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

thanks for the findings about the color, that gives me a relief and some dissapointment on the limited color palette lol.

You guys are right.. its not over-powered in the meaning you are using at all..
if there is so few dirt tiles, then it would make sense and be nice to have a catalogue of "tiles" in general...

 

This is a great idea! Managing inventory is a waste of time that doesn't add any entertainment value to the game.

Let's take it one step further and say the character had an automatically sorted catalog with unlimited space that contained every item in the game (not just tiles). This would completely eliminate the need to deposit items in chests. How do you think this would add or take away from the experience?

edit: Note that you would still have to find the items, this would just sort and store them for you.

 

The thing is, a certain amount of inventory management IS fun for a lot of people, myself included. Sometimes it's nice feeling like you have a reason to return to your home base, and dropping off your cool findings is a perfectly good one. Other times the tension of trying to decide what item you want to get rid of so you can fit something new is compelling.

The issue is that right now, inventory management in Starbound is tedious and there needs to be a couple things done to make it a bit easier. Being able to keep absurdly large stacks of building materials in a pre-sorted catalog would mean you could then focus on managing your ores, fuels, furniture, weapons, saplings, seeds, and so on... And all of that is more than enough to keep inventory management interesting without making it a "well, it's been five minutes, time to stop and sort out my inventory again" thing.

 

Here's a good thought how to evolve the main idea a bit further for the sake of exploration and RPG.

The catalog could work similarly to the 3D Printer, but with a progression system... What goes in has to come out with a price, but not Pixels for once..
On that I stand to my idea of including only tiles of all sorts, not items per say.. Maybe Decorations, not useful items to keep the balance of the game.

The catalog is built in the inventory. There would be an extra slot beside the trash can slot called the cataloger.
What ever you feed it (tile-wise of course) gets compressed into the catalog, creating a new entry in it, sorting everything you give it, neat and accessible to use, and amassing up to an infinite amount of resources.

The first block fed to the catalog enters in the database of usable tiles, slowly building up your collection of.. dirt tiles for example...
Because of inventory space constraints, its only fair to include a drawback for stashing all tiles in infinite number so lets say:

(All this need balancing of course so I need input on all that)
You put in 1000 wood logs in the catalog, every time you pull 1 log out, it cost you 100 logs out of your catalog due to matter compression, or loss of "data" or whatever reason we find fit..

It sounds like a lot of lost resources but wait for it: everything you put in the catalog can be burnt 1 stack a a time to reduce any further cost per use by 1.
By default, each tile cost a 100 tiles of your catalog stash.
You decide to burn a full stack to reduce the cost by 1. Now it cost 99 tiles per use instead of 100.
Burn 9 more stacks and then each tile will now cost 90 instead of 100.
If you manage to burn 100 stacks of those given tiles, then your cost goes to 0.
The same would go for any tiles of the game, having to burn stacks of every unique tiles.

That way, you will have space for every tiles, but you will have to spend a lot of time to get them down to zero cost.
The space saving catalog becomes optional as you can still keep your tiles out of it for direct use. Or choose to process them to your catalog instead of trashing them all like I usually do.
The catalog shouldn't be transferable to other players. Kinda like techs..

Now I think about exploits: So you can't become a milking cow for other lazy players, all tiles you place from your catalog in the world would be tagged as.. decompressed, spent, replicated or whatever term we find adequate
meaning that it just won't go in any catalog again. That is a solution to zero cost tiles without free duplication for all...
Otherwise the cost of tiles could simply not go lower than 1 for 1 in the catalog.. Then let the players do whatever they wish with their resources I guess..

All taken in account, similar object/feature could exist to replace the 3D Printer from the ship.. Similar Catalogs for type of items?
For your imagination to create. It starts to get very very interesting, maybe Chucklefish will fall upon out tread one day and like some of it, or a very talented Modder!

 

I like this idea very much.It's also good for storing blocks from dungeons, since it's already a pain to grab furniture, i find myself never taking tiles cause i will rarely use any.

If anybody doesn't want it for balancing issues, my suggestion would be to store them in the same machine with 3D printer (a new option for the catalog). Maybe having only the list for printing, so you can check what you have on hand without going back, but have to go back to actually grab it. This item could also send the dirt to the ship without having to go deposit.

I also like to point out i don't think any kind of upgreadable would work.

 

What if instead of carrying this catalog around with you, it was on you ship. Essentially a chest with unlimited space that automaticlly sorts all items. You would then still have to return to your base to drop off cool stuff and decide what items to carry when you run out of room, but there would be no tedious inventory management.

