The dirt catalog: take the second backpack tab to a new level!

Instead of a dirt backpack folder, I suggest a dirt catalog. When the player clicks the dirt catalog icon in their inventory, the game pops open a window separate from your current backpack, and it has many pages of dirt and cobble and sand - one space for every variety in the multiverse. They all start at 0, they stack to a very large amount, and you may take a 1k stack out at a time. Of course any inventory dirt can be quickly dropped onto the catalog icon and it gets sorted.​

For the sake of this post, dirt = virtually everything that gets sorted into the second inventory. This includes cobble, tar, gel, obsidian, wood, sand, moondust, and fine sand. Platforms, glass, wood planks and other materials used primarily for construction might also be excellent additions.

At current, there's no practical reason to lug around more than one 1k stack of dirt, but its a pain to keep more than a single variety. Managing dirt is most of my inventory management time, and mostly I garbage it. This is a maintenance chore within the game, and it feels awful when destroying big stacks of slow-to-mine cobblestone or trashing a hundred of pretty green dirt because I've got a full stack of ugly brown.

With a catalog system, I can easily collect whichever dirts I might want to use in future construction, and other dirts can gather in my inventory without interrupting my play. Gathering dirt becomes a pleasant treadmill rather than an annoying chore. I'll never have to junk potentially cool rare dirts while thinking, "a little house made out of this stuff might be cool, but I just probably won't ever use it." With automatic sorting and virtually limitless storage of dirt I can simply not worry about the boring part of my inventory and focus on organizing/trashing weapons, seeds, decorations and ores.

A catalog just for dirts would simplify and speed up inventory management without affecting game difficulty. No trial outside house building requires more than a few stacks, but no player outside the most compulsive organizer has fewer than five stacks! The only real challenge that this system would circumvent is the occasional return to the base from the action to drop off and sort big stacks of miscellany, and that particular challenge is no good for the game.

Further, the dirt catalog would allow players to more easily create expressive buildings and give players a new collection challenge. Future achievements may include cataloging a sample of 1 or 1k of each dirt, and multiplayer travelers will trade exotic dirts! Unusual and rare dirts could make an appearance. Under the current system, a rare glittering cobblestone, swirling sand or hyper-fertile soil would be just another inconvenience, but with a dirt catalog planets with these strange dirts would be prizes! Particularly exotic dirts might be cataloged as "???" until the player finds them. Similarly, wood, wood planks, and wood platforms from each tree could have their own unique look and color without compounding the current inventory troubles.

The dirt catalog has a few opportunities for gating upgrades, as well. Unlocking starmaps might allow for adding woods, ores and bars, or building materials to the catalog. Players might be able to build capacity upgrades to expand the capacity to up to 100k per dirt.

The dirt catalog would be a time-saving update which would keep the player out of their inventory and in the action! When it's time to settle, the dirt catalog will give the player everything they need to create the house of their dreams with no fuss and quick cleanup. Collectors will love filling it up, socialites and traders will love trading their favorite materials, explorers can keep burrowing or traveling without the headache of heading back to junk their inventory, while raiders and builders can now tear down set pieces without a care of the state of their inventory. This is a change which players of all stripes can love!

Be sure to comment and like this if it appeals to you!

 

might be better to have it a sample book of what your run across, and get some sort of material convertor in the crafting tools. this kind of dirt converted into that kind of dirt

 

I like the idea, but I would rather have this be built directly into a 3D Printer upgrade, that enables you to scan any regular block like this and print them at prices that are fair and balanced. For example, Dirt and Sand might be 10 blocks for one pixel, Cobblestone 1 block for 1 pixel, etc. Whatever would be balanced.

 

That doesn't really get at the heart of what I'm hoping to solve, though. My big concern is that gathering dirt is frustrating because the player must take time to either destroy the dirt or stash the dirt in ever overflowing chests. When raiding a keep, I'm often trashing dirt just to make room for more interesting loot.

