Placing glass shards is tedious and repetitive

[remd]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.

I want to use glass shards as a highly available source of materials for trapping large areas. When I activate glass shards from the inventory and place them the hotkey for the glass shards stack changes. I have to check for what the new hotkey is, or key up/down to the glass shards directly. Wielding the glass shards and using the "Use wielded item" hotkey doesn't help here because you can only wield one glass shard at a time, since it can be used as a weapon. Assigning a hotkey to the glass shards doesn't stick after activating them and reducing the stack by one again.

Because glass shards are destroyed when stepped on this process has to be repeated to fix any spots where the enemy pathed.

Solution you would like.

I think it would be reasonable to say that glass shards are not able to be used as a weapon and change them to be stacked like pebbles or gravel. There's already a "glass shiv" weapon and recipe that involves wrapping some cotton or duct tape around it to make it more suitable as a weapon. I'm suggesting making this step required to use glass shards as melee weapons.

Describe alternatives you have considered.

Maybe glass shards could be used to create a trap similar to, but less effective than, nailboard traps? The trap could survive being stepped on, reducing the need to change the current handling of glass shards.

Additional context

No response

[Brambor]

change them to be stacked like pebbles or gravel.

This will not happen. We are moving away from charges and all their problems.

Assigning a hotkey to the glass shards doesn't stick

+1 to this. This should be fixed.

[remd]

change them to be stacked like pebbles or gravel.

This will not happen. We are moving away from charges and all their problems.

Cool. Makes sense.

Assigning a hotkey to the glass shards doesn't stick

+1 to this. This should be fixed.

I can try poking at a solution. No guarantees, but I can try. 🙂 If you have a hunch about where in the code this behavior stems from that would help me greatly.

[Brambor]

I think these hotkeys are called invlets.

[dominic-dimico]

There's a recipe for something called loose glass caltrops; but it has the additional requirement of superglue. It does damage in spite of footwear!

It seems like anyone without footwear steps on glass shards, they should take 1HP and bleed mildly for it. But then account for realistic countermeasures. Most zombies have footwear to protect against it, and most animals have innate countermeasures (such as hooves, exoskeletons, or wings). Then is it worth it to implement it if everything on our natural Earth is already more or less protected from it? Perhaps it could be faction-specific, affecting only Nether creatures, who I assume do not wear shoes.

If you wanted to allow for just glass shards to do damage, but don't want it to be OP, then an appropriate nerf for the player could be the requirement to wear heavy-duty gloves when handling broken glass, or else suffer bleeding wounds on their hands when they pick them up, wield them, or throw them.

[Brambor]

Maybe make it a construction recipe? You can then make a rectangular zone and auto construct in it. Would that solve the issue?

[remd]

Maybe make it a construction recipe? You can then make a rectangular zone and auto construct in it. Would that solve the issue?

That would definitely work. I'll be honest I started down the path of trying to understand invlets and became quickly overwhelmed with how many places in the code use that concept/term. 😅

[kevingranade]

I do think doing something that lets you leverage zones is a lot better than trying to micro-optimize a huge number of keypresses.

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