Random Chest Storage - Game Tested

On my first playthrough I noticed that I spent a lot of time storing, labeling, and organizing items in chests, but relatively a small amount of time actually retrieving things from chests. And that the majority of my retrievals were to fetch the same few items.

So for my second playthrough I decided to try out "random chest storage". That is, I would simply build stacks/rows of chests and put items in randomly. Here's how it went…

Method A: I put items in chests randomly. To store an item I would start on the left and keep moving right until I found an existing stack or empty slot. To retrieve an item I would do the same. This was fine for a few chests, but quickly became more work than it was worth.

So then I tried more of a hybrid approach…

Method B: I create multiple sets of chests. Each set would store a predetermined category of items. I would also position the chests strategically based on their use (e.g. food near the cooking stations). Within each set I would use method A, that is, just put/get things randomly moving from left to right through the chests in the set. This ended up working wonderfully all the way to end of the game, and I plan to use this method again when the game is released. I never had to label a chest, storing items was quick, and retrieving items was quick. For reference, these are the chest sets I ended up with: