Storage and dropping items

[renton555]

First of all, this is my first post and I just wanted to say what a fascinating game this is. I’ve never seen such a realistic and brutal survival game (maybe Don’t Starve comes close) and I have to give props.

Anyway my suggestion comes from the reason for the last couple of deaths I’ve suffered. I’m hauling a bunch of shit in my duffel bag and a fairly tough baddie jumps me, my only effective weapon vs him is melee but I’m too encumbered to effectively use melee. So I have to drop my duffel and a bunch of items, many of which have 1 or 2 volume, i.e. I have to spend 50 turns dropping stuff so I get instajibbed before I can even fight.

Now I know there are gameplay solutions to this mainly revolving around extreme caution and never carrying too many things in uncertain areas. And caution is certainly a rewarding approach to this game as it would be in a true survival scenario. But in reality, a man encumbered by things would just instantly drop his duffel bag full of its contents and then deal with the threat, and this action would take seconds, not minutes as in DDA.

I see two solutions, one very simple (possibly too simple) and one quite complex but potentially more rewarding.

1. Make the act of dropping items instant, or like 1/10 of a turn per item. This would probably be a greater reflection of reality, anyway, it would seem. At the very least add a prompt to allow you to stop dropping items when someone is too close. I got instajibbed by dropping a bunch of stuff on day one when a Mi-Go was like 50 spaces away. I should have at least had the option to stop dropping while he was hitting me.

2. Introduce local storage of items in bags. Perhaps the main inventory is just the storage granted by your clothing and non-encumbering storage items such as drop pouch and holster, but there is a seperate inventory for duffel bag, backpack etc. That way when you need to offload in an emergency, you just drop the bag and the contents go with it. When you pick up items, you will face a prompt as to which container to place it in, similar to the prompt you get when choosing between two types of arrows to nock.

What do you think?

[Mrnocamera]

[me=Mrnocamera]kicks down the door, holding a megaphone.[/me]
IT’S ALREADY BEEN SUGGESTED ABOUT FIFTEEN TIMES.
[me=Mrnocamera]leaves quietly.[/me]

[renton555]

Sorry I perused the first page and didn’t see anything related. I’m guessing there’s a running list somewhere?

[AseaHeru]

Yep. A list that includes Boats, sharks, z-levels and many other things.

[Zireael]

Yep. A list that includes Boats, sharks, z-levels and many other things.

Good one

[Aenye]

Hi guys,

First of all, sorry for applied necromancy - at least the topic wasn’t that old…

I’ve got the same issue as renton - out of my last 20 deaths, 14 were caused by something hacking away at me, while I was loading / unloading stuff. Safemode on, motion sensor on, but no warning whatsoever that something is attacking me. No such problem with installing / removing car parts, building and crafting, so it would seem picking up / dropping stuff is handled differently by the game…

While being able to “drop everything onto the ground instantly” would be a nice option (if unlikely, judging from the discussion), I believe even a dialog allowing the player to break inventory operations would be lovely and would pretty much avoid a lot of frustration (day 50+, came back to base from routine rag run, in the case of my last death). Damn ninja zombears…

[FunsizeNinja123]

Good to see someone else has the same problem…

[Hague]

I’m pretty sure someone was working on that, or a rough approximation. Something like automatically dropping items in size equal to the volume of the item with it, if I recall correctly.

Personally, I would like it if the game just randomly dropped stuff out of your inventory when an effect made it so volume was too high, with a chance of damaging it. So instead of applying such a strong debuff for carrying over volume, you’re just ever more likely to just drop things with increasingly catastrophic results, “Oops! You dropped X!” “@#$%! You dropped the X. It appears damaged!” #if is_glass “@#$%! You drop the X! It shatters loudly!” #if contains_liquid " … It shatters loudly, spilling all over!"

This could also apply to effects on LBE (load-bearing equipment) when damaged. So if a zombies rip your messenger bag, its storage capacity is reduced. Instead of getting a huge debuff, you just randomly start dropping things until you’ve reached a new limit. Flee in panic as your food and water fall behind you. Very fitting, I think

[Zireael]

I like the way you’re thinking, Hague.

