Ability: Hotbar

Ability Hotbar

Ability Hotbar gives the Tensura RPG pack one bar for every combat ability: Tensura skills and magic, Iron's Spells spells and battlewills, all assigned, selected and triggered from a single configurable hotbar that sits alongside the vanilla one, never on top of it.

What it does

(Design phase, no release yet. The open issues on this repository hold the full plan, research tables and open design decisions.)

• Nine-slot ability bar - vanilla-style slots with dynamic ability icons, cooldown and resource overlays, and both direct-slot and selected-slot activation on configurable keys.
• Management menu - search, filter, preview and reassign abilities; your layout persists per player.
• Tensura skills and magic, ISS spells and battlewills share the bar through one contract. If an ability or its provider goes missing, the bar handles it.
• Optional spellbook hotbar - a separate, independently toggleable bar for the spells of your equipped Iron's Spells spellbook (with ISS installed).
• The vanilla controls are untouched: the modifier keys only claim the wheel and the number keys while they are held.

Controls

All keys are rebindable in vanilla's Controls screen under the Ability Hotbar category. Defaults (from SPIKE-hot-3):

Selecting a slot never fires an ability. Activating uses the selected slot and leaves the selection where it was. Empty, restricted, unaffordable or on-cooldown slots fail with no resource consumed.

Our controls never steal vanilla or chat input: with any screen open (chat, inventory, a mod GUI) nothing is intercepted, and without the modifier held the plain wheel and 1-9 behave exactly as if the mod were absent. The in-game verification matrix is in docs/input-gating-matrix.md.

Configuration

The bar's look is a CLIENT config (display.*) - display-only, never policy; it is never synced to the server and cannot widen server rules. It opens in NeoForge's own configuration screen (config UI mods are bypassed for this mod so their editor cannot reset values you did not edit). The slot count is two-tier: the client's preference is clamped to the server's ceiling (see Persistence).

Persistence

Your assignments are per-player data, stored in a server-authoritative attachment and kept on death. The format is versioned so a pack update never destroys a bar. Stored NBT keys:

Upgrade and preservation rules:

• A compound written before schema_version / slot_count existed upgrades forward with its values retained; the slot count is inferred from the highest slot_N key present.
• A stored id whose provider is missing is preserved raw, so the slot renders as diagnosed-inert rather than being dropped (REQ-HOT-21).
• An id that cannot even be parsed is logged and left empty, never crashing the load (REQ-HOT-15).

Dependencies

Credits

• Built on NeoForge.

License

GNU Lesser General Public License v2.1 - see LICENSE. Copyright (c) 2026 Bitwise Madness.

AI disclosure

Parts of this project were written with the assistance of AI coding tools. AI-assisted code, data and documentation ship only after human review by the maintainers.