Various UI and QoL suggestions and feedback

[qda]

Hello Klei, and thank you for the great work, ONI is more enjoyable now than ever !

Here is a list of various ideas/suggestions I got while playing the game :

1) I think it would be a great idea to NOT show and count unpermitted foods in the edible kcal counter on the top right corner, while keeping the total available kcal count in the top left list of materials. My reasoning behind this is that there is a lot of parameters to constantly watch during the course of a playthrough, and the UI should be here as an easy access to this important information. I can't remember how many times I am constantly checking the edible counter just to realize that what's left is food that I chose to disallow/spare for later. So, to me, this edible counter is misleading and often leads to starvation issues. I really think it should display total permitted food instead of total available food.

2) Having the encyclopedia (or database I believe) being accessible from the main menu. While thinking about contraptions and stuff outside of the game, I often find myself wanting to check some info (input/output values, or anything really), and have to start the game and load a playthrough (which can a loooooooooong time for late game bases, not that I mind, I understand) just to check a single value. This is quite a hassle, and since the encyclopedia is already there, it might be possible to add a way to access it from the game's main menu. On that note, having output temperatures of all coumpounds created by a building, whether they are fixed or dynamic, would be a real nice addition to the encyclopedia.

3) Gas and liquid vents aren't selectable from their respective overlay. I understand you have to hit a compromise, since allowing to interact with it in its overlay means that it could be cancelled or deconstructed, but I probably would find this behavior more consistent and logical.

4) Since the official release is closer than ever, I believe the buildings categories could be refined a little bit :

- I believe a new player would rather have atmo, gas element and liquid sensors in their respective tabs instead of the automation one. On the other hand, it could also work by having in-pipe sensors in the automation category. Either way, the actual categories feel a bit inconsistent to me right now.

- On this note, I feel the "utilities" category has been something in which you threw stuff you couldn't fit anywhere else. However, it happens that most buildings in there have something to with heat management. I feel like moving the oil well to the refinement tab and the ore scrubber to either medecine (a bit weird, but it somehow cleans stuff) or refinement (cleaning ore is actually, in a sense, a form of refinening) and renaming the category to "heat management" or even "temperature management" (more user friendly I feel) would be clearer for new and old players alike. And to follow on the automation remarks from before, it would then be consistent to move the three temperature sensors in this category. That would leave the automation tab with only logical elements. The other approach would be to split the automation tab into a logic components tab and a sensors tab which would countains every sensor in the game.

5) It would be great to be able to limit priority setting to only a certain category of buildings and items, similar to the cancel and deconstruct overlays. Sometimes, it would be nice to drag a priority over the entire screen rather that to have to separately click on single buildings because other prioritizable elements are in the way. However, now that we can copy settings for many buildings, this is much less relevent to be honest.

6) I'm probably not the first one to ask for that, but a proper gas overlay, without the built-in gradient for oxygen pressure and a separate color for every gas would be really nice in my opinion. However, if there's no room but for a single improvement, just a different color for polluted oxygen would already be great !

7) Clothing priority is still tricky and weird. Since the issue has been there for a long time, it's probably harder than it looks to fix, but maybe just making it the highest priority whenever work is scheduled would already be a huge improvement, since it's a one time thing and requires a ridiculously low amount of time compared to everything else in the game.

8) I might be stupid, but I didn't find, in 900 hours of play, a way to sort the dupes, in the "Consumables", "Vitals" and "Priorities" overlays, back to the default state which is the order in which dupes have been printed, or simply put, sorting them by age in descending order. Once I have played for a few hundred cycles, I somehow memorized this default sorting, and I know exactly where to look in the list to find the dupe I want.  Once I do a single click on any sorting category, I just cannot go back to the way it was before, making these tabs a pain for me. So, am I stupid, or is there really no way to go back to the printing order ? If so I believe it would be great to have that option, even just for the moment when someone feels nostalgic and wants to remember who are the oldest/youngest dupes.

9) The unresponsiveness to mouse clicks. I encounter that a lot, especially in both jobs and research tabs : whenever I click an item, whichever it is, on those tabs, one time out of ten (rough estimation), the game just doesn't register the click. The most common and frustrating scenario is to click on some research without really paying attention (because you know, we do that hundreds of times per game) and exit the tab just to realize that the research wasn't queued. And no, this isn't my mouse, my game, my computer, or anything else. I have seen it multiple times on friends' computers and various streamers on the web seem to experience it.

10) Upon saving, I really think that there should be some kind of message or visual indicator assessing the game has been saved and which lingers on the screen for a few seconds. More often than not, I find myself saving a second time right after the first one because I can't remember if I just saved the game or not. It is one of the many things that we do mechanically, without putting much thought into it, and for which there are no clear visual indication to remind us briefly that it has been done. Again, small stuff !

That's all I can think of right now, probably forgetting some other suggestions.

I realize some of these are personal suggestions that would fit my vision of the game, but I also feel some of them could be nice additions for everyone.

Anyway, thanks to Klei and anyone that can sit through this long and boring post !