Inventory limit :(

[Denis]

I'm sorry to say this, but this inventory limit just makes this game not fun at all for me. I'm not very advanced yet (due to starting from scratch a few times and having lost some progress) so I'm not even making the more advanced stuff yet, nor do I have advanced workbenches or materials in my inventory, and yet I'm over then 20 items limit. I am basically at the phase where I'm trying to gather enough iron to make enough steel to make a craftman's workbench. And with this inventory limit I have to swap things out now? Uck!

[edit] I removed the rest of this post that tried to explain why this is a problem because it was still too full of steam. I'll try to post a more cooled down version soon!

[rkda]

As with many other games, inventory management quickly becomes an issue. The 4/6/8 slot chests can be built pretty early on, and pretty cheaply. Store stuff in them. Store lots of stuff in them. Put the chests way out of the way, and once they are placed, you never need to go near them again. I tend to keep mine in the original eye of the forrest.

The trick to making chests useful, is to cary one (the forge and kiln now count as small chests). You don't keep anything important in the chest you cary. When your inventory is full of some item you want to put in a chest...you drop the chest you are carrying on the ground, and then dump stuff into that chest. Then, before you pick that chest back up, you open the chest, and drag all the stuff from it, to another chest. When you want something back from a chest, you stop your robot someplace where you can see both the robot and the chest that has the stuff you want in it. Then you open that chest, and drag your items out and drop them on the robot.

You need to be able to plant pine trees, pick 1, and toss the other 3 kinds of pine seeds into a chest. It's ok to change which one you use once in a while (variety is more interesting some times) but at any given time, you only need 1 kind of pine seeds. When your pine seed stack is full, put half of them in a chest (I have on chest which just has 200 each of the 4 kinds of pine seeds in it). After that, sell them. I sell thousands of pine seeds. You never need more than 1 stack of seeds in a chest, and 1 stack in inventory.

When I am farming Steel Bars - which you need way to many of - I cary the following:
- clay - forge - kiln - workbench -
- pine seed - pine wood - lumber - charcoal -
- ironwood seed - ironwood - iron ingot -
- beach seed - beach wood - silicon crystal -
- steel bar - chest -
that's 16 items, with 4 slots to spare in inventory

(I could drop the chest, freeing up one more space, now that forge and kiln both count as chests)

Convert wood to charcoal or lumber while planting or harvesting. Convert ironwood to iron ingots, on the fly. Convert sand wood to silicon crystal on the fly. When you have over 100 iron ingots, convert them all to steel bars. That way you never have the problem of full stacks of anything getting in the way. I check my quantities at the beginning of each row. If harvesting this row is gonna overflow anything, process it before you start harvesting. In general, try to do the checking and processing on the fly, but sometimes you just have to look at the row you are about to harvest, and see if it's going to overflow anything when you do. If so, deal with it first.

With 14 different kinds of seeds, you can't cary them all. You can't cary all 6 kinds of wood as well as the bar/ingot/lumber/crystal/plastic that you get from first level processing. It's practical to cary the three kinds of seeds, and tools, needed to make steel. Copper and plastic go together ok, and gates are a separate thing on their own. That's 3 completely different sets of things to cary, depending on what you are trying to produce at the moment.

Higher level crafting is a whole nother thing by itself. When I am trying to make advanced tools, or in your case a Craftsman Workbench, I just assume I am going to have to dump everything I am carrying into chests, and then start gathering up materials from an empty (or nearly empty) inventory.

Sorry for your frustration, and I hope this helps put inventory management into perspective.
(as with other things...once I explain how I manage...he's gonna change things, so it's gonna be all different in a week or two, or three)

[Denis]

I didn't think of the trick to not have to go where the chests are, that a good one and might make everything more bearable. I'll have to experiment with that. If it becomes possible to just stand still and grab everything that was dropped from the chest that could work out not too bad.

I'm not opposed to some sort of inventory limit but I think it should come later in the game (not "turned on" later in the game, just become an issue later in the game). At the stage I'm in at the moment, I don't think it's a good thing. You're more advanced and you know how things work and you have a clear method to deal with things. Early gamers (like myself) will be struggling with what they're supposed to do. I'm constantly checking what's required for something and going "oh right, I need more of this to go on". That doesn't go well with having to manage inventory, especially when mistakes cost you so much pain. We're still in the discovery part and figuring out how to get organized. Having to manage inventory at this point doesn't encourage discovery. Most of the time, I'm finding the next step by looking at what I can 'almost' do. If a big part of my inventory is in a chest that won't be so easy. And since you don't have all your methods nicely in mind, you're bound to make mistakes when juggling inventory (like me dropping my workbench on the other side of the farm).

There might be something I'm not seeing, some magic reason why a 20 items limit is necessary.

tl;dr: my opinion: I'm still at the basics (iron, steel, etc.) and inventory management/limits should not be an issue. It should become one when you're more advanced and have more stuff, and that becomes an added challenge to "higher level" players.

[Denis]

Whatever happens with inventory, there should be a inventory counter somewhere so I don't have to scroll through the inventory drawer and count to figure out how many items I have and how many I have to get rid of.

[Denis]

I've tried the trick where you keep a chest with you and drop it to swap stuff around without having to move the robot near the (remote) chest and that helps a lot, thanks for the tip[1].


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[worfc]

Rkda: Awesome suggestions. Can I convince you to copy/paste (with optional editing, if it needs it) your answer to Denis into the "Tips & Tricks" forum? I think it'd be a great "How to manage inventory" post.

Denis: Sorry about the frustration. As with a lot of things, inventory limit is still being balanced, though I tend to think it's pretty close. FWIW, it used to be 15 AND items in your tools & gates drawer counted!

(Yeah, that was a little to "mystic-quest"-y, even for me. <G>)

It's part of the game's design that inventory management should be something for the player to deal with. But it's also part of the design that it should be fun & interesting and not "just a @#$% pain in the @#$%". I'll continue to tweak things, there.

Inventory counter: Case #917, slated for next week.