how do you feel about the inventory system in Dredmor?

Seconding, thirding, and fourthing the multi-bag idea. Quiver, gem bag, etc. They take up 1 spot, and have exactly enough space to hold every type of that thing - but can only hold that one type of thing.

And Essence, I agree with you on a lot...but the cube is not the only answer, and cash DOES come in handy when you're cleaning out vending machines for Holy hand Grenades, Ibn dust, etc. to have more AoE cleaning tools. It's not the hard items that hoover space...it's the stuff you're saving for the next zoo that'll be gone after the next zoo that you then have to replace before the NEXT next zoo.

 

Oh how I wish there were bags for the various item types; that would free up plenty of room. Even just a quiver and reagent bag would be far better than what there is now.

 

At the very least, I would like to trade some inv rows for more hotbar rows, as it gets /really/ annoying juggling equipment, shrooms, pots, arrows, throwables e.t.c.

 

I would like to see things like quivers and crafting material bags or new dedicated crafting inventory panels (basically a copy of the existing inventory panel) so that the crafting professions aren't hampered by a small inventory. Without a craft skill, I think the space and function of the inventory is fine.

 

A quiver would be great. Though given the looks of the tinkering parts and the alchemist set, it almost looks like you can store stuff in them. It would also be great to have a separate hotkey for crafting, and right-clicking your tinkerer set/alchemist set would allow you to open them up and store reagent/components in them.

 

You know, back in my day we did store things in our crafting gear. You had to, so you could have your hands free to hold your little brother on your back while walking to school up hill carrying both your lunch and his while fighting off the wolves.

IN THE SNOW.
[/grumpy old man]

Seriously, though. I can't believe I'm hearing complaining about something limiting crafting. Has anyone stopped to think about how powerful crafting skills are most of the time? You get stats from them AND they let you make the Axekeytar. Or potions. Or cruelly barbed frigging steel bolts. Inventory management is a small price to pay for that. Even if you don't like it, you can choose one or two things to make and stick to them. You don't have to make everything a Tinker can produce in one run.

Although there should be an achievement for that.

As for money, you can usually get enough to buy you what you want just by saving and selling most of your artifacts. It'll be enough for the occasional Universal Principles of Mace of the Misunderstood Warlord or whatever Brax is stocking on the lower floors, and will leave you something for Bolts of Squid on the side.

 

IMO they should simply add backpack items to random loot. You could carry as many backpacks as you could find, and right clicking a backpack would open it. A backpack would take up one inventory slot, but have X amount of its own slots (I'm thinking 10, but that'd be something that would need testing).

 

Yes, and I believe that when concerting tinkering and smithing (two skills that require you to get the most ingredients), and especially smithing, the proper word was "underpowered".

And inventory management is one thing, but having less than one row of empty slots at all times (which in most cases is "less than 4 slots", even) is just annoying, as unless we drop items somewhere (which many people are reluctant to do), it means we spend 70% of our time going back and forth to Brax. It does improve a bit if we find the skoling cube, but it's still not worth it unless you simply love crafting.

 

Kazeto's point seems key here. Roguelikes are meant to be hard. They are meant to be unforgiving. They accomplish these things by demanding constant focus and a high degree of strategy. They do not accomplish this by driving the player out of their mind with tedium.

ToME, DCSS and the other leading Roguelikes (including Dredmor) owe a lot of their popularity to their emphasis on user friendliness, streamlining the annoying stuff (inventory management, exploring empty areas in between interesting things) so the player can spend more of their time on the fun stuff (dying at the miscellaneous appendages of eldritch abominations because they forgot to buy a ring of Resist Paralysis). I think this is the direction Roguelikes need to keep moving in.

Losing is fun. Inventory management, beyond a point, is not fun. That doesn't mean we need to go all Mass Effect 2 or Dragon Age 2 and treat the player like a lobotomised monkey incapable of making choices, but it does mean we should emphasise fun or meaningful choices (using cool item A or cool item B; how do I use the contents of my inventory in order to survive this difficult battle?) over boring and repetitive ones (having to discard cool item A or cool item B; how do I rearrange the dozens of items in my inventory in order to pick up one more mushroom?).

 

I agree ^

Right now I'm playing a rogue with Tinkering and if it wasn't for the fact that I love crafting, I would be tired of this character two floors ago. I'm on floor 6 right now, and I get five free slots every time I go to Drax, counting that I sacrifice almost everything to the Lutefisk Cube, except for buff items, materials and bolts. I'm even throwing away equipment if I don't think it's gonna be worth selling. New materials on CK mod didn't make it better, since I also have that skill tree. I'm thinking of what would happen if I wanted to get CK + Tinkering + Smithing, to see a full clockwork knight and my head just spins.

