SWTOR Quickbars Guide

Quickbars in Star Wars: The Old Republic are the rows on the user interface where you can store your character’s abilities.

By default you’ll have two showing, which is more than enough for when you start off at level 1. Over time, you’ll gain more abilities, and you’ll need to enable more of your quickbars. to turn them all on, press ESC on your keyboard, choose Interface Editor, and then choose “Advanced” from the dropdown at the very top, then click the tiny “load” button that looks like a sheet of paper on the right You’ll then have all the quickbars you have available enabled. You can edit where the quickbars are placed by clicking them on this user interface editor – you can drag them around to move them, or change how many icons show up in a row, with the sliders in the middle of the screen. If you still can’t see all your quickbars, you may need to enable some. In this layout, there’s four on the bottom, and two on the left. To enable the quickbars on the left, click them if they are red, then check the small “enabled” checkmark on the bottom of the screen and Save.

Free-to-play players will have 3 quickbars for a total of 36 abilities, preferred players will have 5 bars for a total of 60 abilities, and subscribers will have 6 bars for a total of 72 abilities. If you’re free-to-play or preferred, you should be able to fit all your main combat abilities on your bars just fine, but if you want to unlock additional quickbars you can buy them for 200 Cartel Coins per character, or 540 Cartel Coins for an additional quickbar for every character on the account for a total of 6 quickbars – you might also be able to purchase the quickbar unlock on the GTN from other players for credits, the item is called “Unlock: Quickslots”. More than three quickbars aren’t really needed for combat, but they’re handy to have as you can put travel, item and mount, toy and pet abilities on your bars as well. Personally when I have additional quickbar slots available I like to put my mount on there, my fleet pass to go back to the Republic or Imperial fleet, my quicktravel ability to teleport around the map, and my medpacs.

Another thing you should know about quickbars is that they can be locked and unlocked with the tiny locked symbol located on your main quickbar. Locking your bar will ensure that you don’t accidentally click and drag abilities off your quickbar or have them switch spots on the quickbar. If you accidentally lost an ability that way, press P on your keybard, as it will open your abilities list. You’ll then be able to look through the different tabs for your class, advanced class and the general tab to find your missing ability and drag it back on your bar.

If you like seeing exactly how long you have left on your abilities that have a timer, you can enable this by going in to ESC key -> Preferences -> User Interface -> scroll down to Cooldown Settings -> check Show Cooldown Text. This will show the cooldown you have left on your ability as a number on your quickbar.

The last thing you can do with your quickbars is keybind them. Keybinding is attaching an ability on your quickbar to a key on your keyboard, so you can press the key instead of clicking the ability with your mouse. By default, your first nine abilities are already keybound to the 1 through 9 keys on your keyboard, but you can add additional keybinds to make activating abilities easier. For example, you could keybind your Q, E, Z, X, C, F and R keys to some of your most used abilities. Experienced players keybind all their abilities by creating keybinds with the SHIFT key involved. To keybind your quickbars, press ESC -> Preferences -> Keybindings tab on the bottom -> Quickbar tab on the left. To set a keybind, first find the quickbar slot your ability is on, click the button beside “Key 1” and then click the key on your keyboard you want to keybind. If you haven’t moved anything around with the Interface Editor and are using the “Extended Quickbars” preset, your Main quickbar is on the top middle, Quickbar 2 is right under it, Quickbar 3 is on the right of your main one, Quickbar 4 is on the left, Quickbar 5 is vertically on the far left, and Quickbar 6 is right beside it.