There's been a few calls to reduce inventory space. The arguments mostly boil down to realism: that the vanilla Minecraft inventory allows you to put a castle in your pocket. That's hyperbole, of course; it's more like a small house with some furnishings. Still, the fact that you can fit so much in your inventory is used as a cudgel to argue for a reduced inventory size, noting that you can get a lot of building done with an inventory full of building materials.I argue that this is exactly the point of having a large inventory: that you are able to get a lot of building done with a single inventory load. From a gameplay perspective, that's good, because a large inventory minimizes what is arguably the most boring task that anyone can ask of another person — hauling. Even with carts, with a restricted inventory you will spend much more time going to your local materials stockpile and returning to your work-spot with the blocks you intend to place, than you will spend actually placing those blocks.The same problem plagues mining, albeit in a different form, with a restricted inventory. In this case, a limited inventory means that the combined task of mining does not involve actually breaking rocks, but carrying them from the place where you're mining to your drop-off stockpile and returning.With smaller inventories, in order to spend most of your time mining or building, someone else must spend a comparable time hauling. This works in Dwarf Fortress because all of these jobs are done by NPCs: hauling, building and mining. It worked in bronze/iron age Greece and Rome because the people who mined and hauled were slaves. In a day where most ways of life were pretty miserable, the only people they could find for these tasks were ones who were forced to do it. In modern times, we pay people to haul things to and fro — with real, you-can-live-off-of-it money, and even then they benefit from hand trucks and other means of moving stuff. In TFC, the only people who you will find to do the hauling jobs are real people, who are free to play TFC or not, without tangible pay — they cannot be forced to do the task, they will not find being relegated to hauling jobs at all fun, and they cannot be compensated in any meaningful way for their time doing those not-fun jobs.The more I think about the vanilla Minecraft inventory from a gameplay persective, the more sense it makes to have it that big. The fact that you can carry so much material with you in one go makes perfect sense from the perspective of the player's experience of the game. The inventory is large enough so that significant work gets done between episodes of inventory management. By the time you're doing big things, you have minecarts to quicken resource distribution, but the game is still arranged such that inventory management will take up little of your time. This is true for all successful games with inventory, even those with small inventory sizes — the game is structured in a way such that the average player doesn't have to rearrange things too often if he's playing the game properly.In short, the size of the vanilla Minecraft inventory was chosen entirely on purpose by Mojang, tailored for the kind of game Minecraft is. A restricted inventory threatens to make most of play time being hauling time, and hauling is boring. Furthermore, carts and multiplayer will not alleviate this problem. Even with carts, you still have to go into the cart often to manage your inventory. Multiplayer does not make managing inventory more interesting either, but can only dilute the boredom along with the real play by distributing what are essentially single-player tasks amongst many people — or worse, unload the boring stuff onto a player lower-class who will quickly not want to play anymore. The vanilla inventory is large enough to get a substantial amount of work done between trips, and small enough to be restrictive for bigger builds — the existence of many backpack mods and mods with backpacks are proof that, if anything, the vanilla inventory is too small.A restricted inventory will not create challenge in TFC. It will create busywork. Even with transport infrastructure, it will increase the time the player spends hauling materials and managing inventory, tasks that the best of game designers have failed to make at all interesting.Here, realism and believability must give way to a more fundamental goal, part of any game — a quality gaming experience. We have a higher than usual tollerance for busywork, but it's not an infinite wellspring of patience. If I look back on my experience with TFC (or any game) and find most of my time eaten up by inventory management and hauling, I'd go look for more enjoyable wastes of my time. (And yeah, I realize I'll probably catch flak for this, but I think it's important for TFC to remain viable as a game.)