How do you deal with inventory clutter?

[4Hooves2Appendages]

I struggle with making decisions about what to leave on the floor and what to carry around. This is particularly bad for species that have more armour slots and character that use throwing. Which items do you think are indispensable, and which items don't need to be picked up?

[Sar]

I stash, duh.

[Shard1697]

If I hit inventory limit I drop stuff I don't need and never look back.

First things to go are extra food types. After that, extra wands and stuff I don't need on the character, books, etc... I rarely carry more than 1 or 2 weapons, and only sometimes carry armor I'm not wearing.
On throwing characters I just carry a stack of highest damage throwing item(jav or large rocks, depending), and nets if available. I don't care about poison or returning, rarely care about silver.

[4Hooves2Appendages]

I stash, duh.

Temple or Lair?

[Sar]

Lair.

[4Hooves2Appendages]

I try to clear out a bit of clutter before entering branches, so that the items remain a bit more accessible than tracking down to shoals:4 or something. Why am I so attached to junk items?

[Shtopit]

Generally speaking, with hate. I tend to shift+s and go do something else whenever I have to deal with inventory management. Anyway, you can throw away many forms of food and eat them immediately any time you come across them. I drop all wands which aren't cast on myself. I avoid having more than 3 weapons. I drop a lot of rods, because their use is situational anyway and, once they should be useful, I am strong enough to deal with problems without them. I stash books, or I just drop them and ctrl find them if I want to learn a spell. I leave potions I don't need and scrolls of torment. I turn off a few auto pick ups.

[njvack]

When my inventory gets full, I usually drop some stuff I don't care about very much. I'm bad at swapping items, so extra jewelry goes away. Also consumables I know I should get good at using but don't (torment, lignification).

If I start to stress about it, I save my game and go play Crypt of the Necrodancer for a while.

[4Hooves2Appendages]

I often save instead of actually making the decision. But that just means I have to deal with it the next time I want to continue my character. Ough.

[Psieye]

Why am I so attached to junk items?

Hoarding instincts. Other games tap into this to make you measure progress (read: make you feel good for playing the game) via item collections. If you're doing it in crawl, it's because you like it on some deep down level (or you wanted a break anyway). If you're getting stressed over what not to drop on the floor (be it at a stash tile or wherever you happen to be), you need to work on your reflexes to filter quicker or stop hoarding.

[dowan]

It's also because there's a shitload of useful wands, evokables, jewelry to swap to, scrolls and potions that might come in handy.

I'm constantly dropping useful things to make room for more useful things. It does take some consideration sometimes.

Blaming the user for a commonly complained about problem is also an option of course.

[vergil]

Why am I so attached to junk items?

Because there isn't that much of junk items in crawl. Almost any item is usefull, in certain situations of course.

I tend to hoard most of the stuff in the inventory, throwing away less usefull stuff, and prioritize more usefull items over it.
Disabling autopickup on certain items is way to go in my case.

[njvack]

Remember that it is important to have as many varieties of food in your inventory as possible at all times. Your character will appreciate the available variety.

[Shtopit]

Remember that it is important to have as many varieties of food in your inventory as possible at all times. Your character will appreciate the available variety.

Ever played Stronghold?

[4Hooves2Appendages]

Wouldn't it be great if scrolls and potions had their own separate inventory pages?

[lethediver]

Not sure what having an inventory limit accomplishes in this game other than increasing stash management and strengthening the tedium-to-optimal-play correlation.

[4Hooves2Appendages]

I suspect it's more or less a legacy system. Over time some of the bad things have been sorted, like item weight, item destruction, some ammo brands, etc. I guess there's still work to do, and more change will probably happen, but who knows when?!

[dowan]

Well, it would be a player buff to have an unlimited inventory, which is generally undesirable. Stacking wands, goldifying food, doing away with books all would help a little bit, but I suspect to some degree you're supposed to have to choose sometimes, rather than just carry everything. I wouldn't say it's bad design, but I disagree if someone claims there's never a need to make a choice, and if you run out of inventory space it's just because you're tending to your OCD.

[4Hooves2Appendages]

I'd prefer unlimited inventory for consumables, probably compensated by lower rate of item generation.

[tabstorm]

I just drop all wands except teleport, dig/disint, haste, and HW after early game is over. I never have inventory probelms.

[4Hooves2Appendages]

I quite like lightning, because it's one of the few penetrating ranged attacks that's reliably available to non-conjurers. And ice blast, because it gives AoE. And flame because I can make steam clouds over water to block LOS. Ah, who am I kidding? Maybe I should really just drop them.

