Cataclysm-dda: Allow sorting in recipe menu

[angoddu]

I'm honestly not sure how difficult this would be but would it be possible to allow for sorting in the recipe dialog? instead of sorting by difficulty could we have options to sort by name and maybe other things. It becomes rather difficult to find the recipe that I am looking for in the menu without searching by name.

[Leland]

instead of sorting by difficulty could we have options to sort by name

Agreed and in fact, I'd propose that alphabetical be the default. From a UX perspective that's almost always what people expect from menus for exactly the reason you outlined: how else could you find a specific item (without searching)?

[BevapDin]

I like the current sorting. It lets you find the important (and newly available) recipes that you want to do to improve your skills.

If you want to find a specific recipe, why go through the list at all? There is a search function exactly for that purpose.

[angoddu]

While the search is useful for finding specific recipes, it makes it hard to find items when just scanning the list. And I'm not suggesting to remove the difficulty sorting, I'm just saying to allow for alphabetic sorting as well.

[Leland]

I like the current sorting. It lets you find the important (and newly available) recipes that you want to do to improve your skills.

@BevapDin an approach I think you'd agree with is to make things as low friction as possible for new users, and then provide means of customization for power users such as yourself. E.g. pressing S to switch to difficulty sort.

Alphabetical is generally the way to go for lists as that's a standard convention across both operating systems and the web, and is thus immediately intuited. Sorting by difficulty only becomes relevant when one wants to start grinding to increase their skill level – "improving your skills" is not the first order of business for brand new players.

If you want to find a specific recipe, why go through the list at all? There is a search function exactly for that purpose.

Giving users more ways to find what they're looking for is always a good thing. Plus, and this is a UI issue rather an UX one, the search key isn't actually marked on the window.

Additionally, I didn't even know that the lists were sorted by difficulty at all until this issue. It's not marked anywhere. Turns out that's not even the full story – the recipes are sorted first by difficulty, then by reverse order of subcategory (e.g first Other, then Vehicle, etc), and then finally alphabetically within each subcategory. The end result is that menus appear entirely random (all of these are difficulty 0):

[angoddu]

At first I thought the menu was simply unsorted until I statred trying to grind skills. That's why I figured we should allow the user to sort how they want

[Night-Pryanik]

Closing as per lack of discussion.