I am thinking about potential Forum Rules for Mechaenetia Mods

[Gregorius (Gregorius Techneticies)]

@Max

I think you’re fighting the hypothetical. Suppose this magic system requires the use of book items for reasons - the character can’t memorize the spells, or maybe the magic only works when read from a page. As soon as you put down the book you can’t cast spells any more, and the actions only work when holding a speedbook.

“Putting Book at Page X and casting Spell” is something you could bind with the Keybind System easily, as I already said here:

@Gregorius

And in case of Wizard Spells, if you attempt using such a Spell the Player Animation could automatically grab the Book out of their Bag, hold the Book and start the Spells Idle/Casting Animation.

@Max

Here’s another example. A mod adds a new multitool, a swiss army knife. This mod adds a new action for each of the multitool’s “modes”, that is, for each tool that swivels out of the knife. Do you expect the swiss army knife to be useless until the player goes into the keybinding menu and sets up key bindings for each function of the swiss army knife?

You seem to misunderstand massively how Keybindings work. There is an Action Menu Default Keybind, which would have the “switch to X Tool” option inside that Menu. You could just hit the Action Key and then select via a Menu or a Radial Menu what kind of Action you want to do with the Knife. That is literally a 2 Key Action if you use the radial Version of the action Menu (3 if it has Sub-Menus). GTA5 does this already and it is very easy and comfortable to use, even with a Controller.

@Max

I see you use the context menu for swiss army knives on the ideas page. But let’s say this modpack is all about using the swiss army knife to solve puzzles and wants to map each tool to a keybind - the context menu would be very tedious since it is used so often.

Then let the User decide if hitting two Keys in a row is tedious or not by letting them assign their own Hotkeys themselves (which in on itself is just hitting 3 Keys to configure it quickly, Open Action Menu, point to Action, do the Right instead of Leftclick, Hit the Key you want to assign it to, done). This is not the job of Modpack Makers at all.

Note: I will not make it Rightclick in this case, but it will be one of the Default bindings that is used to quick assign other Keys form the Action Menu.