Inventory Management Overview

[Pollen_Golem]

1-9 doesn't work in crawl because they're used for dropping multiple items

D'oh!

Probably dropping multiple items should be removed, it makes no sense in 0.16 (except when entering trove).

Nah, leave it in, it can be useful sometimes (you need 1 ?mapping, 1 !berserk, 1 ?rc, 1 phantom mirror, you take some plain arrows you plan to leave behind, etc.)

[dowan]

Probably dropping multiple items should be removed, it makes no sense in 0.16 (except when entering trove).

Nah, leave it in, it can be useful sometimes (you need 1 ?mapping, 1 !berserk, 1 ?rc, 1 phantom mirror, you take some plain arrows you plan to leave behind, etc.)

When does it ever make sense to drop some items from a stack? In what situation would you want to have 1 ?mapping, 1!berserk, but not 2? Why would you want 100 arrows, but not 1000? Even for a trove, why would you want to do this?

[johlstei]

Probably dropping multiple items should be removed, it makes no sense in 0.16 (except when entering trove).

Nah, leave it in, it can be useful sometimes (you need 1 ?mapping, 1 !berserk, 1 ?rc, 1 phantom mirror, you take some plain arrows you plan to leave behind, etc.)

When does it ever make sense to drop some items from a stack? In what situation would you want to have 1 ?mapping, 1!berserk, but not 2? Why would you want 100 arrows, but not 1000? Even for a trove, why would you want to do this?

I dunno I guess you could bring only four magic mapping into pan and then you can free up the slot to pick something else in the unique pan lord floor? Pretty niche but possibly enough to keep the feature around for?

[Pollen_Golem]

1 mapping for when you're diving to the bottom of a branch.
1 berserk or phantom mirror for when you're going back to kill a unique you left somewhere.
100 arrows instead of 1000 for when you're going to waterworld: just ditch them after killing everything.
1 rc for ossuary/tomb (but that's changed now)
I'm only using these examples because that's what I have done to make sure my inventory will 'open up' for taking loot.
For a trove I would just do something simplistic like "d!" to drop all my potions before entering.

[Sandman25]

For trove I meant that you can drop all but N potions of heal wounds when trove entrance fee is N potions of heal wounds so you can enter the trove with 15 empty slots instead of 16.

[Pollen_Golem]

I don't see the point of doing such a strangely specific action when you can free up ~10 spaces in a couple of keystrokes, by dropping all wands/scrolls/missiles/etc. After all:

In the case of stacks of items, the trove will only take as many as it's asking for if you have more than the required amount.

[dowan]

He's saying if you had 10 hw pots, and the trove wanted 9, if you go in with 10, now you've still got 1 taking up a slot that could better be filled with sweet, sweet trove treasure!

[PleasingFungus]

Also books can, I think, be safely "rune-ified." (In case this is unclear to people, runes used to be items that you had to physically pick up and carry in your inventory, whereas now you pick them up and they are permanently carried with you, without taking up inventory space.)

I just did a count on two mid- to late game characters with close to full inventories, and rune-ifying currently equipped gear, missile weapons, books, and food would free up about 16 or 17 slots for me. So, net loss of 10, which would be manageable. Nemelex might become more annoying with this change, but perhaps that can be mitigated some other way, idk.

Decks are probably going to cease to be items at some point, regardless of any larger changes. (My strong suspicion is that they're going to be exclusive to Nemelex and live in the abilities menu in some form or another.)

Apologies for the tangent. I like the idea of considerably shrinking the inventory, though it's extremely nontrivial and probably best accomplished by steps.

[Quazifuji]

I don't see the point of doing such a strangely specific action when you can free up ~10 spaces in a couple of keystrokes, by dropping all wands/scrolls/missiles/etc. After all:

In the case of stacks of items, the trove will only take as many as it's asking for if you have more than the required amount.

I've dropped partial stacks of items before going into a Ziggurat before so that if I need to make some space I can drop the remainder without losing everything I have (e.g. drop most of my remove curse scrolls, keep a few in case I weild-ID something cursed, but I can always drop what I bring if I need the space knowing that I'm not dropping every rc scroll the game has generated). Admittedly, that's probably unecessary since I'll eventually have to make room for the partial stack when I get back outside of the Zig anyway, and unless it was the depths Zig I'm gonna have to abandon all but 52 of the items I have either way. So maybe that's a moot point.

Anyway, whether dropping partial stacks is useful or not, I think it's reasonable to say that maybe it doesn't deserve 9 keys allocated to it. Maybe there could be a single key that, when used, prompts you for how many of a stack you want to drop?

Granted, that's only valuable if there's a desire to add 9 more inventory slots anyway. It seems like the stronger leaning might be to reduce the number of necessary inventory slots and shrink the inventory instead.

[svendre]

To clarify a question asked what I meant about getting an item by type:

User types "g" now, they get a list of all items from all categories, with limited space for letters and then the player must page through all items. Sometimes items of a particular category get split into multiple pages. It works, but it gets messy.

What I was describing is a filter such as instead of pressing "g", maybe they press "G!" and the screen displays only potions laying on the ground, then the selection process as it currently exists continues. It would be a minor improvement, mainly dealing with stashes.. eliminates the temptation to make multiple piles.

While I found some of the ideas interesting, such as lowering the number of items that need to go into inventory in the first place, these ideas would change the game in more ways. Saying that having a large stash bag of sorts that took time to access would give infinite inventory is only marginally true and depends on the disadvantage required to access the stash. The fact is, currently as-is, you can build a stash.... it is helpful, but tedious. My proposal barely changes the game as-is but simply removes the tedium out of what you can already do.

To leave the game even more intact as-is than the stash bag is to simply be able to mark items by type as being "strategic" much in the same way you choose what to auto-pickup or not. So, at least then whenever your inventory fills up, you just press the "D" button for "drop all marked item types set for auto-drop" and make a few poo-piles around the place instead of a stash and you auto-clear out 2/3rds or more of your inventory. Even if you continue to make one centralized stash, this would ease the tedium quite a bit, without affecting game balance one tiny bit, pure interface change... and an optional one that people don't have to use if they don't want to. It doesn't confuse newer players, because they just don't use the command until they are ready to dive into the more advanced commands.

I'm possibly interested in more radical changes, but would rather promote something that doesn't tamper too much with existing game balance, yet makes the game more fun - something that has more of a chance to get implemented quickly without a huge revamp/rethink of the entire game balance.