Categories: DiscussionValheim

Thoughts on overwhelming inventories in games

As Valheim gets bigger and more complex, so does the amount of different items. Even existing mechanics get split up into more items: the old Raw Meat is now split into Boar, Deer and Wolf. Other crafting/building-games go down the same path, like Minecraft for example: It used to have only stone Dirt and Wood in the earliest version for which the inventory and the chests were designed. Now your inventory and many chests are completly full with clutter after only a few minutes of playing.

Even tough I love the added features and complexity, it all still depends on the old inventory size and the tedious manual sorting of a player who has to remember into which tiny chest every single scrap from a small adventure goes. Soon you have a tiny house full of chests, all filled with random junk that might be useful in the future. It worked very well with only a few items in your starter-house. But as Valheim progresses in development, I fear that this aspect will become a total pain in the ass in an otherwise very intuitive and relaxing game that does so many tasks much better than all the other survival-games out there.

I feel like something needs to be done about that in oder to not devolve Valheim into a memory-logistics simulator. Alltough increasing the inventory slots further to row 9 might help, that does not adress the bigger issue of simply overwhelming the player. The solution might be a new piece of furniture:
An individual extension to each crafting station, that hooks up to it, like an upgrade, but does not increase the crafting level. Instead it works like a large storage cabinet for usable materials. All items within act as if you would hold them in your inventory, allowing you to craft and upgrade items. Like an old 19th century food cabinet out of wood and glass for your cooking station, or a box of supplies for smithy and workbench combined. It would also be nice to just be able to press E and automatically dump all possible items within your inventory (exept the 1-9 hotkey bar) into the container, allowing you to take vertain items out again if you wish.

Then chests would have their place for gear, food and trophies in the later game progression.

Please tell me what you think about that idea, the problem or other possible solutions

Gamer

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