Allowing for virtually limitless player storage for dirt isn't bad for game balance because no trial outside house building requires more than a few stacks (which most players always have that and more), but with automatic sorting and limitless storage of dirt I can simply not worry about the boring part of my inventory and focus on organizing/trashing weapons, decorations and ores.

Making this a part of the 3D scanner doesn't help, I'm still lugging around quarter stacks of my pretty purple dirt "just in case" and still loading up my poor starship with useless old chests full of cobblestone for "the next big house".

A converter also is no good for these same reasons. Even if the dirt didn't stack according to color, I could still be looking at ten or twelve different dirt types at the end of a raid or trip. Further, when I find little houses with unusual building materials, I never want to murder the inhabitant and strip those materials (I play floran), just because I don't want to deal with that inventory mess.

 

Alright I'm seeing what you mean now. I suppose it makes sense, and depending on what all gets sorted into it shouldn't be too much of an issue with balance. After all, you already mined it, so what is the harm in being able to hold it easily?

 

I like this. It's not too terribly hard to justify narratively either, you just use applied phlebotinum to compress the dirt a lot. Since it's dirt, it won't get damaged by this like regular items would.

(Okay, so this is handwavey, but it's no less plausible than that you can carry around roughly a truck's worth of wood and coal, and enough furniture to fill an IKEA showroom on your back.)

My one concern is that the second backpack tab can now hold non-dirt items, which comes in handy when looting furniture – for me it's very rarely full of dirt. Replacing it with something that only holds dirt would in fact nerf directory space the one time it's most needed.

Then again, I also have no idea why the inventory is as restricted as it is with no way to upgrade it – I've yet to encounter a situation where I think "I wish I took $ITEM with me from the ship". Ripping off WoW's system (and multiple hotbars) would IMO be a flat improvement to the game unless future additions to the game increase the pressure on inventory space in other activities than hoarding furniture. (Which I'm not sure is the one aspect of the game that requires this element of challenge, as opposed to platforming and combat.)

 

Great idea, OP!

You may consider using the word "tiles" instead of dirt, as that appears to be what they're officially called (or at least, that's how they appear in the game code)... although I was pretty amused at the notion of players being able to trade "exotic/valuable dirt".

I strongly support the inclusion of ores and bars, as those account for a massive portion of my own inventory issues.

Regarding the order of how the items are listed - things like ores could follow the obvious choice of sticking with their tier order, possibly keeping fuels separate. The tiles in general, though, should be arranged by color! ^_^

*seeds would also be a good candidate to catalog... they *would* be a cause of inventory trouble, but I just immediately junk them after I obtain them because they're not worth the inventory space. If inventory space wasn't a factor, however, I might actually invest some time into farming.

 

If this doesn't make it into the final game, I hope someone at least turns this into a mod. Because seriously, something that took every item in the game that can be described as a "block" and sorted it automatically would be an absolute dream. There'd still be a ton of furniture and such to sort, but perhaps decorations could get their own separate "catalog" while we're at it. At that point, it would actually be manageable to place only a handful of chests for keeping a few odds and ends, like seeds, produce, ore, and bars, and we'd be able to focus on actually building when we want to build and fighting when we want to fight. Inventory juggling would be a lot more manageable.

 

YEEEEEEEEEES. Seeds! I didn't even think of seeds because I don't farm because *trumpet sound* I don't want seeds and foods everywhere! That's a good catch that I'll add to suggestion.

 

sounds like creative mode in minecraft, sort of

 

In Minecraft's creative mode you have ready access to every material in the game with no effort whatsoever. This would simply be an expanded inventory that sorts the stuff you pick up into a handy checklist. The UI may be similar, but we're not talking about getting blocks for nothing.

 

Essential infinite storage space, but only for the blocks/dirt/tiles you've already found. Rather than 5978 pieces of dirt taking up 6 spaces in your materials tab, you'd have 5978 pieces of dirt stashed in your hammerspace catalog, taking up no spaces in any tab.

