Container-less Powdered goods

[Vastin]

Most of the powdered goods in the game are far smaller than the containers that hold them.

You can save an enormous volume of inventory space by emptying out every cardboard box or bottle of cereal, flour, salt, and so forth that you find and stuffing them all loose into your pockets, backpack, or trunk space.

1. It is odd that most of the cardboard boxes are so much bigger than the things they hold (a good rule of thumb seems to be 1l for a box, 0.25 for its contents)

2. Most ‘powered goods’ would be rendered just as contaminated and useless as liquids if you just dumped them out, and probably should be treated similarly.

[Gnorse]

i like to think that powdered goods arent directly in a cardboardbox, they are actually in a much smaller container IN a carboard box
say, the cardboard box was the container that the goods got shipped with, so it had like 5 as much
but through use/selling whatever, only that amount remained
so when you empty the box, you are pretty much taking the powder INSIDE a container

did this make any sense whatsoever

[Vastin]

Sort of. I could also technically mash the contents of an entire box of cheerios down to a much more compact form - dont think they’d count as cheerios any more after that however.

[Kadian]

Gnorses Idea doesn’t hold up though, as the powdered goods in STORES have the same amount as houses do. I can accept that the cardboard boxes in houses would be used and therefore only have a small-ish amount left, but unopened containers from a store? Yah, not so much, those would be filled to the top, more or less anyways.

The thing with the powdered goods is actually a long-time joke by now. I remember drawings of people with a shopping cart full of powder (usually gunpowder), which is already an oxymoron, but then the character in the drawings is able to burrow through the gunpowder in order to grab exactly one portion of clean, usable flour or something similar.

[RedPine]

So basically you want “powder” to be a new kind of “liquid”, except it’s usually stored in boxes instead of tanks. I suppose that would make sense, but it seems like just an unnecessary complication to inventory management. Assuming containers hold the same volume of powder as their own volume, or close to it, there would be no gameplay difference between 2L of flour and a 2L box of flour (for example). It would also be quite awkward and tedious to be filling dozens of cardboard boxes with 200 flour. It’s probably best to just abstract and handwave the powder problem in most cases.

If chemistry gets an overhaul then I could see volatile chemicals requiring proper storage.

If flour was given a spoilage date, perhaps it could be preserved indefinitely by storing it in a large container like a crate or a canvass sack. Then storing a powder in a container would have more of a gameplay impact as the player crafts and finds containers that preserve powdered foods. Otherwise, for non perishable non volatile powders, storage for powders wouldn’t make sense.

[Shopkeeper]

It’s a gameism mechanic/non-complexity thing. Flour along with various other powdered goods and some foods like cereal aren’t just jammed into cardboard boxes, they’re packaged in plastic bags then put into those boxes for sale. When you take out the contents of a cardboard box you’re removing the plastic bag which is much smaller and more easily compacted then a rigid box, letting you fit more stuff into the same volume.

Or at least that’s how I assumed it was handled for simplicity’s sake. Seriously suggesting that loose powders should get contaminated by vermin or the environment adds nothing but tedium and micromanagement, it’s the exact same logic that led into the filthy clothes debacle.

[Kadian]

I imagine similar things as shopkeeper does - I however usually put all the powders, depending on their usage, into a container of some description, be it the kitchen unit or welding rig in a vehicle or into a cabinet or something similar in a house. The reason behind it is simple: Those containers usually have drawers, or compartments, which can be used to store a certain kind of powder and blocks contamination with other powders. I’m also using the packaging mod, which lets you create MRE-like packages of a certain powder, flour for example, which you can dissassemble quite fast, if you need some flour. That helps too.

By the way: Making powders like a liquid would most likely need an inventory overhaul, as a lot - a whole lot - of things would need to be changed. And the coders and contributors just aren’t interested in an overhaul of the inventory system, so that’s out of the question anyways. Especially with the last few…hiccups which needs to get fixed first.

[Vastin]

[quote=“Shopkeeper, post:6, topic:13153”]It’s a gameism mechanic/non-complexity thing. Flour along with various other powdered goods and some foods like cereal aren’t just jammed into cardboard boxes, they’re packaged in plastic bags then put into those boxes for sale. When you take out the contents of a cardboard box you’re removing the plastic bag which is much smaller and more easily compacted then a rigid box, letting you fit more stuff into the same volume.

Or at least that’s how I assumed it was handled for simplicity’s sake. Seriously suggesting that loose powders should get contaminated by vermin or the environment adds nothing but tedium and micromanagement, it’s the exact same logic that led into the filthy clothes debacle.[/quote]

Ah, see, I was thinking more in the other direction. Right now most packaged goods take up about 0.25 liters, while the box they are in takes up 1L. Moreover, the unpackaged good will stack, while the boxes will not. Thus every time I’m going through a grocery store, I spend most of my UI time unboxing everything that I take of the shelves before storing it. Logistical tedium is exactly the problem.

