separate inventory for worn items

[bhauth]

Inventory management in DCSS is annoying. This issue could be reduced by having a separate inventory space for equipped items.

With this system, when you go to drop an item, only non-equipped items are shown; you must take items off before dropping them if using the keyboard controls. When you take off items, the key depends on equipment slot instead of the item, and if your main inventory is full then you get a failure message.

[duvessa]

if your main inventory is full then you get a failure message.

> fire giant comes into view
> try to take off ring of ice
> "your inventory is full"

[Doesnt]

I believe Angband and the games built on it do something like that, and if you take off an item with a full inventory it lands on the floor? Been a long while since I played a band though.

Probably easier to just have one inventory for consumables and another for weapons/armor/jewellery.

[RoGGa]

Interesting!
It got me to think of a variant that "worn items" could be attributed to the numbers: 0-9

The only issue I can foresee is for Octopods; they would be limited to wearing 6 rings ...and it would trump the idea of them ever wearing scarves.

[VeryAngryFelid]

Having to remember yet another command and having to always keep an inventory slot empty (meaning you need to manually check if your inventory is full after autopickup gives you another item) just to see 42 items instead of 52 in drop item menu is not an improvement IMHO.

[svendre]

My solution was defining a maximum # of items per category. There is an old thread about it.

[duvessa]

I believe Angband and the games built on it do something like that, and if you take off an item with a full inventory it lands on the floor?

> fire giant comes into view
> take off ring of Yiff {Ice rPois rElec rN+++ MR++ Slay+6 Dex+8}
> You hear a sizzling splash.

[PseudoLoneWolf]

I believe Angband and the games built on it do something like that, and if you take off an item with a full inventory it lands on the floor?

> fire giant comes into view
> take off ring of Yiff {Ice rPois rElec rN+++ MR++ Slay+6 Dex+8}
> You hear a sizzling splash.

> Why would you want to do that?

[Siegurt]

I believe Angband and the games built on it do something like that, and if you take off an item with a full inventory it lands on the floor?

> fire giant comes into view
> take off ring of Yiff {Ice rPois rElec rN+++ MR++ Slay+6 Dex+8}
> You hear a sizzling splash.

> Why would you want to do that?

Because you don't want to wear a ring with rF- when facing a fire giant? ("Ice" Implies the ice enhancer ring, which comes with rC+/rF-)

[Berder]

It doesn't have to land on the floor. You can have your equipped items as a-z, and your wearable but not equipped items as a different a-z. There can be as many different categories as you like: armor, weapons, jewelry, evocables, ammo, staves, scrolls, potions, each with their own namespace. There can also be a combined inventory screen for dropping things or perusing your entire inventory, that is lettered in a repeating fashion allowing more than 52 items, like the spell library or a ctrl-F screen.

[Stonar]

I mean, yeah, there's no reason as far as I can tell that the inventory is 52 slots other than "that's how many letters there are, lower- and upper- case." But a lot of people seem attached to that fact, so here we are. I personally don't see why we couldn't just remove inventory limits. Most people will still drop stuff they don't care about, because who wants to sort through all that?

[duvessa]

It doesn't have to land on the floor. You can have your equipped items as a-z, and your wearable but not equipped items as a different a-z.

And what happens when you take off an equipped item and your a-z for not-equipped items is full? Does it fail to unequip, does it get dropped, or does it temporarily increase your limit for non-equipped items? None of these options are good; I gave examples of problems with the first two, and temporarily increasing your inventory limit should be self-evidently bad.

I personally don't see why we couldn't just remove inventory limits.

Because it would massively slow down gameplay.

[bel]

I don't like the proposal. Doesn't seem to change the situation in any meaningful way.

Really, 52 slots is enough to carry everything you want.

[Stonar]

Because it would massively slow down gameplay.

How?

I see three cases:

1) People who prefer to keep their inventory light. For the most part, these players can deal currently. However, there is the annoying interaction where autoexplore is blocked by an autopickup item, it prompts you to pick it up, you have to say no, find an item you don't like, drop it, pick up the item, move on. In a world with no inventory limits, you save at least 2 keystrokes - you still have to find the item you don't like and drop it, but there's no stoppage in the meantime. Otherwise, the game is largely the same. (Also, sure, there are changes you can make to autopickup settings and all that... but there's no reason expanding inventory limits would change that.)

