Hey y'all. I've got hooked to this wonderful game and as is typical of many people, would like to now offer some unsolicited suggestions regarding UI/QOL stuff.
Inventory management
A relatively simple restock feature with sliders and a single button. First, three main sliders to denominate the main resources (cargo, crew & fuel) which could be brought over by hovering on the respective resource in lower left panel. Here, a simple percentage-based slider to essentially say "How much of available space should be used for the restock". And then a slider when you hover over specific items; supply, volatiles (for neutrino, in case someone out there uses it), fuel, crew etc, which could similarily work in percentages. Then you press "restock" button and it will try to fill the items in from the selected source (selected market or inventory)
If it was simple enough, this feature could exist for every possible item. But you'd probably want then two modes; relative and absolute. First an absolute one where you simply designate "200 units of X" and then relative which works on percentages and is based on currently available space. However, this might be way too much work if for whatever reason you'd have to go through every item manually to implement this.
In similar spirit, a simple "Dump" feature. It can work on previous mechanic by simply dumping all currently available and accepted items into currently selected inventory or a market that aren't designated by the restock feature, including any possible excess. It's probably worthwhile to consider that some items might be reserved by quests and thus perhaps either quests should automatically add a "restock" amount until they're completed.
Lastly, in this category, I'd really love to click on "sort" once more to turn on autosort mode. I'm honestly pretty surprised that autosorting doesn't yet exist!
Ship & fleet management
Current UI for this is unfortunately not great - it appears as something that is more functional when assuming that player only runs a single fleet or maybe even two/three with fairly small differences in makeup. Having this list of ships that you can scroll that fits only 15 ships and only visual information you get without any additional prompt is the outlook of the guns (which can sometimes be enough) is not great when you might have in total 40-50 ships. And, to be honest, it only gets worse when you add in mods that can add so many more ship types.
So, an overhaul of this system I think would really be beneficial. I'll describe what I think could work, but there are probably more simple solutions because what I propose is not unfortunately a simple solution.
First of all, "Fleet Composition Template" would be a really useful concept to have. Basically, all your fleet configurations would be stored as configurations. These configurations shouldn't necessarily be rigid entities but rather fluid; so whenever you make any changes (subtractions and additions), you simply update your current fleet configuration and whenever you switch into another fleet configuration, your current configuration gets stored in the inventory and you can bring up the configuration. The UI doesn't have to be actually that complicated; a simple list of your fleet configurations that, when hovered over, display the ships names and classes. And when you click on them, it brings up a screen similar to current fleet menu with the extra button of "select this configuration" to select it as your current fleet.
Access to configs ingame
I could probably list a ton of balance complaints and various other stuff and hope that these would change. But, handily, most of the things I wanted to change (such as bar events being more frequent) could easily be changed in the config file. While at this point I find it commonsense that often various things can be changed directly from some configuration files, many people probably don't. And thus, I reckon to reconsider the rationale behind hiding these settings (which provide actually good bit of information too on various things) and making them more accessible instead. Considering that Starsector can be quite frustrating at times through various means (my breaking point was going through bar events for an hour and not finding a mod-related bar event).
Not quite everything even needs to be available there - just some more crucial things like various intervals, perhaps aggregated multipliers too. Like for instance, for contact missions, "low, normal, high", all of which affect not only their frequency, but even the maximum amount. Factorio & Rimworld come off as great examples of successful games where a player can change a lot of the parameters of the gameplay directly from ingame menus.
Last and perhaps least: autofitting
While I think that the current autofitting system is great, I would really love to have a wider range of designs - ideally even one that works outside of the save game. Honestly there's not much else to say about it, I'd just love it, but current system is very useable and even designing over and over again the same designs isn't really that boring for me (yet at least).
Nevertheless, thank you for developing this brilliant game!