[dowan]

That's just it, all those items can come in handy sometimes. If you throw away a potentially useful item, you're making a choice.

These choices used to be easier for me when I'd just throw away all the wands like tabstorm said, but there are times where confuse and paralyze wands come in quite handy. Lightning/acid are very good. Flame is great for generating steam clouds over water.

I used to throw away misc evokables, now I know they're good (at least they used to be until quite recently).

A scroll of silence might never get used, but shutting down an ancient lich might save your life.

It's easy to run out of space just by picking up situationally useful items, not just hoarding alternate suits of armor and weapons, or silly things like that.

[Psieye]

sometimes
potentially
choice

Hmm, perhaps there's something deeper here than just "drop it". Consumables (including wands) and 'specialist equipment' are a part of the character just like god choice, spell repertoire and skill strategy. But the cost to 're-configure' the "ready state" of your inventory is trivial (you aren't penalised for dropping or picking up items outside combat) yet tedious. Perhaps there's nothing wrong with that and players need to better judge risk/reward profiles ("how likely am I to really need this paralyse wand in this branch?") on the fly. Might be worth a thought experiment to ponder an alternate reality where dropping things on the floor destroyed consumables and consumables self-destruct if not picked up in a timely fashion (extreme, but that's thought experiments for you).

[stoneychips]

Well off the bat, I'll admit I'm something of a packrat. I tend to fill up around Lair and constantly discard/stash and pick up. It's the worst if I didn't get an early smoking weapon, and grabbed all sorts of situational ones. But then I think it makes some sense to be a bit packrat in Crawl... At least for certain classes. The end of branded ammunition reduced this somewhat, although not sure how I feel about it yet.

Looking back in time, for the record:
Monsters sweeping up some items for their own use/collection made a certain sense to me. It certainly made dropping stuff more complicated!
Item weight system made sense to me, although one could perhaps fuss about the particulars of it.
Item destruction even made sense to me... Although I was not so experienced then, and I think if it came back, I might even still wish for more frequent loot with it.

The arbitrary number of slots does not quite make sense to me. I suppose there should be some upper limit, but shouldn't it have more to do with strength, species size and appendages, type of storage on your clothing (if such existed - but it would make more sense at least)... Everyone having the same flat number doesn't really click with a game where there are all sorts of other species strengths and weaknesses. One might expect at least some difference.

Personally, I'd be happy with a constant adjustment based more on size, body type, strength, and then you get a weight/encumbrance system. Or just a weight system with some of those adjustments, and no slot counting per se.

As far as management, probably the best "reduction" advice I could offer would be, play an unarmed combat type. The trolls can tend to be throwers which stock up some stuff too. But that part gets easier later if they go Oka and/or find a ton of rocks.

[Shard1697]

Well off the bat, I'll admit I'm something of a packrat. I tend to fill up around Lair and constantly discard/stash and pick up. It's the worst if I didn't get an early smoking weapon, and grabbed all sorts of situational ones.

Like what? Early on I'll grab useful brands like elec and poison, but not more than one of each... and nothing redundant(eg: if I find a whip of elec, I'll basically just use that and drop anything else.)

[Eyesburn]

How do you deal with inventory clutter?

after sometime open the inventory and see which items you did use the least or never used and drop those.

[stoneychips]

Like what? Early on I'll grab useful brands like elec and poison, but not more than one of each... and nothing redundant(eg: if I find a whip of elec, I'll basically just use that and drop anything else.)

Maybe I don't like to rely on one skill too much, so I don't train deep enough faster, sometimes I dunno? But I often find that I'm picking up a combination of situational weapons (various brands) and things that might be powerful later, if only I had good things to combine with them or found something else in the same category, higher or lower level, with some more bonuses. So yes, weapons are the worst. Sure, if I have any short blades then the elec dagger will probably win most of the time at least for early game -- oh but what will I use against the skybeast? I tend to think like this, so when I see the poison needles (although that darn blow gun hasn't shown up yet....) or even a hand axe of flame, I'll grab those two... And so many things like hand axes, slings, tomahawks, polearms (if you're a a caster with a blocking spell) can sometimes come in handy early on under certain circumstances, I tend to accumulate weapons. Later on, I drop a lot of those but then I'll have a ton of wands and potions sitting around and I just hate to go back up earlier than I have to. By Lair, I stash 10-15 things if it's going well but by the end of Lair and shortly after Orc, it's usually much the same situation again with neater items.

