Loadout System Improvements

[truemogician]

CE's loadout system is great, but managing loadouts across many pawns and roles still gets fiddly. Building on the composable + ad-hoc loadouts added in #3927, I'd like to make it even better with some ideas that addresses the pains I encountered in my gameplay. They're independent and will land as separate PRs.

1. Player-defined custom groups

The generic slots today are a fixed set — meals, raw food, drugs, medicine, and per-gun ammo. The idea is to let players define their own reusable generics: e.g. a "bullup rifle or battle rifle" group, or "any melee weapon" (the open request in #3876). Groups should be able to contain concrete items as well as nest the built-in generics or other custom groups, so they compose.

2. Modular composition

#3927 added single-parent composition — effectively a tree. For small and concentrated colonies, a tree structure suffices. But when it comes to large colonies with 30 or even more pawns, defining different loadouts for each pawn could be a pain. Compositable Loadouts addresses this with a tag-based system, and I'm considering bringing that structure to CE by extending the single-parent tree schema to a multi-parent directed graph structure. This will allow players to assign loadouts to pawns based on their traits. For example, you can create one ranged loadout for pawns good at shooting, one melee loadout for those good at close combat, and enable both for pawns good at both, instead of having to create another loadout combining both.

Things worth settling:

• Parent selection becomes multi-select rather than a single choice.
• Cycle prevention — the same idea already used for single parents (offer only parents that wouldn't form a loop).
• Diamond inheritance: if A inherits from B and C, and both inherit from D, should D be applied once or twice? I'd lean toward a toggle, defaulting to once.

Note

I explored the feasibility of making Compositable Loadouts compatible with CE, but it turned out to be much more effort than adding that idea to CE's own loadout system.

3. Friendlier item picker

The right-hand selection panel is a flat, text-only list. Two changes would make it easier to scan:

• Show each item's icon before its name.
• Group entries by category with collapsible headers, instead of one long alphabetical list.

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Are any of these directions you'd be interested in seeing in CE? Happy to scope and iterate based on feedback, and to pursue them as separate changes. I have plans to implement all of them, and I prefer shipping them in CE directly rather than going through the verbose and error-prone alternative of making them a separate mod using Harmony.

[truemogician]

Update: player-defined custom groups is now implemented and up as a draft PR #4626.

In short:

• A new Custom Groups tab in Manage Loadouts lets you build a named, reusable group from specific items and/or generics, including nesting other custom groups (with cycle detection). It then drops into a loadout slot exactly like a built-in generic, so rearm/drop behaviour is unchanged.
• Groups are stored per-save, the create/edit/delete is multiplayer-synced, and you can export/import groups to standalone files.