Firstly, my apologies if this is in the wrong section. The one thing that frustrates me about this game (and Minecraft) is that when you mine blocks you automatically pick them up. This can be a very good thing, as having to press a button to pick up a block would be incredibly time consuming and draining, but can't we have an option to NOT pick up a specific type of block if we don't want or need it? Just a simple list of blocks with a tick box next to it enabling which blocks you would like to automatically pick up and which ones you would like to just leave on the ground. I know it's not too difficult to drop what you don't need, but it does annoy me sometimes when my inventory slowly fills up with thousands and thousands of various blocks that I will probably never use. I have no idea if something like this would even be possible, but I don't see why not. Time to go collect more unwanted dirt and cobblestone...
A blacklist would be a neat feature, but I feel that it's a solution to the symptom rather than the problem. The problem being that some items really are so unwantable. It's pretty hard to make dirt wantable, but one solution would be to have a "material archive" of some kind where you can easily dump loads of blocks, as a way to free up material inventory space effectively while storing the stuff for possible later use. Another solution would be a condenser that allows you to condense a lot of something useless into something slightly more useful, and condense that stuff further in time to get something truly useful.
I had run into the same issues myself. I want to keep materials for building things but having my inventory fill up with stacks of different types of dirt is a pain. I had suggested something to address this in my feedback / rant thread. Here's the exert of that part... " Increase the Stack Size of Items - Specifically the stack size of block types. Why limit me to 1000 of a block type? I vote to make the limit be 99,999 per block type or more if you're feeling generous. My reason for wanting this is simple... its a matter of convenience. It frees up my space to hold more block types and thus allows me to be more creative because "I'll be like a painter with more colors on my palette." Incase anyone was thinking of possible balance issues... there shouldn't be any. Any cheap, cheating, unbalancing, abusive, etc behaviors that I could do with blocks in the game... I could easily do regardless of the amount of blocks I can hold. Its purely a matter of determination! When I first started playing Terraria you could only hold 99 of a block type in a stack and given the inventory space you had you could certainly have enough blocks to trap creatures, make boss arenas, use them in place of hooks, pranks your friends, etc all day long! In Starbound right now with 1000 block stacks and about 30 some inventory spaces you can easily hold several thousand blocks! (30 inventory spaces was a guess off the top of my head. I didn't count so don't quote me on that one.) I also can't imagine that upping this limit could cause any kind of performance issues or anything. It wouldn't affect the amount of calculations the game has to do. So far as I'm aware the players inventory is essentially just an array with each inventory slot being a single entry in the array. Each entry (slot) likely only contains two pieces of information, for blocks at least. A way to identify what the item is and a number stating the quantity of the item in the slot. The only real problem I can see with stack sizes over 1000 would be clutter on the screen from having the extra digit of text showing. Although, that could easily be handled by simply changing it so that anything over 999 in the stack would show as 999+. It could just be added that mousing over the item could show the amount you have total. So, in theory upping the block stack size would only allow me to have more fun with the game by stopping me from regularly disposing of stacks of 1000 blocks to free up space. (end of block inventory idea #1) Now that I've typed that it has me thinking of an alternative idea... Why even have blocks going into the actual inventory the way they do right now? The inventory system currently has two "bags" or pages in it. The first, main, one that by default items go into and the second one that blocks go into. They are currently interchangeable if one is full or you manually move things from one to the other. Instead of doing this why not just make blocks have their own entirely separate inventory system that can hold up to 99,999 of each block type in the game. I'll elaborate on this in a second but first I want anyone reading to think about and ask themselves this... Is micromanaging block types fun... at all? Was it fun in Terraria? Is it fun in Starbound? Doesn't the fun of blocks come in using them to create neat structures and architectural master pieces!? Have you ever been trying to build something in Terraria or Starbound and found yourself having to make repeated trips to get more of the blocks you need or when building a long way away from your normal area having to make long distance trips shuttling materials before you can even start building? Has this EVER been fun!? For anyone? Anyone at all? I remember my sky castle in Terraria had a large room with chests and each chest was dedicated to the block types that you could find in each of the games environments / biomes. It was well organized and handy... but it wasn't fun. In Terraria's final updates when they added the ability to paint blocks I used to go and make large statues of the armor suits and pixel art from old games. I quickly gave up on doing that though because, while that actual work on the projects was fun, it was just so boring and tedious to make constant trips for the blocks I needed. Aside from possibly some PVP related stuff I couldn't think of any reason for not eliminating this boring tedium. So my thoughts for Starbound are... Don't have blocks go into the current inventory system anymore. If a player places a block in there that's fine. Allowing us to rearrange things is good. Make a separate inventory system for block types. Every time we collect a block it should go into this new block inventory by default and occupy a slot. The block inventory should be able to hold all the block types. Each block type should occupy its own slot and be able to stack up 99,999. If you have a block stack maxed and collect more blocks of that type then either make them got into the players normal inventory or simply don't let the block be picked up at all. Just leave it sitting on the ground. The block inventory should be scrollable and filterable. Another useful feature to add would be to allow us to mark blocks as "favorites" or something like that. There should be a filer button for these blocks we marked too. So if I'm trying to build myself a nice outpost of something I could filter the list and mark up the blocks I want to use and then be able to work from my custom made list of blocks. This would also mean that blocks would no longer have to be taking up chest, box, or other container storage space. if a system like this was in place they could also change it so that decorative items like tables, chairs, statues, and other furniture-esque items would by default go into that normal inventories second "bag" that used to by for blocks. With a system like this in place I could easily and enjoyably work on building projects without any need to make pointless side trips to pull blocks from storage. The system wouldn't be "overpowered" either since its not like you'd just be given the blocks... you'd have to have gotten them in the first place. Does anyone have any objections to this kind of idea? Can anyone see any actually problems this could cause? As it stands right now I've been wracking my brain and I can't think of any problems that could really arise from giving a player that handy of access to their block supply. So far as I've seen blocks can't be used to get pixels or anything and even if they could with this system you'd still have to gather them in the first place. I also can't see any way that it would break or unbalance the game or allow more griefing or anything. Like I said earlier anything like that can already be done with the currently method of 1000 block stacks in your normal inventory. If you can't manage to break, unbalance, or grief with a couple thousand blocks then you're either not working efficiently or not trying hard enough and having a massive list to work from won't make it any easier for you. "
First off, nice lengthy reply you have there. I agree with what you're saying, I don't see why blocks stop stacking at 1000. There could simply be an inventory or menu separate to your current inventory for blocks only with a single stack for each individual block type. As you said, I can't see this being too much of a problem at all.
Thanks! Glad to see I'm not to only one who would like to see something like this. Not sure how to go about actually getting the developers to take notice of the idea though.
Another idea is to simply limit block collection to the block bag. Instead of always grabbing blocks if the game only grabbed them when you had space in the block bag it wouldn't be so bad. My problem was always that I wanted to keep inventory spaces open to pick up loot put those slots would fill up while mining.
That could also work, just have a separate bag specifically for blocks. Some very simple ideas being thrown around here. Lets hope something gets done at some point! Not that there's a rush right now, more important things to work on at the moment I imagine
