I'm not talking about constant display of stats. I'm talking about an alert that a stat is low, like 'hey, your calories are 0!' Currently, you see nothing on your hud until your organs are damaged and your near death. I think someone would notice if they are starving to death without a fancy pda.

Fair enough. Vehicles would be more fun anyway.

So long as the clearing range is no farther than the shortest actual sensor range.

On the contrary. You can always recharge oxygen or drink when it gets critically low. By the time you see that your out of calories, you don't have time to make it to the hab before taking damage.

A simple icon or  set of indicator lights that only appear when you are below 50% on something would work fine.

Another alternative: range-finding binoculars

Hehe, you could always add some random sparkles and turn it from a bug into a feature.

That would be great! Players could also mark exploration that way. Just snap a pic when they change directions and they can plot the extents of their travel.

An alternative might be to display distances to the markers in the scanner. If you want to keep it 'real', display the distances as approximations... just use 1 to 1.3 significant digits.

I can understand not using the mouse for the datapad as that allows you to continue moving when it is open. However, there is no reason not to do it on the container dialogs.

Given that vitals are about the only screen not hotkeyed, it is cumbersome to check your state often. It would be far more useful if any low vitals showed up in the HUD. Right now, we don't see anything on the HUD unless we're near death. A better method would be to have the vital show in HUD once it drops below 30% or so..... like 'calories 250', 'exhausted', etc. That way, it would be noticeable before your body took damage without constantly pulling up the datapad.