I was thinking that perhaps the boxes should be the same size as their contents (~0.25L), so that this kind of tedious un-packaging methodology isn’t necessary.

Making the contents behave more like liquids would also make sense - but I don’t actually care about that, I just thought the image of a survivor stuffing raw flour into every corner of their backpack was odd.

[Kadian]

the boxes are that big because they are supposed to hold a liter of stuff. I’m pretty sure that some random stuff in cardboard boxes also ue those whole 1 liter of space. The main issue is actually one of the following:

a) The game isn’t filling up the whole cardboard box. Flour has 10 charges per unit, 1 unit being roughly .25 Liter, which is 1 unit of volume. Logically, a full cardboard box would have 40 charges of flour then, not 10. This also happens to cornmeal and similar powders. I don’t exactly know why though, considering that the Game fills up liquid-containers without problems - plastic bottles (volume 2), glass bottles (vol3), wooden kegs (vol…400 I think?) are all filled properly - that is, the game fills ALL the volume up with that certain something. Weirdly enough, this doesn’t seem to be the case for powders, or actually non-liquids in general.

b) The game only has 1 type of cardboard box. The 1 Liter variant. This actually bugged me for a long time: The game has only very limited and standardized containers. You ONLY have half liter plastic bottles, you ONLY have 3-quarter glass bottles, you ONLY have a 1 liter cardboard box. I for one would be happy to see other sizes added to the game - the famous 1 liter plastic bottle, which is widely used for all kind of softdrinks for example, or half-liter glass bottles for beer. Or said smaller cardboard boxes for certain powders.

[Gnorse]

[quote=“Shopkeeper, post:6, topic:13153”]It’s a gameism mechanic/non-complexity thing. Flour along with various other powdered goods and some foods like cereal aren’t just jammed into cardboard boxes, they’re packaged in plastic bags then put into those boxes for sale. When you take out the contents of a cardboard box you’re removing the plastic bag which is much smaller and more easily compacted then a rigid box, letting you fit more stuff into the same volume.

Or at least that’s how I assumed it was handled for simplicity’s sake. Seriously suggesting that loose powders should get contaminated by vermin or the environment adds nothing but tedium and micromanagement, it’s the exact same logic that led into the filthy clothes debacle.[/quote]
there you go, that’s what i’ve been trying to say in my post but couldnt find the right words

[Weyrling]

Containers actually being full would be nice, as-is I basically just wander into a grocery store and start hitting U-0 a lot and just leave boxes and bags all over the place, it’s weird to imagine just emptying everything into my backpack instead of just grabbing stuff.

Equalizing the volume of containers and stuff in them is what I’d prefer over needing to juggle several kinds of containers and things, since inventory management is already a problem for me past the early game.

[KliPeH]

Containers actually being full would be nice, as-is I basically just wander into a grocery store and start hitting U-0 a lot and just leave boxes and bags all over the place, it’s weird to imagine just emptying everything into my backpack instead of just grabbing stuff.

Agreed. I also think containers should be full, especially the cardboard boxes you find in grocery stores. Makes sense for a container not to be full if it was dropped off a zombie, doesn’t make sense when you’re basically looting grocery store shelves of half-filled boxes. If distinguishing between zombie drops and building loot that way is a problem, just fill all containers up by default.

Alternatively, if this change hurts game balance (e.g spawning double the flour or double the sugar is too rewarding), cut the container size in half and fill it up that way. I don’t recall anybody advising me to store food in cardboard boxes and I’ve certainly never done it myself, so I don’t think it would impact the game too much.

[Kadian]

You’d have to cut the container size to a fourth, not half in order to have it completely full. One could, however, change the flour (and other powders) so that they come with more charges and take up 4 units of volume instead of one. For example, Flour comes in 10 Charges per Unit, and those 10 charges take up 1 volume. You could make 40 charges out of it and up the volume to 4, therefore filling up the cardboard boxes.

Messing with the Cardboard Box in general is a bad Idea, as it is used by a lot of different things as packaging, and it could bug out with things which take up 4 units in volume. The game probably would spawn in empty cardboard boxes because 0 units of the 4-volume item can fit into a 1 or 2 volume cardboard box.

Also, having half full, nearly empty and completely full cardboard boxes won’t work. The system works like this: You have a random item, for example Cheap Wine. In the json of said Item is a container written down in which it will always spawn in. In our example it’s the Gallon Jug, which you can find in the World. As it stands, the game should always try to completely fill up the container with that one Item, and this one item with it’s container is used in all the spawn lists. Thats why you never find dark cola in plastic bottles or so, it’s only in cans because that’s how the system works.
I would assume that one needs to redo the whole system in order to make it a random amount of item X in container Y. That would probably also go hand in hand with other inventory overhauls, and those are a loong ways away.