New Toolbar
Alright, let’s see what awesome new features the new realease brings! Aside from the new GUI elements, the first change you will probably notice when starting the updated game is the new toolbar.
As announced in previous Friday Facts, the toolbar slots are no longer part of the inventory. Instead, you can assign items to the various toolbar slots by left-clicking on an empty one. This works similar to how you used to be able to assign filters to the toolbar or e.g. the slots in a cargo train. This means the icons in the toolbar are no longer single stacks of items, but a reference to the type of item you have assigned to the slot. Which is also why the toolbar will now display the total amount of the respective item you have in your inventory.
If you don't have any more items left the slot will still reference the selected item. You can also use the "empty" slot to grab and place ghost-images of the selected item. Depending on your preference this can be toggled on and off in the option (IIRC it was toggled off by default).
Also note the adorable little ghost icon next to your mouse when placing ghost images! I love him!
Another small but really neat change is that grabbing something from your inventory won't "remove" the item from it. Holding it in your hand means it will still technically be in your inventory, as indicated by the tiny little hand icon. This is super useful, because it used to be, when your inventory is filled to the brim and you grab something, the now "empty" slot could get filled e.g. by logi bots bringing you stuff. And then you're stuck with a stack of some item in your "hand" that you can't let go of, because your inventory is full!
You might have also noticed the numbers next to the tool bar and yup, there are more than two in the vanilla game now! You can assign up to ten different toolbars for various tasks and circumstances. I can imagine late game players with dedicated toolbars for any and all occasions: one for base building, one for building mining outposts, a train network one, maybe one exclusively for exploration and fighting biters? There are so many possibilities!
You can still switch between the two active toolbars by pressing "X" (default keybindings). Do note, that shift plus a number is NO LONGER assigned to the second half of the active toolbar, i.e. pressing shift+1 for the sixth toolbar slot and so on. Instead, this is used to quickly change your currently active toolbar to another one. If you want e.g. the seventh item from your active toolbar you have to actually press the number 7. I'll admit I liked the way it was before, because your left hand didn't have to leave the WASD area of the keyboard. Now, if you wnat the tenth item in your toolbar, you have to get “all the way” over to the 0 key. Then again this is more straightforward and it's how most games do it. But if you play the game a lot it's going to take a loooong time to get used to, I know I still haven't!
The next part of the toolbar you will immediately notice is this new area here:
This area is used for some new features and more accessibility for already established ones. Let's start with the new and exciting ones first: cut, copy and paste! I used to always carry around a single, empty blueprint if I needed to copy something real quick. But no more! Now you can just use the copy feature to create a quick, temporary blueprint of something and plop it down somewhere else.
If you've already dismissed the blueprint with Q, just pressing paste will bring it up again. You can also shift + scroll through the last couple of blueprints in your “clipboard”. And if you've ever misplaced a blueprint and need to move it over to the right by one tile, you can use the new "cut" feature, which combines deconstruction and blueprinting by ordering your bots to tear something down and rebuilding it wherever you want.
Alternatively, you can use the new "undo" feature to, well, undo the last thing you ordered your bots to do. It keeps track of the last couple of things you did. This means if you keep clicking the undo button it will undo the second to last thing you did, then the one before that, and so on.
And if you're thinking that clicking the buttons down in the toolbar would be bothersome, don't worry! Because the keybindings for these new features are exactly what you're probably already used to anyways, if you’ve ever used a computer for basically anything other than playing Factorio (although, why would you?).
Other features in the new toolbar are buttons for toggling "alt-mode", which you already know from previous releases. New, however, is the option of toggling your personal roboports as well as your exoskeleton, when wearing power armor! The former is great if your just want to work on planning out some layout with ghost-entities (spooky!) without your eager little bots immediately going to work or when you want the bots from your base's network to take care of some task without your personal bots butting in. And the latter is great if you have a lot of exoskeleton legs so you keep overshooting your target and have trouble getting to the precise place you want to be.
You can also customise which of these buttons you want to show up on the toolbar by clicking the little icon in the upper right corner. I will probably be turning of the alt mode button (because I'm already used to actually pressing alt) as well as copy, cut, paste and undo (because the keybindings are already second nature to me and most gamers anyways).
There are also some other blueprint related buttons for features you are likely already familiar with as well as the brand new, vanilla, no-mods-necessary-yes-you-heard-that-right upgrade planner. But this post has already gotten quite long, so this’ll have to wait for its own, dedicated post.
I'll be seeing you tomorrow with some more 0.17 news!
[Edit: corrected the paragraph explaining the undo button]