There might be couple of other similar menu unnecessities. Like the soldering iron. Every time you activate it, you have to choose between ‘repair’ or ‘cauterize’. Not once, in all my time of playing, have I cauterized a wound with it. Repaired an item? A thousand times, and yet we have to suffer the extra menu step.
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Honestly, I couldn’t be much less interested about the wound cauterization function. In fact, it’s not very well known that it’s a bad idea to close wounds by burning - it sure stops bleeding but infection risk actually goes up. Ask any nurse, or look it up on wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cauterization Also, yet we can’t heat up knives to perform cauterization, which occurred to me to try on like day 1 and hour 2 of playing the game. The soldering iron cauterization just seems so obscure in the grand scheme.
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The worst thing is I’m not sure what to suggest. I do like the option existing, even if I dislike it and never use it, and/but it gets in the way.
Maybe we need a special menu for these rarely used functions. On the other hand, we already have “%”. But then we (or new players) might need to be informed of all the special functions of a said item. List them in the item’s description?
Another example: the tailor’s kit. I’d love to use it as my go-to textile tool, but I’ll use the reinforcement functions only a few times in a game, while clothing repairs can happen hundredfold. But carrying around just the sewing kit doesn’t seem like a perfect solution. So, what if we could instantly craft the tailor’s kit into a sewing kit duplicate called like “tailor’s kit (sewing)”, and upon its activation it functions like the sewing kit, but it’d yet retain the potential to modify clothing, just after crafting it back to the original tailor’s kit. So we’d have like:
Tailor’s kit: Upon activation prompts for sewing or clothes modification (as it behaves now)
Tailor’s kit (modification): Upon activation presents the modification choices. Can’t sew in this mode.
Tailor’s kit (sewing): Upon activation functions exactly like the sewing kit (the menu-be-gone mode)
On the other hand, maybe crafting isn’t necessary, and the tailor’s kit could be harnessed with the power of firearm fire selector. Just like you can cycle between single-fire and burst-fire modes on many guns, you should be able to cycle between sewing and modification modes with the tailor’s kit. Similarily, with the soldering iron, you could cycle between “repair” and “cauterization” modes. (I just had to underline this)
I don’t know what this light shenanigans is about. I haven’t played in at least a month. But it sounds like the interface is taking another turn for the worse. The vehicle controls menu is objectively speaking pretty messy, even if we’ve gotten used to it, grown numb to it over the course of months and years.
Please, for the love of gods, start paying attention to UI usability. Push aside the rarely-used stuff, out of the way, and let the common functions get highlighted first, and sit closer to the top. At some point detail destroys too much usability, and we’ve tapdanced in that minefield a few times now.
