Every point in a crafting skill should give you 5 extra backpack slots.

I think the biggest issue I've found, thus far, is that if you're going to build a competent archer, you basically end up spending half your inventory on different kinds of specialty bolts. I would kill for an efficient quiver.

 

Would a "quiver of auto-loading" suffice? Run out of ammo, automatically selects the next one up/down in power (perhaps configurable).

 

No that wouldn't. First of all you have to pick them. A lot of ammos have benefits that aren't just pure damage. Mundane on-hit arrows especially have benefits over regular arrows. The autoloader wouldn't really help. The problem is inventory management, there's too many different types of arrows that do the same thing.

 

Guys I have a solution for you. Put it on the floor instead of your inventory next to the closest merchant.

Each time your inventory is full and you go the merchant to sell stuff, you can access your free extra inventory space and do whatever.

I have a pile for smithing, a pile of cheese (until I get the elven grater, protip: grind your cheese and meat to save space), a pile for artifacts I can't use (until I can send them to the museum), and so on.


Once in a while you find another store deeper in the dungeon then you can move your piles of stuff around (always managed to do it in one move).

 

I don't play Dredmor to simulate a moving company, schlepping piles of stuff from one place to the next. I play Dredmor to kill things and take their stuff, turn their stuff into other stuff, and then kill more things with the new stuff.

The efficient quiver's primary benefit is the increased storage capacity. Unlike the bag of holding idea mentioned above, the efficient quiver can only hold arrows (well, and javelins and bows, in D&D). It'd be a simple way to make an archer character not have to play inventory management games all the time.

Here, an example:

This is my archer/tinker/smith/alchemist's current inventory. Look how much of it is devoted to crafting components and arrows.



(and, looking at that, it seems I didn't put a sell tag on the rock wand and a potion tag on the potion of replenishment, but I think my point is made)

 

That is the most inventory-filling build possible, do you realize that. When you pick all crafting skills you essentially agree to having a full inventory of crafting materials at all times. And you could easily use up those few unique arrows in tiny stacks.

 

when you turn stuff into gold, you do it at the closest merchant right ? now instead of going back to dungeoning with a full inventory, just drop on the ground those ingots that you are not going to use while exploring and fighting.

If you prefer having an almost full inventory when leaving the merchant and you don't mind having to constantly deal with inventory management, it's your call. I, on the other hand, only have to come back to the merchant once in a while (from twice per level to once every two levels) and always leave for dungeoning with at least 30 empty slots in my inventory despite having 2 "crafting skills".

That said, looking at your inventory screenshot, I wonder if you're really playing a build of tinkering/smithing/alchemy/archery ? If you are then maybe you are calling this inventory curse upon yourself don't you think ? May I also suggest you add fungal arts to your build ? You know just to shoehorn a dozen different mushrooms in there.

Seeing that you have ten different types of bolts tells me that you don't use all of them on a regular basis. You'd save inventory space by not taking with you those bolts you're not using.

Also, see this cubic thing you mislabeled as a crafting component ? It's where every thing you don't have a use for goes, turning it into a nice powerful artifact when going to the lutefisk god.

Lastly you can store stuff in each of your crafting toolkit, that's a total of 15 more units of inventory space, just use it.

 

I do, but with a completed archery tree's high return rate, sometimes it takes a while to get rid of even three arrows.

I don't appreciate the snide attitude. I do know what I'm doing, and I understand that I've got a build that devours inventory space like a ravenous hippo. It is an extreme example, but it is an example nonetheless. Look how many slots are used up by different kinds of arrow, and look how many are used by different kinds of ingot. As it stands, one crafting skill means removing one entire row of your inventory (sometimes more, sometimes less) just on components and the tool needed to craft those materials. The alternative is to spend five minutes every floor going back to a merchant, picking everything up, carrying it around, and then dropping it at another merchant. I hate backtracking through territory I've already covered, especially if its because of something I did myself.

 

My in game solution is to choose a room with lots of space (often a cleared out monster zoo) and put all my ingots along one wall, all my alchemy supplies along another, and all my gems in another. On one character I have tinkering and alchemy. Yes, it IS actually easier to go up 2 floors than to play extended inventory tetris/store everything in the forge/tinkering kit/blacksmith slots.

 

And your solution for an archer, who has to carry his plethora of bolts around with him?

 

What we need is the Torchlight solution; a permanent pet which we can dump extra stuff into. >D

 

For crafters, one option would be to get rid of crafting tool items entirely. Instead introduce a button that opens up a combined crafting dialog. Your character is implicitly assumed to carry the needed tools for his or her crafting. This would free up a few slots of the inventory.

Also, the tools themselves don't bring much to the game, anyway: There is only one kind of each & they are not hard to find. Would also mean that you don't have to bother picking up/unstacking/selling excess toolkits.

 

I think it'd be a great idea to have each crafting skill, as well as the archery skill, come with its own bag that could only hold items related to that craft/skill. Smiths get a bag for ingots, alchemists one for potions etc, tinkerers one for traps and parts, and archers get a nice big quiver. That would keep things relatively balanced and add to the strategy involved in skill selection.

(Another way to keep this from affecting the balance too much might be to consider removing the ability to store things in crafting tools. Right now, storing stuff in your tools' slots, taking it out whenever you want to craft something, and then putting it back in is an inconvenient and painful necessity. Furthermore, right now it's slightly buggy- whenever you save and load, items get redistributed across your tools' slots, including the tools' output slots. Maybe anytime your player moves all the stuff in your tools should get dumped on the ground. You can't carry items inside an anvil or a still IRL anyhow.)

To some extent, I also think the inventory and the bags should be more dependent on the total number of items and not just the different item types/slots; i.e. stacking shouldn't be the primary inventory management mechanism. If I can carry fifty of one kind of bolt, I should be able to carry fifty assorted bolts. (It'd take some thought as to how to work that with lutefisk stacks though; maybe the cube should be capable of magically storing arbitrarily-large stacks of lutefisk.)

Those who say "just use the lutefisk cube if you're low on space" are ruling out the viability of a lot of player builds. Crafting special items can take tons of inventory space; e.g. a smith can't just keep ingots and toss everything else if he wants to make the best items- good maces require wands, all kinds of things require potions, etc. You don't have to have multiple crafting skills to run into serious inventory trouble, especially if you use a crossbow or traps.

Those who say "the current system is fine, just find places to use as a stash and drop your stuff" must have serious OCD. "Look, all my piles are alphabetized!" If I wanted a simulation of cleaning up and organizing piles of junk I'd just turn off the computer and get to work on my real-life messes.

Some roguelikes, diablo-type games, etc can make the stash idea work because you can teleport to and away from the area where you keep your stuff. Having to move the stash around repeatedly is, as FaxCelestis said, absolutely ridiculous. Leaving it in one spot and going up and down floors to get to it is even worse, since a) you may well have to traverse large portions of levels just to get to staircases, which is extremely tedious and b) Uberchest levers and monster zoo counts have trouble when you change level.

 

This is an excellent idea. Like the waystone from Neverwinter Nights, an item that on-use would teleport you to a secure cell and set a flag to teleport you back to where you came from when you hit it again would be freaking sweet.

 

I loved the way Guild Wars handled this:



For those who never played the game: each item in the image corresponds to one crafting material. In addition to that, you had +8 inventory "bags" to hold all other items.

Click here to read more about it.