ui tweak Crafting menu UI idea.

[Walrusst]

So this is a broad little concept for the crafting menu ui.
This is based on something I noticed where some of the people I invited to play this game gave up trying to play early on and spent unhealthy amounts of time just reading the wiki while starving.
This lead to some funny quotes like "I'm sorry, the fridge door was too heavy" when someone died in the camp next to a fridge with 20 meaty stew, but the UX of the game likely at this point needs some refinement so this wiki addiction is less a common part of the new player lifecycle and people can finally look at the UI and go wow this is amazing!

What if items you had never crafted had something like boyscout badges on them which just say what tabs the item is in, to serve a hint as to what goals this item might serve!

(In the empty space on the left.)

That way people who see something like a grammarphone in structures or some other tab like decorations can also see it has a farming badge and discover how utterly trivial it is to remove 90% of the busywork from maintaining farms.

When an item is discovered, these badges display important stats as badges like damage, durability, protection, planar protection, and major stat overrides like range on the cat of nine tails, or the abysmal attack rate on the fencing sword. A pick three of the most important features of a discovered item. Items which need ammo or another item to function should have these clearly marked as a badges as well!

Badges on completed items can be clicked as links, taking you to the other item in the crafting menu, or if you clicked a stats of the item, to the items scrapbook entry.

This gives us several benefits.

• FIRST IT GIVES NEW PLAYERS A CLEAR INVENTORY OF WHAT THEY HAVE AND HAVEN'T COMPLETED.
• Secondly is it relays scrapbook information in a way that isn't like a early 2000's banner ad with no info.
• Third it communicates inter-item contingencies and necessities to reduce players desire to binge the the games wiki.
• It gives players a chance at recovering from fatal mistakes in trusting an item that should never be trusted, as there are injoke trash items in the scrap book that you simply should not use.

[GuyNamedChris]

There's a mod that displays the Scrapbook details of crafting items on the crafting UI. Honestly hoping Klei implements something like this and shows us more info around the world based on how much of the Scrapbook is completed. Cause honestly I don't interact with the Scrapbook page at all and having that info more ingrained around the world would be a very convenient detail.

 

[_mylilsunshine_]

i really love the idea that things in this game change dynamically based on your scrapbook. so discovery = more visual info.

[Walrusst]

4 hours ago, _mylilsunshine_ said:

i really love the idea that things in this game change dynamically based on your scrapbook. so discovery = more visual info.

Plus it keeps the visual overload down for things you've never used.
Since, ideally the idea of some indicators something has a future use is less of an overload then giving exact numbers for its mechanics.

Also the tab badges fill another role, you sort of get some intuitive reminder that the icecube associated with summer items is hot insulation, since you sort of knew the umbrella had both rain and summer badges to it, so surely the non-rain stat has to do with how good it was in summer.

Plus the indicator of what you have never done is going to be good for people who are basically ancient beings in this game looking to spice things up with something they have genuinely never tried.