Slots
A slot is a physical location on your character's body which an item can be stored in, or attached to, for quick access via hotkey.
For example, the right hip can be a slot:
- If you have a belt on, you can place a sheath on your left hip with Q.
- If you have a sheath on your left hip, you can put a sword in it.
The goal is for slots to replace menus to access most of your inventory. Anything not inside a bag should be immediately accessible with a slot button. Slot buttons can overlap with other buttons because they only function as slot buttons when a grab button is held.
Keybindings
Ideally, the location of each slot button should correspond roughly to the slot's physical location. A button on the left should be used for a slot on the left side of the body, and we should attempt to group the buttons so that adjacent slots have adjacent buttons.
| M+KB | Controller | Slot |
|---|---|---|
| Q | X | Left belt. |
| E | Q | Right belt. |
| F | Y | Front belt. |
| X | A | Back belt. |
| Tab | Select | Left shoulder. |
| R | Start | Right shoulder. |
| 2 | ⇐ | Left pocket. |
| 3 | ⇒ | Right pocket. |
| 1 | ⇓⇐ | Back-left pocket. |
| 4 | ⇓⇒ | Back-right pocket. |
| T | ⇑ | Head. |
| ⇓ | Face? | |
| ` | ⇑⇐ | Left arm. |
| 5 | ⇑⇒ | Right arm. |
| Glasses? | ||
| Ears? | ||
| Z | ⇓⇓⇐ | Left foot. |
| C | ⇓⇓⇒ | Right foot. |
The controller doesn't have quite enough buttons to give every slot its own button. To get around this, we can assign certain slots to combinations of buttons; because slot inputs require the grab button be held to initiate them, and we don't execute any action until the grab button is released, no ambiguity is possible. (For instance, while holding the grab button, the face slot can be ⇑ and glasses can be ⇑⇑; only when we release the grab button does it actually perform the action.) This is also helpful for controllers that only support four D-pad directions; the diagonals can just be pressing two directions in either order. (That is, "down-left" can be "down and then left.")
In the map proposed above, we rely on button combinations for directly adjacent slots, which we imagine as lying on a navigable grid navigated by the D-pad.
Layers
Pressing a slot button once selects the outer layer of that slot. Pressing it again -- without releasing the grab button -- selects one layer deeper. For example, press Q once to draw your sword from your sheath, twice to remove the sheath itself, and three times to remove your belt.
Multi-slot items
Many items, generally clothing and armor, occupy multiple slots. A belt occupies all four belt slot buttons. It can be equipped and removed using any of these buttons.
Slot restrictions
Many items may only occupy specific slots. When such an item is held in your hand and you hold the corresponding grab button, all buttons not corresponding to those slots are unavailable.
GUI
The screen normally gives no indicator for what is in your slots or your hands. However, holding down any grab button brings up a "map" of your slots with a few properties:
- This map includes icons for each button and approximately corresponds to the keyboard/controller; the relative position of each slot should be based on the relative position of each button.
- When holding an item, any slot it may be placed in is white, and all others are grayed out; if your hand is empty, slots with items in them are white, and empty ones are greyed out.
- Each layer of item in a slot is visible in this interface. Layers for items that occupy multiple slots contiguously span all relevant slots.
Bags
Your entire inventory won't necessarily fit into the slot system, which is fine. The slot system is intended not to replace "standard inventory management" altogether but to make a significant subset of your inventory more manageable, that being the subset of items that you need readily accessible. If you don't need a given item readily accessible, you can put it in a bag.
A bag still occupies a slot, but it can hold multiple items. For example, a backpack is a bag which is slung over your shoulder(s).1 To access a bag's internal contents, you must grab the bag into one of your hands; when you are holding the bag, the grab button for the hand opposite the hand holding the bag is used to grab/place into it, and the hand holding the bag functions normally: if you simply press the associated grab button, you will drop the bag, and if you hold it and press a slot, you will place the bag in that slot.
Alternative controls
The goal of the slot system is to obviate the need for menus in inventory management, for the most part, and thereby simplify most aspects of inventory management. Following the philosophy laid out in the Controls page, it will likely be hard to learn but ultimately speed up gameplay for experienced users on account of its consistency and unambiguity.
If this is not the case, we can also try more of a middle ground with conventional systems. For instance, we could turn all slot buttons into hotkeys untethered to any physical locations on the body. Players would still place items onto these hotkeys to equip them, but it wouldn't matter which button they pressed. This would make layering and multi-slot buttons a mess, so clothing and armor would just have to be done through a normal inventory menu. Sheaths and holsters would be handled like clothing; players would have to equip them from a menu and be forbidden from hotkeying a weapon without having equipped a sheath to put it in.
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In the real world, carrying a backpack on one shoulder can lead to strain, pain, and posture problems. It is always recommended to use both shoulder straps. ↩