Hotkeys

Unturned U3 Discussion
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Hotkeys hotkeys hotkeys

They play a big role in not making the game tidious. In Age of Empires (for example), you can build a house with 1 click, and 2 buttons. You can even do it without any clicking. We all have that moment when you’re in a hurry and the mouse passes over the button before you can click. So in panic, you click your mouse senselessly while trying to move your mouse to that small button named “scrap”. Not only that, but you also have to scroll down to find the item you wish to use.

As of now, for the inventory/skills/crafting menu, we have the 3 buttons I, U, and Y respectively. But after that, we are forced to use the mouse. Now before anyone gets a pitchfork and a torch, players can have the ability to toggle menu hotkeys on and off.

Crafting menu

In the crafting menu, let’s say we would like to scrap 5 items with a significant distance in the alphabetical order. Currently, we have to scroll or type the name of the item, click that small “scrap” button and search for the next. However, with the hotkeys, you press Y to open the menu, and you have:
1: Scrapping/Crafting tab
2: Clothing tab
3: Medical tab
4: Barricades tab
5: Ammo tab
And so on and so forth till the repair tab.

Now when you press Y then 1, you’ll be in the scrapping menu. And instead of having each item take up a full line, it can in a grid style so that all the items can be seen on the screen (or at least most of them) without scrolling. Giving every item a small box showing the icon and the name. Hovering over the icon will show the items required to craft.
Now that you have your item ready, you left click on the icon and (much like the suicide button) a prompt will ask if you are sure or not, to prevent accidents. This can be hotkey’d to Q (for yes) and E (for no).

Now you might be asking how are we gonna craft multiple items at once (for example dressings and rags). This is when you right click the icon to craft all of them, of course followed by a prompt of “are you sure?”

Skills menu

As for skills, we have to press U to bring up the menu. But to switch between tabs of “Offence”, “Defence”, and “Support”, we can hotkey them to Q, W, and E respectively. Afterwards we can hotkey the skill with numbers in descending order. First (Overkill) being 1, second (Sharpshooter) being 2, third … and so on.
This will help speed up the process of using the menu, and helps in panic situations

As for inventory, it doesn’t really need any hotkeys, we already have the (right click + [number]) so I’ll leave it.

PS. All hotkeys can be changed and this entire hotkey idea can be toggled off.

This might be a messy post and a very “not so necessary” suggestion for 3.0, but I thought I’d suggest it either way. Waiting for feedback :smile:

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I question the sanity of anyone who binds Q, W, and E to crafting menus.

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if they are the default keys for inventory management, Then i have them enabled

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I think it’s meant that there will be multi-key binding, and using Q, W, and E to switch tabs in a menu only works while in that menu, and while not in that menu, it moves your character or does whatever one has those keys binded to for the “world” screen.

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If I’m understanding correctly, you want crafting (among other things) to work like inventory binds when you press Y and a number at the same time. However, I don’t think that’s quite necessary.

I’d opt to instead just bind each crafting tab to 1-9 by default, and then when you press Y and a given number, you should be able to find what you need fairly quickly (especially in terms of medicine). No small grids or confirmation prompts necessary. This would also easily apply to the skills and player tabs.

As for the grid themselves, while I’d love to have them, as Nelson put it, they wouldn’t scale well to small monitors. Although I certainly wouldn’t be opposed to some bigger buttons, perhaps placed on opposite sides of the recipe. This method should theoretically solve any issues of tight situations seeing as they would probably pertain to either food or meds; both of which don’t have a ton of recipes to scroll through.

Simply applying 1-9 binds to tabs makes it very easy to implement and efficient, whilst also being more intuitive than an entirely new crafting screen.

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I just mentioned the new crafting UI to cope with the hotkeys and make it simpler (visually)
However, the main point is to just apply hotkeys for the crafting tabs, and probably the items themselves too