More toolbar slots visible on screen.

[Zavian]

Related to viewtopic.php?f=38&t=64480.

I have a large monitor, easily large enough to support a toolbar 40-50 slots wide. I would like to be able to either expand the existing toolbar(s) to one with 40-50 slots, or alternatively display additional toolbars to the left and right of the standard game's toolbars. (I don't want to add more toolbars vertically, because that starts to encroach on the centre of the screen, which should be kept clear. This would be perfect for keeping lots of blueprints handy, and allowing me to keep all the belts, inserters, pipe, chemplants and assembly machines etc available without needing to keep opening my inventory everytime I try to manually build something.

Personally, I mostly mouse select items from the existing toolbar, so I don't care about keyboard support for the additional items. (Although I'm not suggesting that the existing support should be removed). Please make either the width (number of items horizontally) of each toolbar, or the number and location of visible toolbars, adjustable by the user either, via options or config.ini, or mods/Lua commands or additional researches.

[Koub]

In addition to this suggestion, OP's suggestion would be nice too.
Just a note : If this suggestion was to be implemented, I'd rather not use commands/mods : both invalidate Steam achievements, which would be too much of a punishment.

[Zavian]

Yeah, I would prefer to see it in vanilla, but if the devs decide not to implement it in vanilla, then I would settle for it being available via mods/lua. (And as I said in the OP, I would settle for just being able to make the stock toolbars 40 to 50 slots wide via command, even if the extra slots don't get keyboard shortcuts).

[Nightinggale]

I second this. Playing in 4K on a 27" monitor leaves a lot of unused screen space. It's not a bad design in the sense that it allows more of the map to be viewed at once, but being able to have more toolbar slots present would be really nice.

FFF #278 talks about a quickbar page with multiple quickbars to pick from. Adding more on the screen at once could be done as simple as allowing displaying quickbars side by side instead of just one at a time. Hotkeys would still affect just one, but there could be a hotkey to select which one the hotkeys would pick from. Settings can then control how many the player wants to be displayed, both horizontally and vertically, allowing people to fill up the screen with as many quickbars as the player wants (if the resolution is high enough). This can result in quickbar overkill, but I see no point in limiting this feature more than needed for technical reasons. It might be useful for some, particularly if somebody figures out a way to mod something to make good use of this.

One important aspect to remember here is that now that quickbars are blueprints/ghosts, adding seemingly unlimited slots will not be cheating like it would be right now where items can be stored in the quickbar. It's purely a user interface shortcut or macro access.

[bobingabout]

I can agree that even on a 2560x1440 screen and magnification of 100%, it would be nice to be able to place 2 toolbars side by side.

[egocarib]

The new 0.17 quickbar has a cool feature that allows you to show up to four rows of items. However, when you enable this feature it obstructs a significant part of the vertical viewing area on a typical widescreen monitor. I tried using the feature for a while, because I like having access to extra items easily, but I ultimately turned it off because it wasn't practical. For example, when exploring the map and zoomed out, I would sometimes encounter a biter base south of me and I would enter aggro range for the enemies before I could even see the base, because the quickbars were obstructing my view.

It would be nice if the quickbar could be expanded horizontally instead of vertically to obstruct less of the screen. Possibilities:

• Expand the number of items shown in each row.
• Allow two rows to be placed side-by-side at the bottom of the screen.
• Add an option to show vertical quickbars on the side of the screen instead of horizontal quickbars on the bottom of the screen.

To put some numbers behind it, if you look at this example video of the new 4-row layout, it takes up approximately 20% of the vertical screen space. I assume it varies based on screen dimensions, but this looks like a pretty typical widescreen to me.

I think it'd be cool to have a technology to research that expands the width of the quickbar, but that's just a thought. I'd be in favor of any kind of solution.

[Koub]

[Koub] Merged into older topic with same - or very similar suggestion - for the same issue.

[SuperCato]

I had an idea when I learnt you could increase the number of hotbar rows.

In the same settings tab where you can choose the number of hotbars shown, why not have another slider so you can add more rows on the right of the current ones.
The limit would be hardcoded (set) or would be based on the width of your monitor.

[Koub]

[Koub] Merged into older thread with same suggestion.

[leopoldkabouter]

TL;DR
Make the width of the Quickbar configurable, instead of fixing it at 10.
What?
Ideally the width of the Quickbar can be set to more than 10. 42 for example.
Why?
Because there is room to spare at the bottom of the screen. Having multiple rows in the Quickbar takes up space in the centre of the screen (where the action is). While having a wider Quickbar at the bottom of the screen is always far away from the engineer. Monitors these days are wider than they are high.

This picture shows there is room for at least 30 more stack slots to both the left and the right of the Quickbar.

wider_quickbar.jpg (134.21 KiB) Viewed 904 times

PS Thanks for this amazing game!

[Koub]

[Koub] Merged into older thread with same suggestion.

[leopoldkabouter]

I found the placeables mod and use it now as a Quickbar replacement. It supports a very wide 'quickbar' at the bottom of the screen.

This screenshot is added because I asked the developer for a keyboard shortcut to hide the title bar of this placeables window here https://mods.factorio.com/mod/Placeable ... bdd6620102