Starcraft – How does the Alarm Stack in Starcraft II work

starcraft-2

I'm trying to improve my macromanagment speed and I recognize that I never use the Alarm sound cues. There is a hotkey to jump to the last cue, but I can't quite figure out how it works. You can jump to the last alarm with Spacebar and an alarm can be if a unit was created, you were attacked somewhere, minerals or vespin gas resources are finished in one location, etc.

My first impression was that the alarm system works like a stack. The newest event will be put on top on the stack. If you press Spacebar, you will get to the top of the stack, then to the second element and so on. I thought that if I jumped to an element it would get pushed from the stack and I wouldn't be able to get to it anymore when pressing Spacebar. But it appears to loop. That means if I press Spacebar a couple of times and see the latest events and then do some other stuff, when I come back the same events are still in the stack.

Has anyone used the spacebar hotkey frequently and figured out how it works? Thanks!

Best Answer

The alarm cue hotkey will always move you to the latest alarm event, then cycle through the next recent alarm. Alerts will not be removed from the stack once you visit them, only after the alarm condition has passed.

Additionally, user Aequitas has some good advice on this question from 2016:

While this answer is correct, I'd advise against using this method generally. What if just as you push space, you get a different alert? Then you end up being in the wrong spot and wasting time. Set Camera Locations for important places, such as your main, nat and third. You can double tap control groups for most other regions of interest, otherwise just click on the map.

I would also recommend only using this hotkey to quickly move to a location with an alarm that you could not otherwise move to, such as in the event of an unexpected attack.

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