I could swear the drop rate of poison needles went down, so I haven't relied on them quite so often anymore. And I don't use wand of slowing very much unless (maybe) I'm running more missiles, and in late game I find wand of random effects pretty risky. I can usually drop a lot of armor along the way and go back for it if needed; I figure there's rarely time to change on the fly anyway (others disagree, at least about shields). I do love my evocables (spiders, random-draw decks, lamps, boxes, rods) on any character with 0 or more in evocations aptitude, generally though...

[Brannock]

If my inventory is hitting max slots then that tells me one of two things: I'm either carrying stuff I don't actually need, or I'm not using my tools and consumables enough and making the game unnecessarily riskier.

The arbitrary number of slots does not quite make sense to me. I suppose there should be some upper limit, but shouldn't it have more to do with strength, species size and appendages, type of storage on your clothing (if such existed - but it would make more sense at least)... Everyone having the same flat number doesn't really click with a game where there are all sorts of other species strengths and weaknesses. One might expect at least some difference.

Personally, I'd be happy with a constant adjustment based more on size, body type, strength, and then you get a weight/encumbrance system. Or just a weight system with some of those adjustments, and no slot counting per se.

This appeals to my inner simulationist, but do you think it would make for good gameplay in Dungeon Crawl?

[dowan]

If my inventory is hitting max slots then that tells me one of two things: I'm either carrying stuff I don't actually need, or I'm not using my tools and consumables enough and making the game unnecessarily riskier.

So you're saying the dungeon only generates items as you need them? Or that the same amount of things are always generated?

If Game 1 features lots of wands of haste, acid, teleport, healing, every evokable under the sun, on a character using a ranged weapon and a staff to swap to, and all equipment slots, I am going to end up needing to drop things fairly often.

If game 2 is played with a felid where no good wands or evokables drop, and I'm just using my claws, I'm going to have a lot less incidence of needing to drop things. This does not signify I'm playing well in any way.

[Arrhythmia]

If game 2 is played with a felid where no good wands or evokables drop, and I'm just using my claws, I'm going to have a lot less incidence of needing to drop things. This does not signify I'm playing well in any way.

He didn't say that. He said that if you're hitting your inventory cap, then you're playing poorly. He didn't mention the converse, namely, if you're not hitting your inventory cap, then you're playing well.

[stoneychips]

This appeals to my inner simulationist, but do you think it would make for good gameplay in Dungeon Crawl?

Sounds like a loaded rhetorical question to me, where you've perhaps already made up your mind to scorn it.

Good gameplay is whatever people feel like it is. Some people would be happy with no mana pool at all to worry about; others wouldn't. Lots of people hated item weights but I think it was at least based on a sensible premise. One person ventures a reasoned opinion about one angle of the subject, and everyone pounces "Oh no don't you dare suggest they change this..." Whatever really.

If the game gives each species a whole row of adjustments for combat skills, at the least it wouldn't be that difficult to add one or two modifiers to carrying capacity. Not saying there has to be 200 pages of player's manual. I don't play that game anymore.

But at the other extreme, you get more arbitrary systems with fewer differences between the species. The encumberance now is much more in that direction, where everyone's basically the same capacity out of the blue. Which doesn't have the same flavor as playing different species to begin with, to me at least.

Of course, it doesn't make much sense to me that all purple orc wizards blink into melee left and right... Is it easier to muddle through the game that way than to give them a 10% Intelligence bonus or reduce how often they use Blink at least? For the players generally, sure. But there's a whole host of people also complaining that Crawl is far too easy (not that I'd make that my central argument; I'm more concerned about flavor). If "ease" is the bottom line though, somewhere down there a little further in that direction is Space Invaders. Very simple gameplay, very predictable, who needs separate species. Shrug. It doesn't bother me to death. Just saying. It would make more sense to me that if every other major physical attribute is measured (hunger, combat attributes, armour capacity), what's a little thought about carrying capacity next to all that. Unless you thought the game has too much simulation to begin with. In which case just don't agree, whatever but there's no "neutral" measure of what's better to go claiming moral high ground over.

Good? Bad? For what. It's just my opinion. Can the masses stand it? No idea. The real masses love Facebook, and at least some of them probably play Crawl and a few of those at least might just like to dump half the content and go hellbent in the other direction. Who knows, really (not sitting here with a bunch of polls). Point being: If they did, would that automatically make it "good". Not saying I'm here to ask for 20 more spell levels tomorrow... But hey, someone else might love that and think it was much more flavorful than boring tweaking encumbrance to something beyond a few armor and weapon slot bans.

[stoneychips]

If game 2 is played with a felid where no good wands or evokables drop, and I'm just using my claws, I'm going to have a lot less incidence of needing to drop things. This does not signify I'm playing well in any way.

