by rkda » Tue Jul 14, 2015 3:11 pm
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)