I created a Steam Guide to Inventory Management in the game. It's probably going to be of a lot more interest to people new to the game than to old pros like most of us here. But it's the kind of question that keeps arising on the steam forums, so I decided to create a guide, showing just one possible method (mine) of keeping everything organized. Keep in mind that this is what I do, not necessarily what everyone will want to do. It's a place to start if you are overwhelmed by all the stuff, useful and otherwise, that you'll pick up in the game. http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=154134469
Personally, I don't use autoloot. I prefer to shift+click to send items straight to my inventory, simply because I dislike having to step on an item to pick it up. Also, fun fact: Traps don't go off if you stand on them in the pocket dimension. Otherwise, this is an excellent guide.
I did not know that. Thanks. I'll test that then alter my guide accordingly. (I guess my strategy of putting them in the corner so that I would not accidentally step on them works (although I suppose sticking them in the middle of the room would work equally well lol). One more thing: Traps also don't stack right in the pocket dimension, the way that other items do. They stack just fine in your inventory, but stick them in a pile (in a corner or otherwise) and they do not stack right.
My management is as follows: -Pick up everything using auto-loot (in the beginning) -Keep the following piles in separate ares of your pocket dimension: 1 - For sale 2 - For crafting 3 - For lutefisking 4 - Extra food 5 - Extra potions/wands/bolts 6 - Items you happen to be keeping one per pile in rows off to the side. I use this for fancy things, things I want to keep for some unknown reason, and my hat collection (I keep every different hat I find) -Continue this process until annoyed and then just start selling everything and quit the auto-loot for most item types.
A Crafting pile would be great if it were easier to go through the items in that pile to find what you want/need. The thing about crafting is that you sometimes have to compromise -- you may never have the proper ingredients to craft that uber sword you want, but you might find that you have the ingredients for something else not quite as good. But if you keep everything in a single pile, you may never realize that, and it's a royal pain to find all those ingredients. That's why I try to split those items up to a certain extent. I also do keep individual items in single piles, but those are mainly for stuff that I might want to craft into something else, or something I may want to use if I screw up an item with encrusting or corruption or a seriously bad krong/series of krongings.
It'd be nice if you could just stand on a pile and automatically grab the reagents you need to make a craft. As it is, I use e.g. an ore pile, an ingot pile, an alchemy solids pile, and an alchemy liquids pile. I stand by the pile and take items until I have what I want, then I step onto the pile and drop all the unneeded items in reverse order. This tends to make the more-used reagents float to the top.
I do something slightly different. Because all my piles are in rows, I stand next to the pile and I move items from my right starting a pile on my left until I get what I need. Sometimes, I'll just pick up everything in the pile if I don't have a very specific item that I'm crafting (I'm just going to see what i can make). First I may empty out stuff from my inventory to make room though, so all my food, healing potions, and other necessities all go into its own pile. The pile north of me, is always the stuff I set aside temporarily, to my left is the stuff that I looked at and decided I didn't need immediately, and to my right is the stuff I haven't looked at yet. The next time I may reverse the process and move the stuff from the left pile, putting it back to the right (or if I'm feeling anal, I'll just set everything back to the way it was originally). The other advantage of having everything in a row is that I can move up and down the aisles between the rows. And certain piles are always near each other for that convenience (tinkering crap then ingots then gems then alchemy crap in that order, because of how commonly you need both gems and ingots or gems and alchemy crap or ingots and tinkering crap together). I'm always thinking about how to make it all more efficient lol. I think that since being a computer programmer, my mind works in that way, always trying to come up with a more efficient system. My mind is probably actually a big disorganized mess, but in that respect, I do treasure efficiency. I always like to have certain items on the tops of my piles. If I'm a smith or a tinkerer, I like to have steel, Iron, coal and/or Chalk as my top items in my ore pile, followed by bronze (or brass for tinkering).
I'm going to respectfully disagree with your advice in Pile #3 to convert all ores to ingots if you have either of (Tinker, Smith) above 1. Several wandcrafting recipes require raw ore, and ingots aren't *hugely* rare, so I prefer to only convert those if I need more ingots than I have available. I'm currently playing "Urza" (all four crafts, Archaeology, Burglary, and Golemancy), so crafting's on my brain.
I don't convert ingots to ore or vice versa until I have max smithing. Even then, I don't generally do it unless I need to. Generally I just keep all my reagents in a pile or two and alter or add to them as necessary.
