Small Quality of life features

[StringEpsilon]

Been playing again lately. Here are some miscellanious quality of life features I wish for the game in no particular order.

 

"Cooking water" pre-selects max amount.

95% of the time when I cook water, I cook the 2l of the pot or the 0.5l of the can. For the can, there isn't even another option and flipping the default to 2.0l for the pot would save an extra click in the majority of cases.

Option to reduce light flicker

Most light sources in the game flicker to some degree. But the mariners flare and the electrical lights during an aurora are particularly flickery. It would be nice to have an option to reduce the flicker or get rid of it entirely. At most I get a headache, so I am not particularly affected physically, but it can still be detrimental to the experience.

Incrementing values with mouse wheel.

Both in menus as well as in game (sleep and wait time selection, cooking water amount, ....). Hover over the UI element, scroll up to increase value, scroll down to decrease. Would make some adjustments a little less tedious compared to repeatedly clicking.

Batch actions for item groups

For items like sticks, paper or cloth it would be nice if I could specify the amount I want to harvest. The game already allows that for crafting via the corresponding crafting menus (say for processing birch bark or smithing arrowheads). Again, would take off some repetitiveness.

Improved keyboard navigation in menus

It would be cool if we could focus items in menus with WASD and select them with spacebar. Some of the repetitive actions like bulk harvesting clothes have long mouse paths and a way to do the same with keyboard controls would be neat.

Settings for hotkey priorities

When pressing the hotkeys 1 through 3, the game as a baked in priority for what kind of item and what specific item (I believe based on durability) is selected for the corresponding action. Some of them do not align with my preferences, making the hotkeys (particular 1 and 2) unreliable to use in some cases. For example it is pretty rare that I actually want to use the flashlight, but I might have one in the inventory when hauling loot. The value of these two hotkeys would increase immensly if I had a way to customize to some extend what they select.

Setting to disable revolver hipfire.

When going about with the revolver in hand, it is very easy to misclick on items you want to pick up. And instead of picking up a stick or cutting down a sapling you waste a round.  I see the value in hip fire as a unique attribute of the revolver, but having an option to disable that would be nice. Right now I always holster it for safety and then pull it back out after I am done picking up stuff.

 

I think most of these should be rather simple additions to the game. And while none of the problems they address are more than a very mild annoyance, I think they would greatly enhance my experience with the game.

 

Kind Regards

String.Epsilon

[Admin]

Thank you for sharing your these thoughtful suggestions, we appreciate it! 

[elpresidente]

I would like to add these:

Can we have partially eaten food and small amounts of water take proportional time to consume? Meaning, if eating an entire 1000 calorie steak takes you 2 seconds to eat, 100 calories worth of steak should take you 0.2 seconds.

Ability to load a 6 burner stove (or any stove or fire) with one click for any raw meat or fish we have in inventory. Also, if we have cups of tea in the inventory, they should be after the raw meat we have, instead of being first.

Set automatic drinking of water, if we have it in inventory. For example: drink automatically if lower than 25%

 

[Ghurcb]

19 hours ago, elpresidente said:

Set automatic drinking of water, if we have it in inventory. For example: drink automatically if lower than 25%

Nah... Nope. No-no-no. I mean, what's next? Automatic eating of food? Automatic application of first aid? That sort of automation really doesn't fit this sort of game. In TLD you survive because of your choices, and your character doesn't do anything that you don't choose to do (BTW, I don't like that in Wintermute the new clothes auto-equip). The little things like drinking when you're dehydrated improve the immersion. You don't just observe your character surviving, you ARE your character.

Also, this would be a bad gameplay change that the players would hate, because there would be countless times when you have, let's say, 0.5L of water that you want to use to cook some coffee, but then suddenly your hydration bar fills up with no warning. And now you have to boil some more water, even though you had enough before.
Basically, taking away the player agency like this is rarely a good idea.

[elpresidente]

Perhaps you misunderstood me. The automatic drinking should be optional - you should enable or disable it, with a simple keystroke push. The point of my suggestion was not to ruin immersion, but to improve it. It's to prevent constant micromanaging of your water levels, and preventing taking mini-sips, in order to go to sleep and not awaken with health damage, which can happen if you are not careful. In real life nobody will wake up half inch to death because they forgot to drink glass of water before sleeping. But in this game it can happen. Automatic drinking will prevent such ridiculousness.

[UTC-10]

Eating (or drinking) a portion of something can be done by (on a PC) by hitting ESC to  interrupt the action.  It was the way people used to take a "bite" from a kilo of meat generally as a mechanism to stave off starvation because any calories would reset the clock and then it would take time, once the calories were exhausted, before starvation would again loom.  

If one equips the revolver then one better be in complete control.  It is the first weapon that come to hand with the hotkey so the situations where having it routinely equipped would be an advantage seem rather limited.  If one thinks it necessary to equip the revolver then one accepts that, because the shoot on click was for the purpose of instant, instinctual, defensive action, not being sure that something appears on the cursor before clicking on "it" and having an accidental discharge (wasted shot) is the trade-off that was acceptable.  

[StringEpsilon]

4 hours ago, UTC-10 said:

If one thinks it necessary to equip the revolver then one accepts that, because the shoot on click was for the purpose of instant, instinctual, defensive action, not being sure that something appears on the cursor before clicking on "it" and having an accidental discharge (wasted shot) is the trade-off that was acceptable.  

I would agree, but I never actually use the hipfire when I actually do want to fire. I equip any of the ranged weapons when wolves are nearby so that I am ready to take aim, not because I want to be ready to fire immediately. As the game currently stands, with my particular playstyle it simply is functionality that makes picking up small items more tedious than the hitboxes they have already make it.

You can think of it this way: Currently the character always has the finger on the trigger. I'd rather walk about with finger safely away from the trigger. But that is just me and my playstyle and my struggle with the hitboxes. Hence why I proposed it as an option. Cheers!