The Tavern

There's been a lot of discussion and radical proposals about making inventory management less tedious, I thought I'd pitch in some less radical and hopefully less controversial ideas that could maybe be implemented in the meantime, since inventory reform seems to be a pretty heated topic that might take a while to sort out (if it ever happens).

There are a bunch of ideas here, but they all come from the same core premise: it is optimal to walk around with a full inventory most of the time, because inventory slots can essentially represent tactical options in combat and having more tactical options is better. However, walking around with a full inventory leads to some annoying scenarios. Most of these scenarios either involve some awkward inventory shuffling when you find a new item you might want, or auto-explore being annoying with autopickup when your inventory's full. I think putting all of these changes in would make having a full inventory vastly less annoying.

1. Allow ID scrolls to be used on items on the floor. If I find an unidentified item while my inventory is full, and I want to identify it with a scroll, it is currently a 4-step process: I have to drop a different item, pick it up, use a scroll on it, the determine if I want to keep it or swap it again for the item I dropped. If you could ID items that are on the floor, the first two steps of this process would be eliminated.

2. Make items that auto-ID on pickup (wands and books) auto-ID when you step on them instead. Similar to change 1. Finding an unIDed wand or book with a full inventory is a 3-step process (drop something else, pickup to ID, determine which to keep) that could be reduced to a one-step process.

3. Let scrolls and potions be used from the ground. Another "turn a 4-step process (drop item, pick up consumable, use consumable, pick up dropped item) into a one-step process (use consumable)" suggestion. Food already works this way, why not potions and scrolls?

4. Make the "cannot pick up item" prompts for autoexplore happen when you land on the item, instead of when you try to autoexplore while standing on the item. I think this one's a bit more debatable, might work better as an rc file option. Right now, every time you auto-explore while your inventory is full and encounter and item on autopickup, it interrupts auto-explore. If you try to auto-explore again, it prompts you whether you want to continue or not. Personally, I would find it better and less awkward if it prompted me at the end of the autoexplore when I landed on the item, instead of when trying to start an explore while standing on it.

5. Add a third option to the "cannot pick up item" autoexplore prompt that turns off auto-pickup for the item. The "cannot pick up item" message it also annoying when it's an item that you don' want. This can be solved by going into the menu and micromanaging your auto-explore options, but sometimes I forget or my preferences change. It would be nice if, when encountering the prompt, I could have a third option besides "yes" or "no" for "no, and turn off autopickup for this item" to make things a bit simpler. This way, I don't have to periodically dig through the autopickup menu to modify my changes, and instead can just respond appropriately when the prompt shows up.

6. Add an option to let chunks be picked up automatically upon butchering, but not on autopickup. It's nice to have chunks automatically get picked up when I butcher something if I have room. It's annoying if I leave chunks behind because my inventory's full and autoexplore prompts me about it. I'd like to have an option where chunks get picked automatically when I butcher something if I have room, but are otherwise ignored.

(5) refers to turning off pickup for that item type, yes? saying 'n' already turns off autopickup for individual items, so I assume that's not what you mean, but I'm just making sure.

also, I'm pretty sure (2) breaks autopickup (more than it's already broken)

Yeah these are mostly good but I do make use of say, autopickup grabbing unid rings but not rings of wizardry. That way I get one ring of wizardry if I want it but don't pick up any more. Maybe that's not ideal play but it's what I do.

Yes, that is correct. So if autoexplore complains about not being able to pick up a wand of magic darts, and I pick the new third option, autopickup would turn off for wands of magic darts, rather than just ignoring that particular wand of magic darts on the ground.



This could probably be solved, but yeah, that is an issue I hadn't considered. Having to pickup a book just to ID it when there's a 99% chance you're going to drop it (even if you need a spell, you can memorize it from the floor) is annoying though.



Nothing I described goes against that. I do similar messing with my autopickup settings. I'm not saying to restrict any of the current autopickup customization, just make it easier to modify in response to rejecting an autopickup when your inventory is full.

I especially want 5.

I suggest ctrl-d for drop and remove from autopickup and move macro management to ctrl-m, since nothing seems to use ctrl-m and it is more intuitive than ctrl-d.

Really good ideas, many thanks for the list!

I see two ways to make "use foo on floor item" work. Either the inventory listing starts with an entry that allows toggling to floor items, e.g.
_ - list unidentified items on floor.
Or we list unidentified floor items in a separate section. That has the advantage of not needing the toggle, but I am not sure whether the floor section should come first or last.

We have been talking here about a general change to dropping: if you drop something, it gets set to no-autopickup. (I forgot who came up with this idea, I think it's great and should go in.) Again, one could argue whether a separate "drop and remove from autopickup list" command (as tabstorm proposes with Ctrl-D) is better, or perhaps we're better off with just modifying the drop command. (The advantage of the Ctrl-D command is that there's no possibility of errors, like accidentally or temporarily dropping an item and then having to use \ to get them back to autopickup. On the other hand, using a new command makes it less likely that players will actually enjoy the new convenience.)

Along with 5, it would be nice if the misc category in particular had more granularity. Just because I'll happily carry a disc of storms, doesn't mean I want to pick up every plain deck I see. Once I've decided not to pick up a CBoE, it's pretty safe to assume I don't want to pick up the next one I see, either.

Also missiles. In my last game I had storm bow so I decided to ignore poison/flaming/freezing arrows to save some inventory slots. The most annoying monsters were Centaurs, it's so time consuming to press "o" and "y" for every tile which contains branded arrow.

With the recent change to autopickup anything stackable in inventory, it does make a lot of sense to make dropping something just take it off autopickup.
I do see a potential issue with wands though. Just because I throw away a wand of fire with 0 charges doesn't mean I don't want to pick up the next one I see. But if I throw away a wand of flame that's not empty it would be good if they did get taken off auto-pickup.

The Ctrl+D option keeps that from being an issue, but the way I drop things as an offline tiles player is to shift click in my inventory. It would be nice if I could have access to this new functionality with the same convenience that I currently have dropping things directly from my inventory grid. Maybe ctrl+shift+click?

I think, if 1-3 on my list do get implemented, there won't be a big concern, since I think those would eliminate about 90% of the cases for temporarily dropping items (at least for me).

On the other hand, if those don't get implemented, I would definitely find it annoying to have to make sure I never drop anything that I want on autopickup when I'm doing a temporary drop just to ID a book or use an acquirement scroll or something.

But then you'd just pick it back up, re-autopickup-ing it, right?

The only things that matters for are non stackables that you'd want to auto pickup. That's just wands and rods, right?

That's a valid point. I haven't actually played in 0.17 yet, so I forgot about about auto-pickup or stackables. In that case wands and rings are probably the only non-stackable things that I might drop temporarily but still want on autopickup.

I don't understand what you're saying. It doesn't help that you suddenly say 'unidentified' for no reason.

Here's how I see it: pressing \ in any inventory-menu toggles between items in your inventory, and items on the ground.

This can apply to many screens: q, r, V, F, and "identify/enchant/eat what?"

This way, the ground is always available for 'use' at the touch of a button, but never interrupts you if you don't plan to.

(It could even apply to w, W, P screens if you add the prompt "Your inventory is full. Drop your (item to be taken off)?" or, if you're not wearing a competing item that can be dropped, simply "You can't, your inventory is full.")