One problem I’ve encountered in-game, especially during the winter, is that it’s difficult for melee-centered characters to quickly drop encumbering items/clothes before combat because setting down and picking up a large number of items takes so long.
If items were actually stored in wearable items (clothing, backpacks) instead of just placed into total inventory, and worn items had individual storage instead of just adding to total numerical storage, the player would be able to drop a backpack in one turn and pick it up in another. Pressing (i) would bring up a list of worn clothing items, and the player would need to select the place that they wanted to look. Pressing [g] to pick up an item would open a similar screen in which the player would select the article in which the item would be placed. Pressing (e) and selecting a stack of items would bring up this clothing-list screen first, the player would select the article in which the items would be placed, and then the player could select individual items from the stack, and pressing (Enter) would place all of the items they selected from the stack into the inventory slot they selected.
I understand that this could get complicated quickly, especially when putting clothing items into the inventory, but this could be worked around by causing all clothing items to act as the waterskin does in the game, where when they contain items already, these items increase the amount of inventory space they take up. Therefore, if a player picked up a backpack in the world that contained items already, the amount of inventory that the backpack stored would be added as a straight number on top of the base number of inventory spaces that the backpack takes up, and if this was more than the player had available, they would need to wear the backpack and then empty it out with it on.
This could be interesting, if implemented, in that the player could find items in clothing items/storage articles, such as backpacks, coats, hoodies, ect., and it could make random pieces of clothing in houses and whatnot worth searching through for hardcore scavenger players.
Obviously this would complicate the inventory system and the game in general, but this seems like a pretty basic element that would add a lot of depth to the game.
I well understand that this would be difficult to put into the game, but I think it would definitely be worth the work and I would be working on it myself if I had any experience with coding, or if I had any idea as to how this could happen code-wise.