Handbook Improvements

[jerjerje]

The handbook is already one of the best in game guides I have seen. And it has already seen some improvements, since I started playing. Still, there are many ways to improve it further. I am making this post as a collective overview of improvements I have seen suggested by others, and improvement ideas I have had myself. I will link to other forum posts, when I have found other posts also suggesting these things.

 

1.

Problem: You frequently have to search the same entries again and again.

Solution 1: A way to bookmark pages so, that they can be easily opened again, without having to search.

Solution 2: When closing the handbook it could remember the previous page it was on and reopen that.

 

These two solutions have slightly different use cases. I believe both would be worthwhile additions.

Similar things have been suggested here and here.

 

2.

Problem: It can be difficult to find out what variants are allowed for a crafting recipe. For example, I remember looking at the Mining Bag recipe and wondering what plates I can use for it. The only way to find this out, is by checking what plates are shown. Moving my mouse away from the recipe. Wait until plates change. Check what plates there are now. Repeat, until you are confident that only bronze plates and better are usable. This is annoying.

Solution: When right-clicking a variable item slot, it should show a small popup with all possible items. Hovering over the items in the popup would then give you the item name, etc. Left-clicking them would take you to their respective handbook page, as usual. Left-clicking outside the popup would close it.

Here is a mockup done by @Descruff on their forum post about this issue here. Their solution was slightly different from what I suggest. See their post here

 

3.

Problem: Sometimes there are so many uncraftable items of a type, that it can be difficult to find what you need. For example, before my first winter, I wanted to use the handbook to find some clothes I could make. So I tried to search for “Max Warmth” to find all clothing items that give warmth. This gives you a list of many clothing items, where 99% are uncraftable. This is not helpful. I quickly gave up and used the wikis Prepare for Winter Guide to find the fur clothes. Even now that I have played the game for over 200 hours, I still don't have a good idea of what craftable clothing items exist.

Solution: Filters

A way to filter the search to only show items with certain properties would be useful. I would suggest one filter for craftable items, one filter for tradable items and one filter for unobtainable items (i.e.: decorative items from story locations, that otherwise clutter search results). There may be other filter categories that could be beneficial, but I would suggest these three at minimum. (Some other filters could be “Edible”, “Creature”, etc.)

I would suggest these filters to be toggleable independently and have three states: On, Ban, Ignored. (Ignored would be the default value)

• If “Craftable” and “Tradable” are both on, it would show items that are obtainable through crafting AND trading.
• If “Craftable” is set to on and “Tradable” is set to ignored, it would show all items with a crafting recipe, ignoring if the item can be traded.
• But if “Craftable” is on and “Tradable” is set to Ban, then it would hide all items that can be traded, even if that item has a crafting recipe.

I believe this system sounds more complicated than it is. It should be relatively intuitive to use.
(Sidenote: I would also suggest the current “Guides” and “Blocks and Items” Tabs to use the same "On, Ban, Ignored" system, for consistency. The “Everything” Button would just reset all filter to Ignored.

 

4.

Problem: Comparing multiple items with each other can be very tedious. For example comparing pickaxe mining speeds currently requires searching for “pickaxe”, opening one items page, remembering the value you want to compare, then going back and opening the page for a different item, repeat until you have compared all relevant items. This doesn’t have to require this much clicking.

Solution: When hovering over an entry in the search list, it should show a brief item description, similar to when you are hovering over it in your inventory. Here is a quick mockup to show what I mean:

This would allow players to quickly get the basic stats of an item and allow for easier comparison of different items stats. For example, comparing how good various clothes are, or comparing different tool stats, or comparing how much different poultices heal, etc.

 

5.

Problem: Finding what stone types certain ore can spawn in is very hard to do in the handbook. There is a way to see something similar on the handbook page for the stone types:

But usually the player wants to know the inverse of this: In what stone types does a certain ore spawn? Not what ores can spawn in this stone.

Solution: On the page for the nuggets, show which stone types the corresponding ore can generate in. Additionally, it would be useful to also show the highest ore grade (Poor, Medium, Rich, Bountiful) that can occur per rock type. This information is already technically accessible via the handbook, it is just very tedious to gather it.

 

6.

Problem: Many features of the handbook are never explained.

Solution: Add a guide that gives tips on how to use the handbook. This should include quick descriptions for the bookmarks, filters and right-clicking to see all variants in recipes (should these be added), but even some features already in vanilla could be better explained, such as:

• Pressing “H”, while hovering over an item, opens the corresponding entry.
• Pressing “Shift+H” opens the entry for the block you are looking at.
• You can search for the descriptions and stats of items too (For example, searching “storage slots” gives all basket/backpack variants and all storage containers (chests, storage vessels, etc.)).

These features are very useful, and I only learned about these from other community members. It would be nice if the game actually explained all of these.