Auto-hide contextual interaction dots depending on equipped items

[flint dew]

Hey devs, great work so far, youve made an exceptional game, just a quick thing that's been bugging me. Currently the world is beautiful, however it's littered with hundreds of interaction dots. The preview branch has also added these to every stone wall within villages, which is becoming visually jarring. It can also cause issues when foraging yourself, trying to pinpoint between a broken stick for example, when it's close to a tree stump.

What I propose is to make the dots hidden, unless the correct equipment is already in your hand.

For example trees would have no dot unless you are holding an axe, and the stone walls would only have a dot when holding a pickaxe.

This may also minorly improve performance, as it would mean a lot less interaction dots have to be rendered in some circumstances.

The only real drawback to this approach would be in readability for new players, as it would perhaps make finding what tool is used for what activity involve a little more guesswork (though nearly all of these situations are simple logic, perhaps just a small addition to the tool descriptions would suffice)

Alternatively, also have this as an option you can toggle in the settings, with it off by default (completely eliminating the new player information issue)

[agile girder]

i wouldn't do that. making dots disappear when you don't have the correct tool is ok if you know which is the correct tool, otherwise, for a noob, it is not that obvious

i want to improve this by adding :

make it part of the tutorial, so new ppl know what is needed and veterans are not annoyed. Also make it a toggle option if possible so whoever need it after the tutorial is done, can still have it

another solution is to make something similar to the construct/deconstruct dots which has multiple entry if multiple action are available to the same/similar/nearby node

[flint dew]

I mean there's not a lot of tools... Axe for wood stuff, Pick for Stone stuff, shovel for diggy stuff, hoe for gardening. It's not really complicated.

Just a toggle option in the settings would suffice, as long as the dots were on by default.

[agile girder]

yeah but ... the multi action menu, like the construction one, is really cool! 😎

[weak zinc]

I think they should just be greyed out, so they're slightly less visible

[agile girder]

the problem persist if you can still select them. when you have multiple dots around you, sometimes, it's hard to select the dot you really want to click

for example yesterday i had to take a piece of wood before musk because there was no way to select the musk directly

[toxic yew]

The other problem is that a player may not know that the item can even be acted upon if the dots are invisible. I don't want to have to go to every static in the game and equip every tool just to see if I can de-construct something when trying to plan out my village.

[spark rover]

It should be a "key" that toggles it on/off not dependent on the equipment worn