Question Inventory management, love it or hate it?

[technomadic_rony]

If the UI is good and the system isn't too convoluted, I'm ok with the inventory management. Example,
Bad Inventory Management: Mass Effect Andromeda.
Ok/Tolerable Inventory Management: Fallout 76.
Good Inventory Management: Team Fortress 2/Rocket League.

 

[ZedClampet]

In V Rising I'm now to the part of inventory management where I walk outside my base and drop stuff on the ground. There's a few things related to research that I just don't need anymore, like paper and scrolls. Technically, I don't need schematics, either, but I'm saving those in case I need to upgrade them for a future update.

 

[ZedClampet]

If the UI is good and the system isn't too convoluted, I'm ok with the inventory management. Example,
Bad Inventory Management: Mass Effect Andromeda.
Ok/Tolerable Inventory Management: Fallout 76.
Good Inventory Management: Team Fortress 2/Rocket League.

The thing is that I'm not sure TF2 and Rocket League systems wouldn't work for the other games you listed. I'd be interested in what RPG's or survival games you feel have good inventory systems.

I think the more I play the more I like a few more QoL inventory features like:

1) a button that automatically moves stuff from your inventory to the chest you are currently in so long as there are matching items in that chest.

2) When at a crafting table, it will pull from, at a minimum, your own inventory (so you don't have to move things into the table), or even pull from nearby chests.

3) A sort button.

4) In extreme cases, inventory tabs for different categories of stuff.

 

[mainer]

In V Rising I'm now to the part of inventory management where I walk outside my base and drop stuff on the ground. There's a few things related to research that I just don't need anymore, like paper and scrolls. Technically, I don't need schematics, either, but I'm saving those in case I need to upgrade them for a future update.

Do you have storage containers or a storage chest in your home base to store things? What happens when you drop a bunch of stuff on the ground? Do they eventually disappear from the game world, or do they continue to pile up in one spot? Is there a weight limit to what you can carry?

Just curiosity questions really, but it might be a good case for those inventory tabs.

 

[Slasken]

I use mods to remove weight limits, so I can pick up every cheesewheel I can get my dirty hands on.

 

[ZedClampet]

Do you have storage containers or a storage chest in your home base to store things?

I was going to guess I had around 50 storage containers, but I decided to go count them, and I have 44. Six are the small, starter containers that only hold 21 items. The rest are a mix of 35 and 42 item containers. They have a variety of looks; for instance, you have various wardrobes, book cases, blood cases and chests, with multiple varieties of each, and I will admit to using the ones that seem most appropriate for the décor as opposed to the ones that give the most storage.

Also, I can't remember exactly what I did, but I increased the stack size. I think I tripled it, so each container can theoretically hold up to 3 times as many items as they are supposed to hold.

What happens when you drop a bunch of stuff on the ground? Do they eventually disappear from the game world, or do they continue to pile up in one spot?

They eventually despawn, but it takes a good while. If they didn't, I would keep building more containers, I guess.

Is there a weight limit to what you can carry?

There's no weight limit, but you can carry 9 items in your hotbar and then you have 27 more slots. As much loot as you have to gather and then store and eventually retrieve, I completely redesigned my house to make it easier to store and retrieve resources. Basically the entire layout is now about inventory management.

Just curiosity questions really, but it might be a good case for those inventory tabs.

It definitely would be a good case for that. They do have a button called "Obsessively Count" (which is a reference to the Count from Sesame Street) that will move your inventory automatically into the chest you are looking at so long as there is at least one like item in the chest. I use that constantly, and it really helps. I had a mod that added that feature to Planet Crafter.

 

[Zloth]

Oh my - you woke up some old brain cells back there.

Asheron's Call let you have several characters on a server, but inventories weren't all that huge. So, obviously, people made "mule" characters to hold their stuff. But how do you get you stuff from your main characters to your mules? Well, you could hand over stuff to a trusted friend, but that could have problems like "I gave you 7 motes" "No, you gave me 6 motes!"

However, items put on the ground would remain for a little while (maybe 5-10 minutes?). Of course, while sitting on the ground, ANYONE can pick the items up, so just dropping stuff in town isn't smart. But Asheron's Call is a huge, open world. So, people would take their level 1 mule character, run them off into the woods, and log off there. When they wanted to do a transfer, they would run their main character over to that spot, put down the loot, log off, log back in as the mule, and pick it up again.

It was always a little scary. What if somebody else wanders by? Well, that's easily solved by getting WELL away from inhabited areas.

I might have overdone it.

I use mods to remove weight limits, so I can pick up every cheesewheel I can get my dirty hands on.

Go get'm!

View: https://youtu.be/9UAlEmoRews

 

[ZedClampet]

Oh my - you woke up some old brain cells back there.

That reminds me of World's Adrift. You could have four characters. I had one character that had a huge freighter for our clan with our primary resources on it. If you didn't tie your ship down, it would simply sit in the world when you logged out available for anyone to do whatever they wanted with it. I never managed inventory that way unless I had at least one person guarding the ship. Some people did, though.

