Tool broken status icon not helpful for me

Its not helpful for me because I'm often carrying around broken tools that I'm not interested in repairing.

Unfortunately, the reason for this is because of the way you guys have set up the tool equip system. As players, we're loaded with every tool at the start of the game whether we're going to use them or not, and because they weigh so little and we can carry so much weight -- and we can even hide them -- we're incentivized to not pay attention to what we carry and keep them on our person. This means I currently have every tool in my inventory, and most all of them are broken, I guess they broke after so many deaths or whatever else wore down the tools, though I didn't use them. My current way of playing is that I replace them when I need them, otherwise they're just left broken in my backpack.

In any case, whatever the reason for that, I'm now going to constantly have the red broken tool icon on my screen unless I dump all the broken tools or decide to repair them all.

In the mean time, I still can't tell whether the tools I care about are broken. If I have a broken sickle, I still get the Harvest sickle icon and tooltip whenever I move my mouse over a potentially harvestable resource. If my Misc text filter is off in my chat window, I still can't tell exactly what's happening when I attempt to harvest and I can't.

So I guess I can dump them all as a way to help myself out, but I don't feel that motivated to do so, and I don't think most players will either. Especially since we need to unequip and equip another and so forth through another window besides the inventory screen etc. creating hoops we have to go through to do so.

 

If you don't use them, just get rid of them, then you will have the broken tool icon show up when something you do use it broken.

 

Yea, I mentioned I can do that but I think that's missing the point. Its a lot of trouble to do that just to get your broken tool icon to work in the way it should, so I think most players won't and its not good UI, especially for new players who don't know how everything works. But I doubt I'll go through the trouble of doing that myself, either.

I'm going to do a post in the general forums how I think the tool equip system could be made better.

 

Here we go -- A better tool equip system. Filed in the general forums under Crafting.

 

I find this only marginally useful. Typically, I figure out my tool is broken when I go to mine the next node, and it doesn't work. I lose a few seconds wondering why mining isn't happening and then check my tool.
Now, I keep my repair kits and things in a bag since having them in my main inventory it was a huge hassle to get repair kit and broken tool into a position where one could be dragged onto the other esp. when I have an inventory full of stuff I've been picking up. I've actually named my "bag" bla bla bla "True" so I can type the word "true" in the filter and have it bring up my bag of repair kits AND all the true bronze tools ive got equipped for easy drag and drop which limits the messing about with the inventory UI to some extent.

The 'broken tool' icon will, at least, give me early warning when my pick's about to break, which is helpful I guess, though it does mean I have to keep all my tools in decent repair if I don't want to be annoyed by it, or switch back to prosperity.