Save/Load Favorites would be a nice time saver.

[Axe]

This is a suggested improvement. A small new addition. It is not an important thing at all, but something that would save me some time and eliminate some of the tedium dealing with the UI menus, especially early on. It is the idea of being able to save and load the Favorites configuration you have in the menus. Lemme explain...

 

 

So currently whenever I start a new game, I always end up spending about 2 or 3 minutes just standing there going through all my menus to set up which recipes I want to be Favorited so that I can use the little Favorite Star filter to shrink the lists down to only what I am going to need at the start. For instance, I do not expect to be constructing any mailboxes any time soon, so I turn the Favorite star off for those. It works good to limit the lists to what I want. It is easy to do. It exists already. It saves time. It simplifies the UI. It allows for custom configuration of the menus!! Very nice feature to have. The only problem with it, is that I gotta set it all up every time I play. When I change what I am doing during the game, I have to set it all up to get a different customization for the activities I am currently engaged in...i.e. stock piling, raiding, scavenging, base construction, etc. And because of the time it takes to go through all the menus, I tend not to do it except at the outset. So I feel like the feature is underutilized...at least by me. And it's because it is too tedious to set up. Once it is set up, the thing works really really good at simplifying and particularly customizing interactions with the UI. But for me, in the end, it is a little too time consuming and tedious to set up all the time. I want to use it more, but I suppose I just don't have the patience for it. Or maybe its just because the game rarely allows you three consecutive minutes of safe uninterrupted time to dink around with the UI.

 

What I propose is to add a save/load feature to the menu favorites which will permit me to set up several various configurations of my favorite recipe lists that I can easily activate depending on what activities I am going to engage in at the time. So when I start up a new game, I can simply click a load button to get all my favorites going in an instant rather than spending those initial few minutes running through my routine of setting up all my starting favorites. Something that can be a little bit unnerving to accomplish since when you start you have no cover or safe place and yet you must spend like a couple of minutes with the menu always up dinkin around with it wondering when that first zombie is gonna sneak up and smoke you while you are trying to get it done. Also in multiplayer, sometimes I find that I gotta surf around for a good server to play on. Often you can't tell until you actually join and play for a few minutes. So it can be a bit annoying to have to set up all the exact same favorites like 5 or 6 times in a row because I do a lot of server hopping to find a home. Anytime you can eliminate something repetitive it's a good thing. I think this proposal accomplishes that...albeit for an admittedly very insignificant aspect of gameplay. But also, anytime you can simplify even a piece of the UI, its also a good thing and for the entire UI not just that piece of it. So I'm saying this is good, yeah?

 

I'm not talking about all the menus on all the workstations, only the main ones for the player crafting recipes. If some or all the workstation menu favorites could also be saved along with the player menu favorites then great, but I don't feel that is such an important aspect of what I propose. The player menus would be sufficient enough for my purposes. And the workstations mostly have more limited menus to sift through anyway. Still, both would be better if possible and it doesn't complicate the process.

 

 

What I suggest is that players be permitted to click a save button somewhere (probably on the menu itself near where the Favorite Star is currently located), enter a configuration name, and have all current favorites saved under that name. Then have a load button where players could retrieve and activate previous Favorite configs. Or, alternately, have one button on the menu that spawns a dialog box which has both load and save buttons in it...and probably a delete button too so you can get rid of them.

 

This isn't a problem or anything. I'm not complaining about this thing that's missing. I just think it would help and be a real time saver if something like this could be integrated with the Favorite Star system that is already in place. And it seems like a relatively simple thing to do as features go. IMHO it would allow me to best leverage the Favorites system already in place, which I currently don't take full advantage of, but want to use more. By adding this all that is accomplished is to make it easier and faster, even trivial, to do that which you can already do when you have enough motivation to do it...and you get to name stuff.