 

Or you could add a limit of,say,2000 blocks per tile,it would be a great addition to the game and still would be balanced.(if you got more than 2000 tiles of an specific material it would go to your main inventory).

 

Alternately have the option to just automagically junk anything over 2000 tiles. 1000 tiles (1 stack) is my current limit for even the stuff that has any use (wood, sand, cobblestone).

 

With blocks and furniture (i.e. "creative" stuff that comes in a massive variety) being sorted out, I could easily live with seeds in the inventory. Mainly because any given planet gives me maybe two seed types which aren't that onerous to stash when I get back just to have them around in case I want to settle down.

Seeing how food and ores are "gameplay" items, I'm not sure the devs might want those to not be subject to inventory management. (That's not saying I wouldn't welcome this, as I said I'm not sure why inventory juggling is an important gameplay element here, it seems like you're punished for coming prepared by having to leave loot behind.)

 

You all understand that there is technically 16777216 different dirt color variants right? Its all RGB coded. There should be a limit somehow to how many different colors we can carry. I think it should only contain dirt tiles to keep it simple, and not OP to the bone.. My opinion anyway

 

My dirt has been stacking pretty simply - purples from one planet go with purples from another. I think you might be wrong about the way dirt is colored. Besides, like I've said before, the difference in difficulty between having 5k dirt and 500k dirt is pretty small. The only challenge that 500k dirt helps over 5k dirt is if you're building a city.

 

Exactly how is "carrying many types of dirt" overpowered? And use the literal meaning of "overpowered". I'd like to see an explanation how this would make the player that much more capable of doing anything gameplay-related than what is possible now. (Seeing how, say, cheezing the dragon takes maybe 200 blocks of anything.)

What this does present is UI issues. i.e. making it more or less impossible to get the colour of dirt you want if you have too many colours. That said, your analysis here makes a bunch of errors:

• Even if there were 16 million possible colours of dirt, nobody is going to carry that many. Assuming that every planet only has one colour of dirt – if any, moons don't for instance – any player will only need to carry as many dirt colours as he visited planets. I'm guessing this goes into the hundreds, tops.
• As srsly pointed out, the colour palette for dirt isn't the RGB spectrum. Just think: have you ever seen white dirt? Or grey dirt? Black dirt? Dark or pale dirt of any kind? All the planets I've seen had dirt matching the general Starbound art style: bright, vibrant, saturated colours. Another thing is that dirt colours don't seem to clash with other block types. I.e. I haven't seen yellow dirt, which would be pretty similar to sandstone or dry sand blocks. That would also point towards the dirt colour palette of being pretty limited.

(And for all I know the palette is actually buried somewhere in the assets, I should go look.)

EDIT: Can't find the palette, but all non-dirt blocks that come in colours only have about nine colours. This isn't solid evidence of anything, but it does mean it's plausible that the devs took the same approach to dirt colours as well: picking from a preselected palette known to work with everything else reasonably well. There's also a line saying "variants: 5" in "dirt.material", but I'm not a modder so I'm not sure if the variants refer to colourings here.

 

C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\Starbound\assets\tiles\materials

131 tile types, with up to 9 colors.

*variants are the different patterns that can show up on the same tile type. Dirt, for example:

 

Probably should have just described this in writing, but they say a picture is worth a thousand words, and I have too much free time, so here's one way the color could be handled:

​

This is modeled after the crafting menu, and would only be a single tab of the catalog, with Ores/Bars, Seeds, etc, each having their own tab as well.

Anywho, this is what your "Bamboo" count might look like after completely obliterating a couple floran (or whoever uses bamboo) villages... you'd have an abundance of undyed bamboo (the 5138) and maybe a few dyed ones (35) from the village leader's hut, which is probably a bit fancier than normal.

I hope this serves as a useful visual. OP, feel free to use this image wherever you want; everyone else, feel free to edit it in any way and repost the revised version if you have an idea to make it better.

/salute