InventoryTweaks

A 7 Days To Die mod for Undead Legacy. Five small quality-of-life fixes for UL's backpack:

• Sorting scrolls to the top. Clicking a sort button re-sorts and jumps the list back to the first page, so the sorted result is actually in view. Also in loot containers and vehicle storage.
• Right-click a sort button to lock it. The button lights up, the backpack sorts, and from then on it re-sorts every time you open the inventory. Right-click it again to unlock. The lock is remembered across restarts.
• New and changed items stay highlighted until you look at them. Anything that lands in your backpack, or any stack whose count changes, gets a coloured frame that goes away when you hover the cell or close the inventory. Stackables also show how much the count moved: + 47, ++ 47, +++ 47 (or -, --, ---) in front of the number.
• New items first. A fifth button (!) beside UL's sort buttons. Left-click it and anything you have never had before is kept at the front of the bag: after every sort, on every real open, and the moment you switch it on. Right-click it and stacks you already had whose count changed follow as a second tier. The rest keeps its sorted order; locked slots stay put.
• The key that opened a page closes it. Press B for the character page and B again to close the inventory, the way the unmodded game does. UL leaves only Tab and Escape to close.

Installing

Download the zip from Releases and extract it into the game's Mods/. The mod folder is the root of the archive, so it lands as:

Mods/InventoryTweaks/
├── ModInfo.xml
└── InventoryTweaks.dll

Undead Legacy is required. The mod patches UL's own inventory window; without UL it logs a warning at startup and does nothing. Load order does not matter, and nothing needs building.

Console commands

it prints the menu and changes nothing — inventorytweaks is an alias. Every line names the command that changes it and says what it is for, so the menu is also the reference:

InventoryTweaks is ON
  it on|off                 : [ >on< | off ]                    - master switch
  it scroll                 : [ >on< | off ]                    - sorting scrolls the backpack to the top
  it containers             : [ >on< | off ]                    - ...and loot / vehicle windows too
  it lock {mode}            : [ >none< | weight | price | group | name ] - locked sort - or right-click a sort button
  it autosort               : [ >on< | off ]                    - re-sort on open while locked
  it newfirst               : [ on | >off< ]                    - new items first - or left-click the ! button
  it changedfirst           : [ on | >off< ]                    - ...then changed items - or right-click it
  it toggle                 : [ >on< | off ]                    - a page's key closes the inventory again
  it highlight              : [ >on< | off ]                    - frame new or changed items until hovered
  it color {r,g,b,a}        : 255,200,60,255
  it markers                : [ >on< | off ]                    - +/- before a changed stack count

Three more: it clear drops every highlight, it info prints the same block with the patch state and counters added, and it reset zeroes those counters. Changes are saved — see Settings file.

What it does, precisely

Sort to top. UL's backpack is a 300-cell grid shown eight rows at a time; its scrollbar is really a page number. After any of UL's sorts, the page is set back to 0. Nothing about the sort itself changes.

Locked sort. Right-click reaches a different event from the one UL's sorter listens on, so UL's own left-click behaviour is untouched. The sort on open is UL's own sort, run through UL's own sorter, so slots you have locked with the slot-lock key stay put and the search filter is honoured exactly as a left-click would. It runs only when it cannot get in your way:

• on a real open, not when UL closes and reopens the window as you switch between the crafting, character and other tabs;
• when nothing is on your cursor;
• when the sort buttons are not greyed out by UL's Shuffled Backpack debuff.

New items first. The ! button is added to UL's sort row in memory, just before the game parses the window XML — a plain XML patch could not do it, because mod patches apply in folder order and InventoryTweaks sorts before UndeadLegacy. Left-click toggles new first; the button lights up in the same gold as a locked sort. Right-click toggles the changed tier on top (switching new-first on if it was off); the icon then takes the highlight colour. Both are saved like the lock.

While on, after any UL sort of the backpack — a sort button, the locked sort on open, or the standard-controls sort — the stacks the new-item highlight knows you never had before (framed, no +/- marker) are pulled to the front of the movable slots, then, with the changed tier on, the stacks you already owned whose count changed (the +/- ones), then everything else. Each tier keeps the order UL just sorted it into. On a real open with no locked sort, and at the moment you switch the button on, there is no sort order to follow, so within each tier the most recently changed stack comes first and the rest of the bag stays as it was.

Slots locked with the slot-lock key are never moved, exactly as UL's own sorter leaves them; the item open in the modify window stays selected. Hovering a highlighted item acknowledges it, so it drops back into normal order on the next sort. The same guards as the locked sort apply on open: not on a tab switch, never while an item is on the cursor, never under the Shuffled Backpack debuff.