What I usually did was go to a spot out of the way on an island with lots of treasure. Everyone knew exactly where the treasures spawned and never bothered to go anywhere else because it was a mad dash to see who could get the treasures first. So I'd go behind a hill where some trees were and there was tall grass and put down a treasure chest and dump the stuff in it. The grass was so tall that sometimes even I had to look around before I could find the chest. It always made me nervous doing that, though, especially when I had high grade titanium and aluminum from the PvP zone.

No one ever got it, but it did nearly despawn once. If there were too many player structures on an island. stuff would just start despawning at random. Even parts of your ships weren't safe (it really, really sucked). I didn't have much in it that time, and I always paid careful attention to how many treasure hunters there were after that.

 

[ZedClampet]

What happens when you drop a bunch of stuff on the ground? Do they eventually disappear from the game world, or do they continue to pile up in one spot?

Oh my gosh, after typing my answer above, I remembered the worst inventory management dilemma of any game I've ever played. It was in Satisfactory.

So Satisfactory is in early access. In one of the earliest updates, they added nuclear power. Power generation is a constant nightmare in the game, so everyone was looking forward to going nuclear. The only problem was that nuclear power plants produce nuclear waste, and there was nothing you could do with it but store it somewhere. A single power plant produces 50 barrels of nuclear waste every 10 minutes or 300 per hour. And you are going to want maybe a dozen power plants (for a conservative build), so that's 3600 barrels an hour.

You can't get anywhere near any of this stuff without full radiation gear on (and even then you can't pick up the really bad stuff), which adds a lot of trouble to it because you can't wear any of your mobility stuff while you have the radiation gear on, so no jetpack or anything. So you have to build this impossibly huge area filled with storage containers--ridiculous numbers of storage containers, and you know you'll have to make more and more of them the longer you play.

So the first time I made a nuclear power facility, I was pretty happy with everything and went back to the main base. After about an in-game week, my power production dropped dramatically. It was clear something had gone wrong at the nuclear facility (when things go wrong in Satisfactory it is always your fault--there are no mechanical failures, only engineering failures). So I grabbed my radiation suit (I didn't put it on), and hopped on the train I had built to bring products back and forth from the facility. (there are other things you can make with the byproducts of nuclear power). So I'm riding the train and it reaches the top of a hill where I can finally see the facility and the whole screen starts to turn an undulating reddish color and I start taking very high damage. We aren't even particularly close to the facility yet, but the radiation has spread about 500 meters out from the storage area. I quickly put my radiation gear on and just barely managed to stabilize my health before it ran out.

Anyway, this story is already too long, so let's just say the whole thing was a nightmare, and I planned to never use nuclear again, but in a later update they created a product that you could make with nuclear waste and then send that product into space, so no more waste containment.

 

[Pifanjr]

They do have a button called "Obsessively Count" (which is a reference to the Count from Sesame Street) that will move your inventory automatically into the chest you are looking at so long as there is at least one like item in the chest.

I don't know if it was meant to be a reference to Count von Count, but vampires obsessively counting stuff (particularly seeds) is part of European and Asian folklore.

 

[WoodenSaucer]

I don't know if it was meant to be a reference to Count von Count, but vampires obsessively counting stuff (particularly seeds) is part of European and Asian folklore.

Well that just changes everything with Sesame Street. I didn't know that. Lol

 

[Zimbaly]

Personally I freaking HATE it. How else em I suppose to grab every plate, fork, spoon, jug, candle, bread, cheese, wine, beer, coal, umbrella, bowl, vase, pot, pan, mug, cup, knife, towel, sock, nail, 2x4, pouch, hammer, pillow, straw, spork, saw, lint, button, bead, book, medal, and piece of paper to sell to make tons of money.

You know how many trips that is in an RPG????

 

[ZedClampet]

I think for non-traditional type games that it's best if the inventory systems just flow naturally from what you are doing.

In Farming Simulator, it's all very natural and what you'd expect on a real farm. I think the only thing you can actually carry around on your body is a chainsaw. Everything else, like seed, fertilizer, etc is either in containers on the ground or, as it is most of the time, in your equipment. Harvested items usually go straight from the plant to the harvester to your trailer, and then you take them to a sell point and dump them out or put them in various kinds of silos. If you have the wrong item in a machine, like you have fertilizer but you need herbicide, you can do a button press and the fertilizer gets stacked up in containers next to your machine. You can then further move them with a forklift or any number of forklift-like machines. When you put things like straw into bales, they are just left in the field until you bring another machine to come pick them up. You could probably say that moving your inventory around with various machines is a main focus of the game.

 

[ZedClampet]

I don't know if it was meant to be a reference to Count von Count, but vampires obsessively counting stuff (particularly seeds) is part of European and Asian folklore.

Thanks. Didn't know that Sesame Street was so accurate.