made me all the time when starting a new character before block all slots that were to be filled with weapons and tools with dirt and whatever else I got.


And that's pretty much what it's doing better from my point of view.
I play SB since pretty much ever with 2h weapons so the new hotbar is a loss for me.

Usually I had a 2h sword in the L slot, a grenade launcher in the R slot
1 held a sniper or assault rifle
2 held a rocket launcher
3 was grapple
4 was bandages
5 had the flashlight
6 had my torches or printed lights
7 & 8 were platforms and dirt for building pathways during exploration
9 was a low priority alt weapon which was useful in few cases and didn't need to be reached quickly
0 was the boat

This setup worked for me perfectly. Mainly because how the LR slots worked.
Since I had a 2h weapon in L I would hold the sword when I pressed X so being ready to retilate to something jumping my face was dead easy.

And the grenade launcher in R worked great with every thing else: equiped bandages? launcher on R click; hanging from the ceiling with the grapple? launcher on R click; running around with the flashlight in the dark? guess what I can fire with R.
All this needed only a single keypress to equip, and unlike with the new hotbar did I not need to setup every and each of these combinations before hand, this was the strength of the old hotbar and it was a great strength.


But for dual wielders was it of course not that easy to change things around, but it still worked out.
So lets take an example with someone who uses sword and shield and a pistol and grenade launcher as main weapons.
Sword and shield would probably be in LR because they offer defense too and having a fallback when you run out of energy is in my opinion preferable, so the pistol and launcher go into 1 and 2.
Admittedly, that person would need to press 1 shift + 2 to change weapon sets which is depending on how you count 2~3 keys. If you switch a lot then I guess that that can be a little bother some and for these people would the new hotbar be preferable.

However: you are not able to use the versatility of the old hotbar with the new one.
The old allowed free combination of your 1h items on the fly, which might have been slightly clunky because there are only so many free keys on the keyboard and we didn't have enough for "equip 1 in L" AND "equip 1 in R" so we had shift + slot instead.
Still this allowed you do things like grapple yourself out of harms way and nom a bandage. Given my layout from above I'd at first hang around with the launcher on R and the grapple on L, but the old hotbar was great as it let you SWITCH offhand items while being grappled, so pressing shift 5 let me chew some bandages while hanging around.
Try that with the new hotbar, you'll fall down even IF you have 2 sets that use the grapple, no changing allowed anymore.


My first experience with the new hotbar wasn't great, in fact it ruined most of the fun I had, or more specifically did not have, in the beginning until I started adapting to it. The bigger fun kill was though to have started on Survival which I severely regretted fast and fixed afterwards. SB survival is meh but that's not the point here.
The main issue was for the longest time that I kept hitting X when something jumped my face because that used to be my panic key. It took a few days to adjust that to 1 instead. The problem was that it wasn't always the right "1" thanks to the bar switching and my inability to stay aware non stop which one I was on...
So I had a bad first time with the hotbar but I somewhat adapted to it.

1-1 got the broad sword
1-2 the rifle
1-3 grapple + light
1-4 bandages + light
1-5 torches though at the end were my printed lights here
1-6 dirt for building pathes until I got the boat

2-1 got a spear (at the end a rocket spear as these are awesome jetpacks in asteroid fields)
2-2 healing staff (these things are pretty nice, outside of combat)
2-3 grapple + light - I need this to be available no matter what to prevent falling to my death if I am so it needs to be present in both slots as there's not time to figure out which bar I was in while falling, so already one slot wasted
2-4 bandages + light - same as above, two slots wasted
2-5 torches
2-6 platforms

This setup worked somewhat for me.
Except that thanks to the bar switching I sometimes tried to shoot things with the healing staff or tried to super spin things with the rocket spear.
Still these miss-selections are not as bad as the fact that we have a dedicated key for deselecting everything and making our hands free AND can now also do so while pressing the same slot again.
I can absolutely not understand why this decision was made and even more so why this decision was forced upon us without giving us the choice to turn this off.

As already mentioned, I have mixed up the two different bars already from time to time which didn't exactly kill me but put me at a disadvantage. Which most monsters that's not exactly something to care about, unless you fight with things that can 3 shot you.
This recent change to the new hotbar added a new possibility of screwing up for me because I have already had it happen in the past that I was running around with my rifle (1-2) selected and something jumped me and I pressed 2 to select my rifle and shoot it's face off.
At the times where this happened did nothing go wrong, because the same slot deselection wasn't a thing.

But now the next time that'll happen I'm gonna stand there like a moron holding no weapon, so thanks for that.


This is my reasoning why we as players should have not only the option to turn off this non-sensical same slot deselection but even more so be able to choose which bar we want to use, because depending on how you play Starbound, or wanted to play it, is one of them putting you at a disadvantage.

 

One month of silence, guess everyone gave up on this now.
Sad that there's still no response from the devs about this.