The hot bar itself works well, but I find it pretty limited in terms of the number of slots. The way I play only leaves me with a single slot for building materials, etc, so I'm constantly having to dive into my inventory to swap blocks when I'm building.
What would be REALLYhandy is to have a second hot bar. In the mock-ups below, the main hot bar is in it's normal space, accessed by the 1-9 keys and a second hot bar has been inserted above it, below the XP bar. Items in this second hot bar can be selected by using SHIFT + [1-9], and the contents of the two hot bars can be swapped by a single key (maybe the ¬ key, to the left of the 1 key on most UK keyboards). In addition to giving players better access to their items, it also provides an additional 9 inventory slots overall.
Initial Layout:
Swapped:
If this is deemed to take up too much space on screen, or otherwise undesirable, an alternative would be to simply swap the hot bar line with the bottom line of the inventory when the toggle button is pressed. This may be preferable on other editions of Minecraft (PE, XBox, etc.) where players don't have a keyboard an may have limited screen real-estate.
The hot bar itself works well, but I find it pretty limited in terms of the number of slots. The way I play only leaves me with a single slot for building materials, etc, so I'm constantly having to dive into my inventory to swap blocks when I'm building.
What would be REALLY handy is to have a second hot bar. In the mock-ups below, the main hot bar is in it's normal space, accessed by the 1-9 keys and a second hot bar has been inserted above it, below the XP bar. Items in this second hot bar can be selected by using SHIFT + [1-9], and the contents of the two hot bars can be swapped by a single key (maybe the ¬ key, to the left of the 1 key on most UK keyboards). In addition to giving players better access to their items, it also provides an additional 9 inventory slots overall.
Initial Layout:
Swapped:
If this is deemed to take up too much space on screen, or otherwise undesirable, an alternative would be to simply swap the hot bar line with the bottom line of the inventory when the toggle button is pressed. This may be preferable on other editions of Minecraft (PE, XBox, etc.) where players don't have a keyboard an may have limited screen real-estate.