Game Mechanics Shiftable Hotbar (Hopefully the Right Way to Title this...!)

Mythical Golden Bunny

Empress of Light
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So to basically get into the nitty gritty because this is a pretty small suggestion... The hotbar's kiiind of small for some aspects, mainly building. So here we have Shiftable Hotbar, which was the best title I could come up with... This on the spot!

Right now you have the base hotbar, extra inventory, it's where you use items without plunging your head into the menu every three seconds. But being able to just "move" it down to the next set of items would revolutionize the way your average Terraria goes about their business. For example, they could have blocks on the hotbar but with one press of the designated "moving down" of the hotbar to the next set, they would have the wall version of every block from before. To go even further, each layer of the inventory could be accessed by "shifting" the hotbar to allow for multiple active setups. Inventory management doesn't sound fun by default but the potential a player can unleash by utilizing this feature in an active manner besides building could, well, "change the game".

Other features could include setting hotkeys so specific rows can be brought to the hotbar besides the row above (which there isn't one by default because... Hotbar). But how does this even work? I'll try my best to explain in detail because this is a bit... Off the wall.

So I imagine that by default the Hotbar is row "0". Below is the next row of inventory space, aka row "1", then so on and so forth. By pressing the "shift hotbar" key, row "0" would swap with row 1, at least functionally. Row "1" is now the hotbar, but shifting it again would bring it to row "2" and row "0" (aka the old hotbar) into the slot of row "1". If you cycle back around to where row "0" is the hotbar, the order of the inventory won't have changed since the rows snap back to the number they were in before, which means minimal disruption. To make this a bit easier to understand, perhaps numbers could be added to the ui on the sides of the rows to show where they were pre-swapping?

So yeah. This one's pretty, as I've said, off the wall but I do believe in the potential it has if it were added to the game.
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This idea has potential, but there are a few changes I might want to make to it. First of all, I think we need to realize that while we may sometimes want to shift one item in the hotbar with another, we would rarely want to shift the entire hotbar. Even if you're a builder, there are some items that you'll want to have access to at all times, such as a pickaxe and Money Trough.

I'd prefer if the swap hotkey shifted only the selected item with the one underneath it, in the second row. Pictures probably speak louder than words, so...
Screen Shot 2019-05-11 at 11.04.35 PM.png

As you can see, slot 4 is a nice switch for paint-related things, both water-manipulating items are in slot 7, and slot 8 demonstrates the "block with its wall version" that you stated up at the top.

I can see this being useful for combat loadouts, too; for example, Flairon/Vampire Knives for the DPS/regeneration tradeoff, or Magnet Sphere/Rainbow Gun to condense two temporary pseudo-sentries into one hotbar slot.

I think the hotkey should be X or C, since my thumb happens to rest pretty neatly on that spot.
 
This idea has potential, but there are a few changes I might want to make to it. First of all, I think we need to realize that while we may sometimes want to shift one item in the hotbar with another, we would rarely want to shift the entire hotbar. Even if you're a builder, there are some items that you'll want to have access to at all times, such as a pickaxe and Money Trough.

I'd prefer if the swap hotkey shifted only the selected item with the one underneath it, in the second row. Pictures probably speak louder than words, so...
View attachment 221258
As you can see, slot 4 is a nice switch for paint-related things, both water-manipulating items are in slot 7, and slot 8 demonstrates the "block with its wall version" that you stated up at the top.

I can see this being useful for combat loadouts, too; for example, Flairon/Vampire Knives for the DPS/regeneration tradeoff, or Magnet Sphere/Rainbow Gun to condense two temporary pseudo-sentries into one hotbar slot.

I think the hotkey should be X or C, since my thumb happens to rest pretty neatly on that spot.
Actually I never have my mining tools in my hotbar. I use auto-select exclusively to pull up all items it functions with.
 
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