Some quality of life user interface suggestions

[Thihi]

I'm a new player, just bought the game last week. It's pretty cool, but I have a few user experience nags. These two suggestions if implemented would make a big difference to my play style.

1) Please implement hotkeys for mouse selecting different kinds of things. At the moment the select box prioritizes selecting my own colonists first, animals second, and items last. I wish I could force these categories, for instance pressing ctrl while drawing the select box would always select animals, or pressing alt while drawing the box would always select items. This would make mass-unforbidding stuff and mass hunting designations easier, since a lone ibex in an area full of swag or a lone colonist in an area full of animals wouldn't keep messing up my selections by making the box select only the wrong types of things.

2) When mass selecting multiple types of things, show a list of the things instead of just (various), and make the items on that list clickable to unselect things. When I draw a big select box so I can mark multiple creatures to be hunted, the box which usually shows me the entity type I've selected, just gives me a vague (various) instead of a list. So I need to check each selection individually by hovering over it with the mouse, to make sure I'm not targeting a creature type I would rather not hunt, and then shift-click on them. I would love to have a proper scrollable list with checkboxes to unselect them. A list like that would also be somewhat useful for items, since I don't want to unforbid shoddy or poor pants, but would like to unforbid that superior kevlar helmet a psychotic colonist dropped earlier.

I tried to search the suggestion forum and didn't find these. Also, like I said, I am new to the game, so these actually might be implemented in a way, that I haven't found yet. If so, I'm sorry.

These would be really appreciated.

[night777]

For #2 you may like to search for animals like this:

Drag the selection box over large areas of land to find animals, if necessary.

Double click the animal and all of the animals of that type on your screen will be selected.

[Thihi]

For #2 you may like to search for animals like this:

Drag the selection box over large areas of land to find animals, if necessary.

Double click the animal and all of the animals of that type on your screen will be selected.

Thanks a lot, this will come in handy.

[DariusWolfe]

Caveat to night777's advice: If your drag ends up including even a single colonist, you will select the colonist(s) instead.

For mass hunting/unforbidding of a particular type, the double-click is the best option; Find a single instance, zoom out to max, then double-click the item/animal. Any other animals/items of the same type on the screen will be selected as well. It seems a little glitchy to do with chunks of stone, but otherwise, it's a very easy select by type en-masse.

[SpaceDorf]

Sorry nobody said this before. These are incredible suggestions
Both would massivly improve the usability of the UI, and both should be pretty easy to implement in the existing game, without having to reprogramm ( much ).

Awesome first suggestion, well written and thought of. ( I wish I had done it myself )

[Thihi]

Awesome first suggestion, well written and thought of. ( I wish I had done it myself )

Thank you. From your nick I suspect you came to Rimworld from the same direction as I. Because of my Dwarf Fortress roots I almost shied away from suggesting UI related stuff, since this is already heads and shoulders more playable than Dwarf Fortress (alhough it does have massively more to do, and I do prefer it).

Anyway, I have another suggestion, which would make playing faster for me:

3) Make the work-screen sort from best to worst, when you click on the name of a column. After the number of pawns gets too big, I no longer remember which one is best at what, and although the background coloring does help, it would just be faster to use, if I could sort the pawns from best to worst by clicking on the name of a task. Also, even though skills such as shooting, melee, and social are not "work" as such, it would be useful to be able to sort pawns by those skills too.

[SpaceDorf]

Good Suggestion, this will be implemented for sure.

If you don't want to wait, may I suggest Fluffy's Tab Mods to you. 
The WorkTab Mod implements this feature.
The Mods are to Rimworld what Therapist and  dfhack are to DF ( less hacking, but Rimworld has a DevMode )

Also the Community Core Mod ( CCL )
And DESurgery and Advanced Prosthetics and Organ Engineering ( it has PEGLEGS AND EYEPATCHES .. YARRR ! )

Rimworld is a lot more Modfriendly than DF ( and a lot less feature complete .. )

Also after a while I noticed my main suggestions to Rimworld are UI features that DF allready has.
and DF's UI has a lot more going for it, than most people give it credit for.
I will not argue that the UI looks like shit. But it is one of the fastest and most precise UI's I know. ( well except for the storage pages )

QoL ->

Fluffy :
https://ludeon.com/forums/index.php?topic=16120.0
CCL :
https://ludeon.com/forums/index.php?topic=16599.0
DESurgery:
https://ludeon.com/forums/index.php?topic=22120.0
APOE:
https://ludeon.com/forums/index.php?topic=10571.0
And This .. you will know why
https://ludeon.com/forums/index.php?topic=14711.0

---- EDIT -----

I forgot :
May Armok be with you

and if you still don't feel at home
Supply Chain, you will also know why ^^  :
https://ludeon.com/forums/index.php?topic=24473.msg251518#msg251518

[Thihi]

DF's UI has a lot more going for it, than most people give it credit for.
I will not argue that the UI looks like shit. But it is one of the fastest and most precise UI's I know. ( well except for the storage pages )

This is true. It is very precise and it gives you powerful tools to do things with, but those tools are often buried in hideous and cryptic (in the sense that the logic in each can be very different from each other) submenus which you basically have to get into muscle memory before it becomes easy to use. Stuff like sometimes down and up being the arrow down and arrow up keys, sometimes they are plus and minus, etc. The UI in it is a huge beast of a ride which lets you do anything ... after you learn it by heart.

Thank you a lot for the mod suggestions. I will start checking these out.

[SpaceDorf]

Have Fun
In all definitions.

[carbon]

At the very least, if the game has a group of (Various) selected, it should tell you the number of selected entities.

(Various) x18

Raiders always have different names, so the game has never allowed a quick head count by simply selecting the raid. You have to do it by hand.

[Wex]

For #2 you may like to search for animals like this:

Drag the selection box over large areas of land to find animals, if necessary.

Double click the animal and all of the animals of that type on your screen will be selected.

This won't work for selecting all roosters, you'll select the hens and the chicks also.