Returning player: Inventory UI issues abound.

[Sly-Scale]

This critique is gonna be a jumbled mess, but only because that's what the UI feels like.

1) Inventory is on the side, not above.
Getting flanked? Is there a cockatrice in the corner of your screen? Can't see it; to have such clairvoyance, you'll want to keep the game's music turned on.

2) Inventory is the same button as the character sheet.
-Initially confusing when I checked the keybinds for specifically 'inventory' or 'backpack' or 'items menu' or something else that'd make more sense for accessing my inventory. Now it's just annoying. If I want to see my character sheet, I'll hit a button for it. Or better yet, bundle the character sheet with the skills menu. Don't narrow my FOV with this two-in-one nonsense. There's no verticality to the enemy placement, so you might as well keep that stuff along the top.

3) Spells menu doesn't toggle inventory off.
-So you're saying I can use number keys to toggle equipping a weapon, but this doesn't extend to my spellbook? Why does it cycle between my backpack and spells, anyway? I hit my 'spells' button, not 'inventory,' what is this.

4) Can no longer unequip weapons and offhands if your inventory is full.
-This implies no switching to sneaking nor punching while your inventory is full. Want to douse the light to your lantern to hide? Too bad, your inventory was full. Are you a monk? This issue bones your class. Want to put your crossbow away, so you can smash crates with your fist? Drop something first. The only workaround is having 1 less inventory slot.

5) Vertical inventory auto-sort on a vertical inventory space.
-Remember when the inventory space was horizontal? Vertical inventory auto-sort made sense then. But I read English, and English goes from left to right.

6) Auto-sort is unreliable.
-If you equip a tinkering kit and auto-sort, everything will be arranged in one way. But if you equip a shield or lantern, everything gets shuffled 1 slot over. You can't even begin to grasp the contents of your inventory at a glance. Speaking of at-a-glance:

7) Inventory slots are a blue-and-brown scheme, instead of black-and-gray.
-This reduces contrast, and makes the inventory a lot muddier to look at, especially since most items now visually take up more of the space that they occupy. It's harder to grasp the contents of your inventory at a glance.

8) Scaling down the HUD is ugly.
-I'm not sure how to describe it, besides the font looking jagged in places and icons losing their cohesion.

9) The hotbar selection now moves to whichever number key you press.
-Not only is that redundant, but I can no longer use my old control scheme: pressing numbers 1-thru-5, and delegating 6-thru-0 to using mousewheel and pressing 'R'. Now whenever I press a number, I have to run the mousewheel based on which number that is; no more snappy and reliable mousewheel up/down a controlled distance to alternate among 6-thru-0. The best solution is pressing 1 (which only sometimes unequips my crossbow because my inventory is usually full)

10) Click-drag to equip is a thing.
-You mean I'll just be accidentally equipping cursed items that I meant to throw away?

11) Cursor resets to the middle when I open my inventory.
-Meaning I get to run out of mousepad space whenever I want to access my inventory.

12) Can't dump the contents of a chest on the floor.
-For Mechanists whose inventories are perpetually full, that was a nice feature; they could just salvage whatever they didn't want, and move on. Now they have to dump some inventory to nab the stuff, first.

13) Can't hold down the 'interact' key to spam item pickups on the floor.
-Did you have a strategy for bypassing weight constraints? Dropping stuff at the starting room, so you can explore the floor at full speed? Do you use teleporter traps to teleport your overencumbering supplies from said room to the exit? If you do, that means there's tons of water, food and scrap you're dropping and picking up. Did you like holding down the "interact" key to pick it all up in 3 seconds flat? Too bad!!! That's gone now! You get to spam that button now.

14) The backpack carries fewer items now.
-I still prefer the backpack over the cloak of the guardian. So maybe that's a necessary nerf, but then the developers introduced all these issues, so Barony isn't really all that fun anymore.

And I haven't even reached the Labyrinth yet.

[Sly-Scale]

I'm in the Labyrinth and I just bumped into another issue:

15) The game "remembers" where you had things auto-filled in your hotbar.
So if you expected your empty 4 slot to be filled when you pick up tomahawks... well, no, it won't always do that. If they were originally in your 5 slot, they'll go there again. Unless something else fills your 5 slot, then it'll go to your 4 slot.

As if I'm going to remember how all that works. I'm already juggling the other 14 inventory issues.


16) The NPC party menu's presentation in general.
-Cycling between them is no longer highlighted, but belt-fed. It's not instant anymore, either; it comes with a transition. Transitions are totally great for when you need to hit that cycle button 5 times to select, say, your Gyrobot.

17) Target-commanding an NPC will cycle your selection to that NPC.
-This might've already been the case, but now issue #16 makes this one an issue.

[Sly-Scale]

Further feedback: after more playtime, I've been able to wrangle with the UI changes; nearly all the issues aren't as acute as they once were, though that still leaves issues #8, #13 and #14 as problematic. (I really do miss that "hold R to spam interact" feature, even if it did cause lag in multiplayer. I guess if I could code a macro on my keyboard, as a workaround.)

In relation to issue #1, though: you can't see your minimap while in the inventory.

[WALL OF JUSTICE]

Hi, appreciate the feedback.

For the HUD scaling, recommend using a value of 50% of 75% to keep the pixels scaling correctly at 720p/1080p/1440p etc. If you prefer another value, enable "Filter Scaling" in "General" tab to soften the pixel edges and look less jagged which may help.

Holding the interact key used to be a bug I believe, holding R or another key like your inventory/hotbar would spam toggle whichever interaction as the keyboard would auto-repeat as if it were typing. Since we only used the default mouse click that would only click once per input which was the intention, I never knew that was an incidental feature if you rebound it. Sorry to see it go, but you can macro your way around it at least.

As you've played with the HUD scaling you might find that helps seeing the minimap, you can also press the grave/tilda key ` to toggle expand the map in the center of your view and then open the inventory, or press inventory then M for map to open the map as you go.