How do YOU use and manage your v0.17 hotbars?

[MisterFister]

A search for posts that might already exist led me to viewtopic.php?f=5&t=8303 , but at almost 4 years old I thought that necroing it might not be the best idea. When using an advanced search restricted specifically to post titles on an ANY search of "quickbar hotbar toolbar toolbelt" yielded more than 10 pages of results. I browsed the first three pages, and while I did find some of the posts to be interesting to me for unrelated reasons, I'm basically left to presume that the rest of the hits from my search were false positives.

I'm not asking a technical question on how to use the game interface to set it up. I'm asking for input on how other players have chosen to set their hotbars up the way they have, or I suppose even the question of IF a player uses their hotbar (I can't imagine what playing with no hotbar usage would be like, but there's no such thing as "doing it wrong," so maybe.)

I imagine that responses would primarily be images, so that would lead to imgur links. First, for benefit of following up, please consider actually creating an imgur login instead of only using it as a guest every time. (You'll be surprised how often that becomes useful, once you've done it, if you frequent forums like this in your normal computer time.) Second, please, please, make your screenshots with the screenshot functions of the game or Steam. A fantastic reddit post on how to take screenshots can be found at https://www.reddit.com/r/factorio/comme ... many_ways/ . And that post doesn't even consider that the default keybind for Steam is F12! My example is here:



I'm having trouble making the image visible as part of this post, which is what I thought the "img" BB-code tags did, but apparently not. As a backup, my screenshot image is at https://imgur.com/a/zNDUVXJ .

I'm curious if there's anything special about how you do it. Do you run mods that influence your preferred setups? What kinds of things are made easier by your preferred setup? Do you use all ten that the vanilla game allows? Do you make different hotbar setups for different savegames or online multiplayer servers that you split your Factorio time between? Thanks in advance!

[urza99814]

...or I suppose even the question of IF a player uses their hotbar (I can't imagine what playing with no hotbar usage would be like, but there's no such thing as "doing it wrong," so maybe.)

Yup, that'd be me. I still don't really understand the new hotbar system and I find it's quicker to just find stuff in my inventory than set up all the hotbar buttons, so I've never really used it.

The problem is that it just seems so much less efficient. The inventory keeps everything sorted in a consistent way, so once you learn the sort order you can pretty much pop the inventory open and grab whatever you want right away. Having to view the whole thing is no slower. And if you don't have any left the crafting menu is right there. The hotbar can be one click faster, but only if you're already on the right panel and have what you need. If you have to scroll at all it already takes more clicks and more movements to find what you need. And that's not even getting into the fact that you have to stop and build you UI before you can start actually playing the game. I don't want to build the interface, I just wanna build my factory. If the hotbar doesn't populate automatically with stuff I'm using recently then it's not saving any time or effort and just isn't worth the extra effort IMO.

They need to bring back some kind of hotbar automation...too much manual effort required to use that thing now

[conn11]

It took some time to get used to the new hotbar (years of quickbaring took it toll). especially the need to manually set or link items, let me building most stuff out of the inventory a fair while.
But over time the ability to define presets (like general belting, fluid setup, rails etc.) did come in really handy. Not beeing clutters with random useless items certainly helped.
But the new hotbar dose require to be set up activity and dose not accumulate frequently used items automatically.
But you don’t have to constantly delete unused items and can define up to 10 presets, wich is beneficial.

[mudcrabempire]

Like urza99814, the inventory in factorio is just so good that I almost never use the quickbar. I also never display more than one quickbar as it just blocks parts of the screen.

The only task that I really use the quickbar for is combat. Being good in combat requires every fractional second you can get and constantly monitoring what your enemies do (meaning you can't afford to block half the screen with something like the inventory). So I usually put those few items that I need mid-combat on the quickbar (fish, grenades, defense-discharge trigger, ...).

[Amarula]

I bump the number of quickbars hotbars shown to the maximum of four.
One row is solid blueprint books. The rest is all kinds of stuff that I find useful from belts and inserters to repair packs (not to use, that is what robots are for, but so I can see if I am running out!)
Some pretty much stay all the time, but it is so easy to add and remove items that I will quite often put in a bunch of items that I need for a specific task (like setting up a new nuclear reactor) and then remove them when I need the space for something else.
I tend not to use the other six hotbars at all, I just haven't gotten into the habit of switching them. I like being able to see exactly what I've got, not having it hidden.
I just saw the suggestion for a wider hotbar viewtopic.php?f=88&t=75635 and I really like the idea. It would be great if I could choose to have my four visible hotbars placed horizontally across the bottom of the screen rather than stacked one on top of the other.

[Stakhanov]

The hotbar is so practical I can't see myself reverting to inventory for most tasks. Mine is like :

1) (furnace - miner early on) or (yellow storage chest - medium pole) - yellow belt - yellow underground belt - yellow splitter - assembling machine - mining drill - wall - gun turret - repair pack

2) (chest early on ) or (red provider chest) - (small pole early on) or (large pole) - inserter - long inserter - fast inserter - pipe - underground pipe - gate - pathing brick / concrete - fish if still relevant , cliff explosive otherwise

3) next tiers of belts

4) all rail items

5) landfill - circuit wires - deconstruction and upgrade planners - radar - roboport - solar panels - accumulators

6) pure combat bar with combat drones , grenades and more turret types

6) misc production structures (pumpjacks , pumps , chemical plants , beacons) including nuclear complex elements

Majority of my factorio time spent with 1&2 , then 1&5.

