Hands

Know what’s in each hand and what spell you have prepared, at a glance — instead of burning a round on inventory to find out you’re holding a shield you meant to drop.

What it’s for

You swap weapons, you get disarmed, you prepare a spell and then take a hit and lose track of whether it’s still there. The game will tell you, but only if you ask, and asking costs you the moment you needed the answer in.

The hand windows keep all three slots on screen: left, right, and the spell you have prepared. They’re one line each, so they cost almost nothing, and the item names stay clickable. In the desktop GUI they can go further — the icon itself can change based on what you’re holding, so “empty hand” and “axe in hand” look different from across the screen.

Set it up

Common setups

Three lines stacked under your vitals

Add all three hand windows and send them to the same zone, one under another, in the order left, right, spell. Right-click each ▸ Appearance ▸ Frame and turn the border off so they read as one block instead of three boxes.

You’ll see: a three-line readout under your bars — both hands and your prepared spell, updating as you swap gear and cast.

An icon that changes when your hand is empty

Right-click your right-hand window ▸ Hand icons… and add two states, in this order:

1. Hand empty (right) → pick an open-hand image.
2. Hand holds → weapon (right) → pick a weapon image.

Save, then drop what you’re holding.

You’ll see: the icon flip to the open hand the moment the weapon leaves, and flip back when you pick it up — visible from across the screen without reading a word.

Tips & gotchas

⚠️ The first matching state wins. States are checked top to bottom, and a broad condition placed above a narrow one swallows it. Put Hand holds → a specific item above Hand holds → weapon, or the specific rule will never fire. If nothing matches, the window falls back to its static icon and colors.

⚠️ Which hand a window shows comes from its name, and the fallback is the spell hand. A name containing “left” is the left hand, one containing “right” is the right hand, and anything else — including a typo — becomes the spell hand. If a window named rigth is showing your prepared spell, that’s why.

Drag a hand window taller to get bigger art. In the GUI the icon fills the window’s height, so a one-line hand gets a small icon and a window dragged to two or four lines gets large art. The configured icon size acts as the floor, not the size.

Hand icon states use the same condition language as hotbar buttons and indicators. Learn it once and it transfers — Hand empty, Hand holds, Spell prepared, Roundtime active, Vital, Injury, and the rest, grouped with all of / any of. If you’ve built a combat hotbar, you already know this editor.

Empty reads differently in the spell slot. The two physical hands show Empty when you’re holding nothing; the spell window shows None when you have nothing prepared.

See also

• Wire a hotbar for combat — the same condition vocabulary, on buttons
• Indicators — status icons driven by those same conditions
• Inventory — everything you’re carrying, not only what’s in hand
• Skins (GUI Graphics) — where hand icon art comes from
• Build a hunting layout — where the hand windows sit in a combat screen

[[windows]]
name = "right"
widget_type = "hand"
icon = "R:"
row = 22
col = 92
rows = 1
cols = 28
show_border = false

  [[windows.states]]
  text = "(  )"
  [windows.states.when]
  type = "hand_empty"
  hand = "right"

  [[windows.states]]
  text = "R:"
  icon_color = "#c0392b"
  [windows.states.when]
  type = "hand_holds"
  hand = "right"
  item_type = "weapon"