Spoilable Items Clog Inventory Views [Github Issue Mirror]

Game Talk The Drawing Board
1

Issue:

Spoilable items in Cataclysm currently do not stack if they have differing rot timers. This will often lead to situations where batch crafting comestibles such as Pemmican, Fruit Leather, in large amounts will fill the inventory with many stacks that cannot be combined. As time-to-rot extends into the future the player gets progressively less concerned with that value.

Discussion Topic: How can this issue be solved?

My opinion:

I think that a progressive granularity system would work best. This system would group like items that are unable to be stacked due to differing rot times into more useful sets. I propose the following groupings:

  • 1 year +
  • 1 season - 1 year
  • 1 week - 1 season
  • 1 day - 1 week
  • 1 turn - 1 day

At less than 1 day until spoilage it might be undesirable to group comestibles

Selecting a comestible for consumption from a granular group should consume an item that will rot at the nearest future point in time.

Implementation of this granular grouping may be done entirely as a UI construction whenever opening a relevant UI. There will be times that finer detail grouping is necessary, and a sorting option/toggle may be desirable. Because grouping is a UI construction it will have no effect on the comestibles directly and allow them to be grouped dynamically as conditions change.

Example Cluttered Inventory: Red boxed comestibles can be compressed (not comprehensive)

cata_food_stacking
43309029-2ee617fa-9149-11e8-9996-214c2898036b.png544×629 68.9 KB

Example Grouped Inventory: Red arrowed comestibles have been compressed (not comprehensive)

cata_food_stacking_compressed
43309073-54a5d9b2-9149-11e8-9952-55fbd86e2f84.png545×628 41 KB

Please share your thoughts, concerns, and ideas so we can find a viable solution to this issue.

This is a mirror of my issue on the Cataclysm:DDA Git Repository so I can get more feedback.

2

Would it be better to stack them all and show it’s lowest and upper bounds as something like:
Flour (1 day - 1 season)

Consuming or moving from that would take the closest to rot, and there may be an option to look in detail at what’s in the stack of flour, or perhaps opening the window of that specific item shows the list as well as the description and other attributes.

3

Should it be a toggle-able view option? I don’t think that moving should automatically take the closest to rot, since you might have a lower bound of [1 day] but be packing for a longer term trip. I do agree consumption should generally default to the closest to rot. Adding an extra window to get additional detail about a stack sounds like it might be useful too. Thanks for the ideas :smiley:

4

If it moves the closest to rot, and you want the opposite, say, move the y longest duration from A to B, then move the entire stack first to B, then return what you don’t want to A.

Alternatively, there’s a toggle, something you do or that you can press to switch between moving the oldest to moving the oldest.

Perhaps instead of pressing “50a” to move 50 items of stack a, you press “!50a”, and for the advanced inventory, when pressing m, you indicate “!50” rather than “50”.

Or perhaps by just pressing !, the entire inventory, whether it’s pickup, inventory, or advanced, switches from oldest first to youngest first.

5

Different rot times could be shown when examining a stack, like weapon mods. The we could just split between fresh, normal and old.