Better Placed Inventory Management

I'm a packrat when it comes to games, especially games with such an absurdly large item variety as Starbound. I like collecting cool doodads I find on the planets I go to so that I can eventually put them to cool use in some structure when I finally find a world worth settling on instead of stripping of all its resources and moving on to a new world.

Unfortunately, this means I end up with my spaceship being loaded up with nothing but the bare minimum amount of space dedicated to crafting stuff and everything else occupied by the most space-efficient containers I can find (right now I'm using some 16-slot lockers I found in an Apex facility), and I never have any clue of what I have where except for my tools, armor, and ores (which are always on me).

The solution, I think, comes in several parts, heavily inspired by a Minecraft mod called Applied Energistics.

1. Tie storage space into early-game progression. The storage locker the ship starts with should only be about 32 slots to support this - it should go from being a central storage space for the less hoarding-inclined among us to being an entry-level box with no frills. Players should start out being able to craft wooden crates at tier 1, get metal crates at tier 2, and so on until they can fit 16 slots of storage in a 2x2 square block area in tier 4 or 5.
   
2. The Sorter. The Sorter would be a new placeable item roughly the size of a large crate which should be unlocked in tier 3 or 4. When placed, the Sorter first scans the area around it for containers and automatically groups up items in those containers. For example, if you have a bunch of ores all over the place, the Sorter would group them into as few different containers as possible. Same goes for crops and other like groups of items. While it's doing the initial setup there could be some kind of progress thing that pops up, during which the containers it's indexing should be highlighted and inaccessible, and when done it should chime and pop up with a chat bubble saying it is ready. From that point forward, instead of manually putting things in containers, you could just dump them into the internal storage space of the Sorter. As long as there is space in the Sorter's network, the Sorter will dump things into different slots as appropriate. Adding new containers to the Sorter's network should be as simple as placing them down and then clicking a "Rescan" button in the Sorter's UI, which will cause the Sorter to potentially split up things that had occupied the same crate before (say, if you had so many ores and crops that both had some extras in the same crate, those extras might be split up if more containers became available). The UI should also indicate how many slots are left in the network (not counting itself), and its own inventory should be used as overflow. Smaller Sorters should be unlockable at higher tiers.
   
3. The Index. The Index would be an item that, when placed in a Sorter's network area, would cause containers to give a tooltip on mouseover indicating what categories of item they store. It should be unlocked the tier after The Mk. I Sorter. Placing an Index in the area of multiple Sorters will permanently link it to the first of the Sorters to rescan its inventory until either it or the Sorter is moved.
   
4. The Terminal. The Terminal would be another item that can be placed inside the Sorter's area, but shouldn't be unlockable until at least tier 7. It would be one single inventory that would show everything in the network of whichever Sorter it is linked to, separated by category rather than by inventory. So if you have so many ores and bars in your chests that they span multiple containers, the Terminal would show them all together in one group. Multi-sorter behavior should be the same as the Index.
5. The Portable Terminal. This would actually be two items - one receiver, and one transmitter. The receiver would be kept with the player, the transmitter would be kept in a Sorter's area. From that point onward, the player would be able to open up their Terminal UI simply by using the Portable Terminal in their hotbar. As long as the linked network is on the same planet or in orbit around that planet, players would be able to stow items or retrieve items from the network as if they were in front of their main Terminal with the cost of a few pixels per item transmitted. Naturally, this would be a top-tier convenience item.

All of that would go a long way towards giving players more of a sense of accomplishment as they progress even if they don't actually build anything grand along the way simply because the clutter would decrease by measures while simultaneously making them more aware of exactly how much they've collected instead of just bogging them down under the weight of ever-increasing clutter without any real way to manage it all. And when they're ready to get building once they've conquered the Endgame, they'll have the Portable Terminal to do it conveniently without endless trips back and forth to their ship.