He didn't say that. He said that if you're hitting your inventory cap, then you're playing poorly. He didn't mention the converse, namely, if you're not hitting your inventory cap, then you're playing well.

Isn't it also possible that at least sometimes you're playing the Felid, useful wands don't drop so much when you need them, and you don't overload the present fixed capacity (at least not mainly from wands, sometimes)? Or have things been tuned so much that it's a certain % wands by level X, now? While I tend to pick stuff up left and right, I don't play felids and I've only gotten around to Pakellas lately. I think there's still a fair chance of mismatch between the type of items you get and what you might better use, at least some proportion of the time (it's more obvious if you count up things like your early game casters sometimes getting small plus Str rings and no matching booster items and such well past Lair/Orc, or pick whichever mismatch scenario fits your class). Or are those just the ones that stick in my mind?

What was I originally trying to say.... There's more than one way to get to a stockpile of things, and it isn't always because you're playing horribly. Just as RNG can lead to getting just the items you need "almost when" you need them for a couple levels, and you burn them up cause wow you really needed them. It might be a sign of poor strategy or it might be 4 uniques and large trash packs in close proximity all on level what, 4-5 like I had the other day? Or maybe I'm just horrible. But I think RNG on item drops can also still play a big part. Then aren't there some people who have too much stored up because they're "too good'? Another logic test: I mean, what exactly did those 23 scrolls of teleportation in your inventory we see at endgame mean by that point? Did a player of your skills really need to fill up a whole slot and slow yourself down with those just to escape the Dungeon? Is that really necessarily? If you weren't showing off so much for so long, why you could have another wand of haste or rod of shadows or something!

And maybe it would have been "better" gameplay to show us you could do the last 10 levels with no inventory at all! That's real display of skill and accumulated power, isn't it.

[Arrhythmia]

If game 2 is played with a felid where no good wands or evokables drop, and I'm just using my claws, I'm going to have a lot less incidence of needing to drop things. This does not signify I'm playing well in any way.

He didn't say that. He said that if you're hitting your inventory cap, then you're playing poorly. He didn't mention the converse, namely, if you're not hitting your inventory cap, then you're playing well.

Isn't it also possible that at least sometimes you're playing the Felid, useful wands don't drop so much when you need them, and you don't overload the present fixed capacity (at least not mainly from wands, sometimes)? Or have things been tuned so much that it's a certain % wands by level X, now? While I tend to pick stuff up left and right, I don't play felids and I've only gotten around to Pakellas lately. I think there's still a fair chance of mismatch between the type of items you get and what you might better use, at least some proportion of the time (it's more obvious if you count up things like your early game casters sometimes getting small plus Str rings and no matching booster items and such well past Lair/Orc, or pick whichever mismatch scenario fits your class). Or are those just the ones that stick in my mind?

What was I originally trying to say.... There's more than one way to get to a stockpile of things, and it isn't always because you're playing horribly. Just as RNG can lead to getting just the items you need "almost when" you need them for a couple levels, and you burn them up cause wow you really needed them. It might be a sign of poor strategy or it might be 4 uniques and large trash packs in close proximity all on level what, 4-5 like I had the other day? Or maybe I'm just horrible. But I think RNG on item drops can also still play a big part. Then aren't there some people who have too much stored up because they're "too good'? Another logic test: I mean, what exactly did those 23 scrolls of teleportation in your inventory we see at endgame mean by that point? Did a player of your skills really need to fill up a whole slot and slow yourself down with those just to escape the Dungeon? Is that really necessarily? If you weren't showing off so much for so long, why you could have another wand of haste or rod of shadows or something!

And maybe it would have been "better" gameplay to show us you could do the last 10 levels with no inventory at all! That's real display of skill and accumulated power, isn't it.

I'm a little confused by what you're saying, but I think both of our theses aren't that different. You say that "it would have been "better" gameplay to show us you could do the last 10 levels with no inventory at all", and I'd agree (to a point, not with the part about having no inventory but with the spirit of having a much more diminished inventory), but not because you've willfully gone without items, but because you've been using them about as quickly as they've been spawning.

[Brannock]

The idea is to use your stuff to prevent any chance of your ever getting into a bad situation, not to save your ass from a bad situation. Ounce of prevention, pound of cure, etc etc. Of course there will be some games where you just get overwhelmed with pickups and fill up your inventory anyway.

[lethediver]

Well, it would be a player buff to have an unlimited inventory, which is generally undesirable. Stacking wands, goldifying food, doing away with books all would help a little bit, but I suspect to some degree you're supposed to have to choose sometimes, rather than just carry everything. I wouldn't say it's bad design, but I disagree if someone claims there's never a need to make a choice, and if you run out of inventory space it's just because you're tending to your OCD.