2) People who want to horde everything. We already have systems to limit crazy switching of items, and unless we start caring about raw turncount more than we currently do, there's really no difference between dropping an item on the floor or keeping it with you. These are the people that keep proposing ways to increase their inventory limits, through goldifying food or Nemelex cards, or whatever. These are the people spending a bunch of time running across the dungeon to pick up some thing they dropped half a world away. Surely, letting these people carry the stuff they care about takes less time than having to run across the dungeon all the time to twiddle themselves into the perfect outfit.

3) New players. This IS somewhat of an issue, though default autopickup settings go a long way to messaging "This is the stuff you should be carrying around with you, maybe think twice about the rest of the stuff." Plus, it's a problem you can solve once you care to, and once you understand it's a problem, you can solve it the way that fits you best.

And finally, none of this would eliminate the fact that you SHOULDN'T need to carry 52 items around with you, and design can continue to eliminate things that aren't really useful in the game. There's no reason why we couldn't change this AND strive for item design that creates meaningful choices without bogging you down so much.

(And yes, I agree, nobody needs to carry more than 52 items around with them to win the game, but in my mind, that doesn't really have anything to do with the issue, which is simply a QoL problem.)

[duvessa]

Because most players would carry way more than 52 items (they'd be stupid not to), greatly increasing the amount of equipment swapping as well as the time it takes to pick out any specific item (because you're scrolling through more items and can no longer rely on a single key corresponding to a single item). Even offline players that manage items with the mouse would be slowed down because their inventory would end up needing a scroll bar or multiple pages.

[bel]

It's not clear how best to implement an infinite inventory. If I understand you correctly, you're proposing that there be multiple pages of inventory, and by pressing spacebar, you can scroll through them, and label items on each page with "a-z A-Z"?

One of the disadvantages of this proposal is that it breaks a direct link between an inventory letter and an item. So, suppose you have two pages of full inventory. And you label the second page as "a-z A-Z" as well. Then the item on the second page full inventory has an "effective" inventory letter of <space> followed by an inventory letter. But not always: if you only access the potion menu, all your potions might fit on one page -- then two potions may have the same "letter". And what happens when you need to rearrange items?

Basically, an infinite inventory is workable, but it's too much trouble to bother with, and for negligible rewards.

[Fingolfin]

Alternatively : remove evocables as items, instead add them to the ability menu upon pickup

[Berder]

By the way is there any setting that says "if I deliberately drop all of a certain item, don't autopickup it again"? I find it a pain to keep dropping wands of flame, random effects, scrolls of enchant armor/weapon, etc every time my inventory gets full, and it's also a pain to go into the item list to disable autopickup for those items manually.

[Berder]

It's not clear how best to implement an infinite inventory. If I understand you correctly, you're proposing that there be multiple pages of inventory, and by pressing spacebar, you can scroll through them, and label items on each page with "a-z A-Z"?

One of the disadvantages of this proposal is that it breaks a direct link between an inventory letter and an item. So, suppose you have two pages of full inventory. And you label the second page as "a-z A-Z" as well. Then the item on the second page full inventory has an "effective" inventory letter of <space> followed by an inventory letter. But not always: if you only access the potion menu, all your potions might fit on one page -- then two potions may have the same "letter". And what happens when you need to rearrange items?

Basically, an infinite inventory is workable, but it's too much trouble to bother with, and for negligible rewards.

If you're talking about what I said, I proposed using a labeling system like the spell library only for dropping items or perusing the entire inventory. The labels in this case would not be configurable by the player.

Under other circumstances you only need to look at a specific category such as jewelry, and these categories would be in separate namespaces. Each item would have a fixed letter within its namespace that the player could configure.

[bel]

I don't know who proposed what. But as I said, that proposal would sever the link between an item and its inventory letter. A potion having two different letters in two different contexts would be very confusing.

I don't really see the gain which follows such pain.

Comparing it to spell library doesn't really work. For a spell, you memorize it once, and then it's part of your memorized spells -- it has a fixed letter.