Quickbar Much Less Useful with Quality; Suggestions

[Worloq]

TL;DR: Quality breaks Quickbar usability. Implement UI change to restore usefulness.

1500 hour player here. I've noticed that I use the Quickbar much much less in Space Age after implementing Quality in the early mid-game.

It's somewhat analogous to the belt and inserter tiers. You start with a Quickbar filled with yellow belt components and burner inserters, then you get access to red belts and yellow inserters so you have to juggle between the two tiers using multiple Quickbars, and you keep upgrading the Quickbar as you work your way up. Eventually you abandon yellow belts and yellow inserters from the Quickbar entirely, and even higher belt tiers get steadily phased out.

Quality is different in important ways: even in the end game there are lots of structures and turrets at multiple quality levels still in use, and usage is dependent upon inventory! I rarely have a full stack of the upper Quality levels, unlike tiers of belt and inserters. The situation is even more dramatic in Space Age because every space platform and planet has their own inventory. The new logistics UI addresses this by adding groups, so you can request all Quality levels for a given item, but the Quickbar is too space-constrained. I'll note that even with pretty aggressive upcycling for Quality in the end-game I'm still juggling multiple Quality levels even for early mid-game items like chem plants. I use lower Quality chem plants where I'm not space constrained and don't need high throughput, my highest quality chem plants where I need maximum throughput with space constraints, and whichever Quality level I have good local inventory otherwise. The ghost mechanic is excruciating with Quality. I have to bypass the Quickbar, open the local inventory, visually find and check the various inventory levels for the Qualities I have, decide which Quality to use, open the ghost menu, click the appropriate Quality button, click the item and finally place it.

My initial idea is something like the long press sub-menu mechanic in Apple's OS X and iOS (and for alternate glyphs in Adobe Illustrator):

iOSSubMenu.png (27.92 KiB) Viewed 354 times

AISubMenu.png (9.01 KiB) Viewed 354 times

I imagine a long press of the left mouse button shows a sub-menu of the item with all the quality levels in inventory for that item, e.g. long press on Assembler 3 icon in the Quickbar shows I have 50 Uncommon, 23 Rare and 4 Epic in my inventory, so I move the cursor to the Rare Assembler 3 icon to select that. Then I only need to add the normal item itself to the Quickbar, even if I have different Qualities in inventory.

There's an obvious UI question about what to show as the inventory level for the "generic" icon in the Quickbar. I don't have a suggestion for that.

[eugenekay]

Feature exists: hold ALT + Mouse Wheel Up/Down while holding an Entity which supports Quality.

I hope this helps!

[angramania]

Alternative solution is Placebles mod. It makes quickbar almost obsolete.

[Muche]

Also see Show logistic storage counts in item/entity tooltips (maybe better as mod than vanilla).