My problem is that that crawl doesnt just encourage careful inventory pruning, but also heavy stash management/loadout juggling. If items disappeared when you dropped them this wouldnt be a problem, if hunger clock was real this wouldnt be a problem, if unavoidable jellies occasionally consumed your stashes this wouldnt be a problem. Its the particular intersection of permanently safe stashes, niche-yet-extremely-situationally-useful-items (scroll of silence/noise/vulnerability/MR-/torment/flight sources/rCorr/etc) and the fact that inventory space is like 80% as big as it would need to be for most PCs to be satisfied with their loadouts.

Frankly, by the time most players have a bad ass, inventory-cluttering assemblage of items, the game is more or less won. Inventory clutter doesn't enter into the game before that point and serves no real purpose after. If a good player NEEDS an item to safely navigate a branch he WILL return to his stash to get it, and (sighing) perform the taxing series of mental calculations needed to re-jigger his inventory until it is ideal. All the inventory limit really achieves is cause this to happen with more regularity than it needs to.

[goodcoolguy]

re: Inventory clutter as a matter of balance/design, the best possible changes involve removing items and making items stack. In terms of reducing the annoyance of dealing with inventory overflow issues, marginal slot reduction brought about through stacking or removing items increases exponentially with the number of slots reduced, until the problem simply ceases to exist.

To that end, make all items, especially wands, that could conceivably stack stack. Only one kind of food. Make Fedhas use inedible special purpose items, say cacti, remove all species food conducts, if you have to keep monster eating, only allow the player to eat directly off the corpse. (Better of course is removing food altogether.) If influential people think royal jellies and/or pizza are funny, make all food pizza and make royal jelly a pizza flavor. Funny!

[stoneychips]

I'm a little confused by what you're saying, but I think both of our theses aren't that different. You say that "it would have been "better" gameplay to show us you could do the last 10 levels with no inventory at all", and I'd agree (to a point, not with the part about having no inventory but with the spirit of having a much more diminished inventory), but not because you've willfully gone without items, but because you've been using them about as quickly as they've been spawning.

Probably me trying to do too much in one post. I was partly still nervous about Brannock's "good gameplay" reference. To me it isn't very specific, and could sort of mean whatever quality one happens to feel is missing in a game. The line about ten levels with no inventory was actually meant to be a touch sarcastic (I do think it should be possible to make a point drawing upon what most would consider a more 'crazy' example without being nasty). But you saying it's actually something of a good test, sort of demonstrates that, too.

I do realize Crawl has been through at least one version of weight system and designers may have little interest in going there again soon. However, reading this thread sort of helped me realize that having the same number of slots in all situations has actually, slowly been nagging me a bit as I play. I don't think it's a particular fixation with the number at hand, so much as this general feeling that it being one fixed number doesn't relate to anything else in the game world so well. I can't explain to myself why I'm always worrying about the same number of slots so much, having no control over it and wondering sort of whether it's that interesting to be constantly gathering and dropping always to deal with that same very arbitrary number.

I don't think I'm "bad" for being a packrat there anymore than I think I'm bad in this other world for keeping quite a few maps and currencies and business cards for cities I'm not currently in, but might be next month or next year. They do take up space and I don't ever use all of them and can't make it ten map books, but I know what sorts of baggage choices I can make with my body size and where those things fit in that system. Now I'm not wishing for that much from Crawl actually, but some level of modifications and control would be better imo. Personally, I do see I'm doing an awful lot of choosing and managing in a load environment where it doesn't seem to have a lot of obvious rhyme or reason to the parameters I'm given. Now that I think about it. Sure I can do it plenty, but it's probably the least interesting part of the game. I thought limited ammunition and item weights were actually much better immersion, personally. And for me, that sort of seamless immersion is a part of 'good' playability. That's all.

Now, if you say you make it your goal to only use stuff "just in time" never to have a full bag (or empty, or whatever really), well sure that can be all you need to make a whole nother sort of game out of the given system.

[4Hooves2Appendages]

Make Fedhas use inedible special purpose items, say cacti

I would prefer it just changed to piety, or maybe to corpses?

[Shard1697]

Special item called "Seeds" which Fedhas gifts you intermittently. Bring an end to buying all fruit from food shops, using ?acquire on fruit every time, and praying for vaults with fruit in them

[goodcoolguy]

Hm, yes, seeds... that is good.

[Sar]

Bring an end to buying all fruit from food shops, using ?acquire on fruit every time, and praying for vaults with fruit in them

but those are the fun parts of playing with Fedhas