A quick guide to fancy HUD’s
by Fennek F’ox 🦊
(Disclaimer: I do not claim to have come up with all of this on my own, these are just things i picked up over the years. There are a lot of tutorials how to make fancy HUD’s, this is just my version of it.)
Are you tired of having too few hotbars? Tired of your screen being cluttered with job icons, markers, macros and other stuff you don’t need all the time, but removing them would mean you have to look for it every time? Then boy have i the solution for you!
In this guide i will explain different ways to make a clean, more accessible HUD. How exactly you implement it will be up to you, but here you will find the tools you need to make your life easier.
Where to start:
First of all, you need at least two to three shared hotbars. Generally, the move hotbars you have, the better, but you are not forced to use many of them.
Go into your Settings System > HUD Layout and get the numeral index of the hotbars you would like to use. It doesn’t matter which ones you use, but for all examples in this guide I will be using the hotbars number 7, 8 and 9
Make up your mind how you want to use each hotbar, that’ll make configuring it all a lot easier later on.
Hiding Hotbars:
A good place to start is probably a hidden main menu. We want Hotbar 7 to be one that is always displayed, and that holds the “Menu button”. Hotbar 8 is going to be the main menu itself, and hotbar 9 will be the submenu.
Let’s make ourselves a macro to realise this idea! We will use the /hotbar display text command to display and hide the menu and submenu hotbar as we want.
We want the menu button to “toggle” the visibility of the main menu, and to disable the visibility of the submenu. That way, when we hide the main menu, the sub menu will also collapse. This works as follows:
| Main Menu: /hotbar display 8/hotbar display 9 off |
Now, for the submenus we could use the same trick. However, that way we’d need a new hotbar for every sub menu we create. But there is an easier way! With the /hotbar copy command, we can copy the contents from one hotbar to another. We will utilise this to avoid running out of hotbars!
Change to a class you never play, I recommend using the base classes like marauder, gladiator, pugilist and so on for this. Place the contents you want in the submenu on one of their job specific hotbars.
Let’s say you want a submenu to display you all the tank jobs. Drag and drop the gear sets onto, for example, hotbar 1 of the arcanist class, which in my case is job specific.
Then we create ourselves a little macro that reads something like this:
Tanks
/hotbar display 9 on
/hotbar copy arcanist 1 share 9
This macro copies the contents of the hotbar 1 for arcanist to the shared hotbar 9.
Copying Hotbars:
You can also realise the main menu in this way, by cycling through two different copied hotbars. This way you can get the menu button and the submenu buttons on a single shared hotbar. In this example I put the two main menu hotbars on hotbar 1 and 2 of the gladiator class.
| Expand Menu /hotbar display 8 off/hotbar display 9 off/hotbar copy gladiator 2 share 7 | Collapse Menu /hotbar display 8 off/hotbar display 9 off/hotbar copy gladiator 1 share 7 |
Which of these you prefer is up to you.
Manually assigning hotbar content:
Another way to assign the content of the hotbars is to use the variety of subcommands /hotbar offers.
There are a lot of them, so i will just give you a brief overview of the commands, what they do and how they are used. A more detailed explanation can be found in the “Text Commands” directory in the User Macros menu.
| subcommand | What it does: | Example |
| action | Sets a specific hotbar slot to a specific sign. | /hotbar action Aetherflow 8 1 |
| emote | Sets a specific hotbar slot to a specific emote. | /hotbar emote dote 8 1 |
| minion | Sets a specific hotbar slot to a specific minion. | /hotbar minion Morpho 8 1 |
| mount | Sets a specific hotbar slot to a specific mount. | /hotbar mount “Alte Roite” 8 1 |
| enemysign | Sets a specific hotbar slot to a specific marker. | /hotbar enemysign “Target to Attack 1” 8 1 |
| waymark | Sets a specific hotbar slot to a specific waymark. | /hotbar waymark A 8 1 |
| general | Sets a specific hotbar slot to a specific general action. | /hotbar general teleport 8 1 |
Hiding and displaying HUD elements:
Another cool thing you can do is to hide and display certain HUD elements. For example the Duty List. There’s the option to hide it when you are inside a duty, however even outside of one it can become a little annoying to have this on the side of your screen.
To toggle the visibility of HUD elements we use the command /hud.
Duty List
/hud “Duty List”
/hotbar display 8 off
/hotbar display 9 off
Adding a delay and auto-collapsing the menu:
If you want your menu to vanish under certain conditions, you can modify the macros for that purpose. Say, if you don’t select any sub-menu after 5s, the main menu collapses back on its own.
To do this, just add <wait.5> after the last line of the “Expand Menu” macro and copy the content of the “Collapse Menu” macro after it.
| Expand Menu /hotbar display 8 off/hotbar display 9 off/hotbar copy gladiator 2 share 7 <wait.5>/hotbar display 8 off/hotbar display 9 off/hud “Duty List” off/hotbar copy gladiator 1 share 7 |
In case any sub-menu is opened after the main menu, the game will start a new macro and cancel the current one. Thus the menu will not vanish.
If you’d, for example want your menu to vanish no matter what, add wait statement and the “Collapse Menu” macro to all of the sub-menu macros as well.
Changing a Macros Icon:
(By common request I’m adding this as well)
There is a couple of ways to change the icon of a macro.
The first and easiest way is by clicking on the macro icon in the User Macro menu while editing it. You will be presented with multiple preset macros, and it’s hard to see but the selection actually has multiple pages.
The other way is to use the /micon command anywhere within the macro, followed by the name of an action (job, role or general) that you want the macro icon to be.
For example, /micon Aetherflow will make it look like the Aetherflow skill, but with a little cog wheel in the corner to identify it as a macro.
I hope this could help some of you organise your HUD better. If you have any additions, how to do things differently or better, let me know, either on reddit in the comments