 

What about infinite storage, but with a maximum quantity total, by ship size for example, I know there is only the basic ship yet but the bigger/better ship, the more maximum quantity you can haul in that storage..
Maybe even a way to beam it up, with a certain amount lost in the process for the price of simplicity.. The deeper you are, the more you loose beaming it up there. If on the surface, or anywhere you can beam yourself in, its free to transfer in the ship..

I'm still trying to find some balancing without ruining some of the realism of the gathering aspect of the game..

 

The problem there is that then you're back to tedious inventory juggling if you find anything remotely interesting on a planet again. There's functionally very little difference between simply having a lot of storage on your ship or homeworld and infinite storage on your ship or homeworld.

 

Not a bad idea, though I think dirts should only appear once you discover them. Other than that, this is almost required. I'm constantly filling my inventory up with completely useless junk which is insanely annoying.

 

This. THIS THIS THIS...

 

Check out the image I posted earlier... post #20 (last post of the first page). A simple tile-available toggle would work great, so that the list isn't spammed by a bunch of tiles you don't have; but for crazy completionists like myself, it's nice to be able to see which ones are missing, so we can hunt them down.

 

I see your point, and with that method of representing it, having all of them there isn't an issue. (I imagined it somewhat different, without the crafting part.)

 

My ideal system would be something two-tier like this. An infinite-ish bag of holding for "decorative" objects - i.e. furniture (and furniture-like objects), and a regular inventory for the "usable" stuff.

The one concern is that this would mostly obviate the 3D printer, whose gameplay role seems to be an endgame gold sink of sorts, something you spend money on once you're all geared up. That said, I'm not sure why "building nice houses" needs to be an endgame activity, or at least one that requires a steady influx of money. Or why SB needs an endgame gold sink at all. (Disclaimer: I know this is an armchair critique of someone else's game design, so take it with whatever quantity of grains of salt is appropriate.)

 

I agree with the sentiment, but not the ideas. I would personally prefer if all blocks that cannot be crafted can be scanned into the printer (including tiles), and just have this for tile storage.

I wouldn't say the game needs and end game money sink, but I am willing to wager by end game you will have more pixels than you need and can gain them easily. I would rather see it adjusted so you can build decent homes at just about any level, it just becomes vastly easier at high levels.

 

This is a great idea only thing that i have to say is that it's split in 2 types. Weapons, clothing/ armor, food, ores, and energy cannot be stored in the catalog. while Tiles, furniture,and seeds can go it the catalog. So this does keep balance and still the use of chest and the 3-d printer so you can make copy's with it.
While saving us from organizing death.
Huehuehue ^w^

 

I feel like with common blocks like dirt that comes in a butt ton of colors, instead of taking up a lot of slots in the inventory it can have one, and when you hover over said slot it has a small color list that you can side-scroll through. and this would apply to personal inventory and storage inventory as well

 

I love this idea, I also think that limiting to anything less than MAXINT is a waste. The addition I made to my house used >1000 tiles so any major construction is going to take thousands and thousands of tiles. I currently do sort and store all my dirt rather than trash it and it takes FOREVER. I have a box of brownish tiles, a box of purplish tiles etc... but the number of chests required and the time spent figuring out which chest holds which color is extremely tedious.
I also like the idea of a tile trade system... some tiles that I'd really like to be able to make a house/area out of are extremely difficult to find... the only material I consistently have available for building is dirt... and who wants to live in a dirt castle?
Give each title a rarity.. White/Green/blue/purple. It takes 1000 white to get a purple, 500 green to get a purple, 100 blue to get a purple

Code:

      | White  | Green | Blue  | Purple
White | 1:1    | 100:1 | 500:1 | 1000:1
Green | 1:100  | 1:1   | 100:1 | 500:1
Blue  | 500:1  | 1:100 | 1:1   | 100:1
Purple| 1000:1 | 500:1 | 100:1 | 1:1

 

The problem with the 3D printer is that it requires treks back and forth to scan and make things. I don't like setting foot in IKEA in real life, a game shouldn't need busywork to deal with furniture. (Cf. the Sims where anything you buy magically appears in the room.) "Make everything scannable/printable" doesn't ease the inventory juggling aspect of building a house.

So, an important part of my sentiment is "interior decoration should be convenient", i.e. that the game should encourage and enable creativity even more than it already does, instead of keeping restrictions that only make sense with the progression aspect of the game. Making tiles printable doesn't really go far enough, where I don't see a reason why one shouldn't.