[kevin.granade]

I’ll look into displaying an indicator of some kind letting you know that you’re dropping a bunch of items along with a container. That’s the only thing that we can do at the moment (no, making dropping items artificially cheap is not an option).
Long-term, yes we want to tie items to specific containers, but the inventory system is exceedingly uncooperative. That might be in a condition where someone can tackle this now, but I haven’t had time to look into it.

[Aenye]

Such an inventory overhaul would be lovely to have, maybe with some more containers as well…

That said, is there any hope for a short-term fix (such as safemode popping up, allowing you to break inventory operations and fight / flee the incoming monster) ?

[Hague]

Well, I was thinking about this problem a bit, mulling over how to make something like this work properly without having to specifically place items in a container or creating a specific system to manage it that way. Right now, my understanding is that if you drop LBE a suitable number of items relative to volume should drop with it but be effectively a series of queued drop actions. Is that correct? Are the items chosen at random?

[i2amroy]

Right now if you drop containers you just become overloaded on volume and get huge penalties IIRC.

That said it is already set up so that if you drop a container that has enough volume to hold whatever other items you are dropping it only charges you for dropping the container, not all of the individual items one at a time.

[Womble]

In the short-term, try spreading your storage around the body more, using cargo pants/shorts to leave the torso less encumbered. If you plan to stand and fight, it doesn’t matter too much if every zombie and his dog can catch you, and all that cotton on your thighs will be decent armour. (Have a short-list of single big items to drop when your pants start getting destroyed, though.)

[kevin.granade]

As i2amroy said, there’s a system in place where if you drop a worn container (such as a backpack) and a bunch of other items, the game assumes you’re dropping them all together and only uses the number of moves necessary to drop the container.
Obviously that’s not at all clear, so I’m going to look into adding an indicator that lets you know that it’s happening.
Until then, you can hit d, select a backpack or other worn container to drop, and then select enough items to drop to bring you out of encumbrance, that SHOULD get treated as one drop action…
BRAINSTORM!
When you select the backpack for dropping, it can also select enough other items to keep you un-encumbered, then you can select and unselect items to fine tune it… that might not be too hard to add…

[AseaHeru]

cant we just select whats in what container if we do that?
I mean, that sounds like going halfway, so why not just do the full thing at once?

[KA101]

The problem with tying things to containers is preserving that link when you leave the container/the container is destroyed, etc. Much easier to do it on-the-fly as Kevin laid out.

[quote=“AseaHeru, post:16, topic:5911”]cant we just select whats in what container if we do that?
I mean, that sounds like going halfway, so why not just do the full thing at once?[/quote]

Obviously you’re the one to do it, then. Chop chop!

[HunterAlpha1]

Could the various clothing items act just like storage spaces in cars; if the item gets destroyed the items inside get dropped?

[i2amroy]

Could the various clothing items act just like storage spaces in cars; if the item gets destroyed the items inside get dropped?

Certainly, it’s just a matter of ensuring that all the various inventory manipulation that currently exists still functions properly when items are being referenced through their containers (or else we’ll all end up like NPC’s trying to eat our lighters). From what I’ve seen it’s not something that would necessarily be too difficult to do, just rather time consuming (which reduces the chance that someone will be willing to do it :P).

[Hague]

What if it selected items relative to how the container is layered on your body. So your bottom layer container contains the first things you’ve picked up, and the topmost layer selects the most recent items in your inventory. So when you drop your pants, it will do your automatic selection of other items to drop if it goes over your volume, but since your pants are the first priority, all the items that were placed first are selected to be dropped. Alternately, the topmost container will attempt to drop

Maybe add an advanced inventory option that shows you how your inventory is sorted into containers? Note: They aren’t actually in the container, it’s just exploiting inventory first-in-last-out order and placing a marker tab to indicate what LBE the items are considered to be.

Something like:

[cargo pants]
first aid kit (3)
bottle of fruit juice (rotten)
box of candy cigarettes 2 (5)
[messenger bag]
batteries (349)
9mm +P (139)
USP 9mm (7)

If you were to switch to default display, first items first, it would look the same, simply without the messenger bag. The expanded mode however, might allow you to swap items around, changing their order in your inventory but not really moving them.