Page key closes. Vanilla's window selector closes everything when the page a key asks for is the one already showing. UL replaces that method with a Harmony prefix of its own and drops the toggle. Harmony runs every prefix even after one skips the original, so the mod cannot simply close from a prefix - UL's would reopen the page straight after. Instead a prefix notes whether the page was already showing, UL's prefix runs as usual (opening a page that is open does nothing), and a postfix then closes the inventory; every other press is left untouched. It applies to every page key (B, N, O, M and so on), not Tab, which UL handles separately. Only a key press counts: an item's Recipes action, perk links and the like also ask the selector for a page that may already be showing, and those must stay no-ops, so the toggle fires only on the frame a page-key action was dispatched.

New-item highlight. The bag only reports "something changed", so the mod keeps a fingerprint of every slot (item, quality, seed) plus the count you last acknowledged, and diffs the bag on each change. Items that merely moved — by a sort, a drag, a shift-click — carry their state with them; merging two stacks adds their acknowledged counts together and splitting one divides it, so only stock that came from (or went) outside the backpack registers as a change. A stack nobody had before is highlighted with no marker.

A highlight clears when you hover the cell, or when you close the inventory — a real close, not UL's close-and-reopen as you switch tabs. Anything that arrives while the inventory is closed is still highlighted when you next open it. Being on screen does nothing by itself; a cell you never hover stays highlighted until you close the window.

Count markers. For a stackable whose count differs from what you last acknowledged, the number is prefixed: one + or - for a change of a single item, three once the stack has reached three times the acknowledged count (or fallen to a third of it), two for anything in between. Hovering resets the acknowledged count to the current one.

Hover, selection, drag and UL's search overlay all draw over the frame unchanged.

Defaults

Setting	Default
scroll to top on sort	on
...in loot / vehicle windows	on
locked sort	none
re-sort on open while locked	on
new items first	off
...then changed items	off
page key closes the inventory	on
new-item highlight	on
highlight colour	255,200,60,255
count markers	on

Settings file

Every setting survives a restart. A change made with it, by right-clicking a sort button, or by clicking the ! button, is written straight out to:

%APPDATA%/7DaysToDie/InventoryTweaks/settings.txt

— the game's own user data folder, next to Saves, rather than Mods/InventoryTweaks/, so updating the mod does not take your settings with it. it info prints the full path and whether the last read or write worked.

It is plain key = value text, one line per setting, each naming the command that sets it:

enabled       = on               # it on|off
scroll        = on               # it scroll
containers    = on               # it containers
lock          = none             # it lock {none|weight|price|group|name} - or right-click a sort button
autosort      = on               # it autosort
newfirst      = off              # it newfirst - or left-click the ! button by the sort buttons
changedfirst  = off              # it changedfirst - or right-click the ! button
toggle        = on               # it toggle
highlight     = on               # it highlight
color         = 255,200,60,255   # it color {r,g,b,a}
markers       = on               # it markers

Edit it by hand with the game closed — it is rewritten whenever a setting changes. A line that will not parse is logged and ignored rather than fatal, and deleting the file brings back the defaults above (which live in Settings.cs).

Undead Legacy

Required. Tested against UL 2.7.32. Every patch targets a UL class by name and reports whether it applied in the startup log and in it info; a UL update that renames one of them degrades to a log line, not a crash. The mod warns, but still installs, when it sees a UL build outside the range it was tested on.

Limitations

• Highlights are not saved. They live in memory and reset when the game is restarted. The sort lock is saved.
• Backpack only. Items that land straight in the toolbelt are not highlighted.
• Highlights are per client. On a dedicated server the mod runs on each player's own machine and only sees that player's backpack.

Building

Requires the .NET SDK; there are no NuGet dependencies. The mod builds in place inside the game install, against the game's own assemblies and the installed Mods/UndeadLegacy/UndeadLegacy.dll.

dotnet build src/InventoryTweaks/InventoryTweaks.csproj -c Release

That restages dist/InventoryTweaks/, ready to copy into Mods/. To also build the release archive:

dotnet build src/InventoryTweaks/InventoryTweaks.csproj -c Release -t:Package

That writes release/InventoryTweaks-v<version>-<date>.zip, taking the version from ModInfo.xml. Neither dist/ nor release/ is tracked — the zip is published as a GitHub Release instead.

License

MIT — see LICENSE.