I like the idea of different types of containers for each crafting type of material. It doesn't have to be able to contain every material of that type, so you still have to choose which ones you keep or something, but it would help A LOT to make crafting oriented characters more manageable.

 

There's nothing underpowered about 8 trap skill and the ability to make thermite bombs (plus concussion bombs and all the unlocked stuff, but who's counting?) And unless I'm recalling incorrectly, those recipes are unlocked, no bookshelfing required.

Is smithing underpowered? Perhaps. Personally, I think it could be fixed just by making its tree a little longer and adding the new equipment to its higher levels.

As for inventory management, I've always managed to keep at least one row and a half free in between visits to Brax even when I am playing a crafter (Tinkerers admittedly take up a little more space.) But then, I never collect all the craft materials anyways. The best ingredients like brimstone or steel are fairly limited in supply, so the other stuff isn't going to be very useful to me after a point.

Also, can I tell you an embarrassing secret?


I leave stuff on the floor.

It's true. There's no reason to collect 85 sewer brews if I'm not a spellcaster. If I am, most of my cheese is going to be ground up in fairly short order and things like danishes I won't even bother with. Prioritizing saves me a lot of grief in the inventory management area. You should try it sometime.

 

All that stuff you say you leave on the floor, I throw in the Lutefisk Cube. And choosing which materials are worth keeping, I do that too. But there are several items that no matter what build you're playing, are worth keeping, such as potions, wands, or interesting throwable items and bolts (obviously not everything, just the best ones). Even doing all that, there are some builds that need a lot more space than others, and obviously, it's part of choosing that build, but it's not crazy to think that some way of help in inventory management would be helpful.

 

I do that too, and I only keep things I can have use out of (I skol everything that is not a crafting material, or strong bolt).
But even then, it's really tedious sometimes, and I don't like leaving things on the floor (right not it's safe, but what about future versions?) though I do it out of necessity sometimes.

 

Right now I would like most, the functionality to take bars off the inv screen and turn them into hotbars, so at least if I am juggling pots/shrroms./arrows/throwables/equipment, I can do it from there easier.

As for crafting it tends to be underwhelming a lot of the time. By the time you can make some of the better equip in smithing for example, you often found a "Awsome Sword of +2 More Swords". If naything it's the worst of the bunch. The others give decent consumables, and the trap skill on tinkerer can mena a lot of easy exp

 

I don't see a problem with that in particular. I see crafting as ensuring you're gonna get decent equipment even though you have extremely bad luck. When I find a very nice weapon in an evil chest, and it's better than, say, the Katana, I just think "well, at least I would have the Katana otherwise".

 

I usually keep at least 3 rows open, and create a huge stash of items on every floor. Moreso because I;m a compulsive collector and I feel compelled to pick up absolutely everything, either to sell, keep or lutefisk. The first few times I ran, I chose all the crafting jobs, and so I was carrying damn near 4 roomful of items with me between each floor. Now I keep alchemy and tinkering stuff, but its still a huge amount of stuff being lugged around.

 

Instead of giving every character a bag, since most characters don't even need extra space, why not just give crafting characters a bag per crafting skill tree? Each tree's bag could be different, could have a different # slots, and could even have the appropriate loot moved to it automatically, along with appropriate crafting stations crafting directly from the bag, reducing the need to ever manually open the bags.

If more loot space is added for crafting trees, and normal characters can easily get it, then they would never have to worry about loot ever, especially since it isn't a problem for them atm. The biggest problem tends to be when you take multiple crafting skill trees at once, and not just one, so it would probably be more balanced if each bag was small (4-5 slots?), but you got one per crafting skill tree, or each crafting skill tree just made the bag bigger.

 

I like the idea of giving extra inventory space to crafting skill trees, but not removing completely the need for inventory management. Just a little help would be fine, since I think part of the challenge is to choose which items you keep or you sell/lutefisk/throw away.

 

That's actually an excellent idea, Wi§p. I proposed the "give bags if you have crafting skill trees" in the googledoc for Dredmor, but I don't know if anyone as much as looks at it, so it's great that you wrote about it here. And with mere 4 slots gained per crafting skill, most people who like crafting would only gain an equivalent of 1 row, which is still enough to reduce the tedium, but not enough to give them the ability to haul around tons of crafting-unrelated junk.

 

That's right. Actually, numbers of extra slots can be slighty increased, as far as they're specific to materials of the crafting skill tree they're bound to. I mean, instead of 4 extra slots (they still seem insufficient), you could get 6 or 8, but they can only be used to store items that are material for that skill tree in particular. Items that can be used in more than one crafting skill, they simply can be put in as many special bags, or special slots, or whatever.