[urza99814]

Like urza99814, the inventory in factorio is just so good that I almost never use the quickbar. I also never display more than one quickbar as it just blocks parts of the screen.

The only task that I really use the quickbar for is combat. Being good in combat requires every fractional second you can get and constantly monitoring what your enemies do (meaning you can't afford to block half the screen with something like the inventory). So I usually put those few items that I need mid-combat on the quickbar (fish, grenades, defense-discharge trigger, ...).

I've always found combat is too fast to use much of anything. I'll deploy robots or toss in a nuke while approaching the base, but once I'm there I'm pretty much focused on where I'm running while my bots and lasers guns auto-fire on anything that moves xD

[Honktown]

First, I hit 1-1 often enough to clear my mouse of what I'm holding, that I rebound quickbar 1 to q, and "clear mouse cursor" to 1. I put fish on 2, and repair kits on 3. I play with mods, so I often have 4 be power poles, and 5 be lamps (for one mod), or nothing. 6-0 are too far away to be convenient (I have joint issues, but I don't think that plays too much of an issue with it, they're far keys).

I used 6-10 and maybe the same places on the next row for item counts, if I'm playing a mod which gives me a lot of relevant stuff but it is also "trash" I need to drop off (ores, coins).

[MisterFister]

Like urza99814, the inventory in factorio is just so good that I almost never use the quickbar. I also never display more than one quickbar as it just blocks parts of the screen.

The only task that I really use the quickbar for is combat. Being good in combat requires every fractional second you can get and constantly monitoring what your enemies do (meaning you can't afford to block half the screen with something like the inventory). So I usually put those few items that I need mid-combat on the quickbar (fish, grenades, defense-discharge trigger, ...).

I've always found combat is too fast to use much of anything. I'll deploy robots or toss in a nuke while approaching the base, but once I'm there I'm pretty much focused on where I'm running while my bots and lasers guns auto-fire on anything that moves xD

With a combat bar, the advantage is that you can use your top-row number keys to hold each corresponding item in your hand. For example, if your combat bar read from left to right as TURRET > TURRET AMMO > GRENADE > REPAIR PACK > FISH, then hitting the 1-key arms turret to your cursor. The 2-key switching to ammo (to load into the turret), 3 toggles to the grenade, etc. I agree with you that combat is an exercise in split second timing, and despite the tone of my OP here, combat is one of the most obvious use cases I've encountered so far. Among few other cases, mind you, making the contrast that much starker.

[urza99814]

Like urza99814, the inventory in factorio is just so good that I almost never use the quickbar. I also never display more than one quickbar as it just blocks parts of the screen.

The only task that I really use the quickbar for is combat. Being good in combat requires every fractional second you can get and constantly monitoring what your enemies do (meaning you can't afford to block half the screen with something like the inventory). So I usually put those few items that I need mid-combat on the quickbar (fish, grenades, defense-discharge trigger, ...).

I've always found combat is too fast to use much of anything. I'll deploy robots or toss in a nuke while approaching the base, but once I'm there I'm pretty much focused on where I'm running while my bots and lasers guns auto-fire on anything that moves xD

With a combat bar, the advantage is that you can use your top-row number keys to hold each corresponding item in your hand. For example, if your combat bar read from left to right as TURRET > TURRET AMMO > GRENADE > REPAIR PACK > FISH, then hitting the 1-key arms turret to your cursor. The 2-key switching to ammo (to load into the turret), 3 toggles to the grenade, etc. I agree with you that combat is an exercise in split second timing, and despite the tone of my OP here, combat is one of the most obvious use cases I've encountered so far. Among few other cases, mind you, making the contrast that much starker.

Ah... Yeah, I play with a controller, so I don't quite have enough buttons to bind all of those actions... Although I'm not sure how feasible it would be to be using the arrow keys, number keys, and mouse all at once even if I were using a keyboard. I guess most people would use wasd though...?

[Honktown]

Ah... Yeah, I play with a controller, so I don't quite have enough buttons to bind all of those actions... Although I'm not sure how feasible it would be to be using the arrow keys, number keys, and mouse all at once even if I were using a keyboard. I guess most people would use wasd though...?

Default keys are wasd, so your fingers are right near 1-4, 5 is okay, 6 is getting away from where your hand normally is. They let you bind up to at least mouse 5, so you can use at least some extra mouse buttons (my mouse doesn't go up higher than that). It doesn't behave like a key though (doesn't refire).

I'm surprised there aren't "hotbar cycle" commands, so you can select the highlighted square (last hotbar item selected) and then press the buttons to cycle left/right, and use another button to clear selection

[GlassDeviant]

Poorly