Hotbar suggestion - reduce confusion, shortcut to items

[MagRoader]

I believe the hotbar entries should be shortcuts to items in your inventory, as opposed to being themselves slots to house items.

Here's the issue: if I have 20 of a thing in my inventory, and 50 of them on my hotbar, it's really hard to tell that I actually have 70 of that thing available. Similarly, if I look at my inventory, I don't see 70 of that thing all nice and neat next to each other; instead, I see 20 of them, and have to look down at the hotbar and add them up to see how many I actually have.

Instead, I would rather if my inventory contained all of my items, and the hotbar acted simply as shortcuts to make use of those items. If I dragged either stack (the 20 or the 50) from my inventory to my hotbar, the items would stay where they are in my inventory, and on my hotbar I'd see a "70" entry (because that's how many I have total).

Filtering would work well with this suggestion. By default, running out of a thing would empty the hotbar slot for it; however, if I used middle-click to filter, the slot would instead be locked to that item and show a 0 when I run out. If I construct a new thing, it would appear in my inventory and the first available hotbar slot would link to it.

An implication of this change would be that your inventory would start out with 10 more slots than it does now (because hotbar slots are no longer extra inventory slots, they're just shortcuts), and hotbar upgrades would give you more inventory slots as well as more hotbar slots.

This would also allow a difference in the way swapping items works. Right now, I find myself constantly accidentally moving items from one hotbar slot to another because I click on one item, then click another, which swaps them. As is, this makes sense because the hotbar slots actually contain items; however, if the hotbar slots were instead shortcuts, this could work differently. If I click on a hotbar item that is actually a shortcut, then clicking on another hotbar slot need not swap the items, but could instead simply select the other shortcut (and leave the previous shortcut where it is). Click+drag could be the accepted way to change shortcuts, or remove them (by click+dragging off the hotbar entirely to clear the shortcut). Creating shortcuts in the hotbar could work as it does now, by clicking an item in the inventory and clicking a hotbar slot.

I believe these changes would make the inventory easier to deal with and more resistant to accidentally moving my items all over the place.

[Engimage]

This was suggested multiple times now. I think devs have to bring it up in the todo list.

Related
viewtopic.php?f=6&t=28904

[MagRoader]

Ah, great! I had searched but must not have used the right terms. Looks like siggboy's response to that thread is much the same as my suggestion.