Hello. This bothers me a lot- just imagine that your car’s trunk is loaded with 100+ cans of food, 50 bags of chips, 50 pieces of meat, and generally a pile of stuff. How is it possible to find and to pick up a specific can from our trunk in 30 or even 60 seconds? Sometimes it is hard to find a specific item in my drawer (in the real world)… In my opinion there should be some kind of penalty (in terms of time) which depends on the number of things which are placed in the trunk. For example: 30+ items in the trunk= 10 seconds, 40+ items in the trunk= 15 seconds etc. Of course it is only a random example
This is such a neat suggestion if you expanded it to all containers and storage in general. I’d been thinking about it for ages, so I’m really glad you brought it up.
Forewarning - I haven’t played the experimentals since last year, so please excuse me if this is being worked on or, heck, even implemented already.
Grabbing something specific out of a full trunk, rucksack, duffel bag, etc. is time-consuming in reality - as anyone who travelled with a fully-packed suitcase could tell. I’d really like this to be reflected in-game as it would encourage players to think a bit more carefully about their looting and hoarding. This should scale as well, the smaller the item in proportion to the amount of stuff there is to rummage through, the slower it should be to retrieve: finding a lighter (say perhaps 1% of the volume) in a bag full of soup cans (the other 99% of the volume) should be rather slow. The inverse should also be true: picking one of the soup cans out (assuming they’re fungible) should be relatively fast.
Ultimately, I’d like this to lead to an overhaul of the inventory system in general. Rather than having a large single 100%-efficient void of a pocket on your person, your personal inventory should be divided into as many pockets as you are wearing. i.e. the couple small pockets on your jeans, the breast pocket on your shirt, and the ruck on your back should all be separate containers, each with their own maximum storage limits. You’re unlikely to be able to fill every pocket 100%.
This will also allow the player to drop containers and have them keep their contents, opening up interesting tactical considerations during gameplay. An encumbering rucksack, for example, could be dropped to get away from trouble, but perhaps you’ll also be leaving behind your spare ammo (will you have enough to fight if you still can’t flee?) and some of the loot you grabbed that night (was the fruitless effort worth the risk?), perhaps you could pick it up later when it’s safe (did you make a note of where you left it?).
For gameplay purposes, I’ll acknowledge that this might seem like unnecessary tedium, but when so many players spend much of the game plundering goodies and hoarding, inventory management mechanics should be as deep as your pockets.
Any inventory system should be as painless as possible. The current system is pretty good, and tracking items by pockets is not good.
I’m all for the idea of being able to, at your option, stash specific items in specific volumes. My lighters and lockpicks are in my cargo pants pockets, my medical gear is in my runner pack, everything else is in the void of pocket. If I drop my backpack and find I’m carrying more stuff than I have volume for, I drop things - but not my lighters, lockpicks, or medical gear because those weren’t in my backpack. Conversely, if my runner pack gets destroyed, my medical gear drops to the floor, even if I have space in my backpack for it.
Managing where miscellaneous bits of loot are - that I’m only going to have on myself for 10 minutes until I get back to my lootmobile/base - is pointless tedium. Having the option to stash stuff I value highly in specific locations is great, but for most of the time, I don’t care and the game shouldn’t make me care.
As an aside, Project Zomboid is another zombie survival game, but it does make you track where your stuff is and has a horrid interface for doing it. PZ isn’t as good as C:DDA, and one of the reasons is the horrible inventory UI. Don’t make C:DDA worse.
This has been a suggestion for a looooong time now, it hasn’t been implemented yet in part because the code involved is hard, and in part because I’m insistent that the interface not suffer. Despite that I’m confident that this is what we will move to eventually, but only when the interface is acceptable.
See here for the current work on it.
Just tossing it out, what if storage zones took penalties to retrieval based on how full (percentage based or percentage after a static threshold is reached) or how many items there were in it?
some storage is bound to be better than others:
- a car seat is worse than almost anything else.
- a mini fridge is better than a trunk.
- a dresser is better than a counter.
but keep in mind that besides organizational dividers there is also surface area:
- the ground has more organizational potential than a bookcase, though impedes movement when ‘full’.
and this says nothing for inventory.
I was thinking that the loot would just be assigned to the largest container (that it fits in) automatically. You wouldn’t need to manually assign things until you want to, preferably through the same UI that allows you re-assign letters/digits for your items. Functionally for those that don’t care so much, this wouldn’t be all that different to how it is now however, it isn’t as perfectly efficient.
The compromise system you’ve mentioned is essentially what’s being used right now except that they’re all considered “holsters” that hold only designated items. Should the shape and construction of these holsters allow, I’d like these to become a bit more generic, like a handy flashlight fits in a magazine pouch if you wanted to pop one in there, but the game only allows magazines.