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wyrmofvt

Why TerraFirmaCraft Cannot Have a Restricted Inventory

21 posts in this topic

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.)

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I completely agree with this! Mainly because when in TFC or even vanilla minecraft has everything you do been done in a small area? Never, and that is the reason for near infinite space in all directions. You would literally never get anything done with a small inventory. I mean as it is most stack sizes have been reduced by half if not more than that (lookin at you vanilla planks). I for one get extremely annoyed by tedious tasks that have no actual purpose. Think if you will, what if your boss at work had you sweep the floor of the entire building with a box of q-tips! Then he asked you to empty the trash one item at a time, and carry it to the curb and place it in another can! Or to walk to the store to buy a brick then walk back and lay the brick and continue doing that until you had a building built! This in essence is the same thing as a tiny inventory! It makes no sense and serves only as a way to make things take longer to accomplish. That may work for some who require every aspect of life to be as ridiculously difficult as possible only so they feel challenged, but that is not the case for everyone.

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I'm against a restricted inventory. Just imagine you're carrying a large backpack and satchels.

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You are right, but you are not looking deep enough. Yes, limiting inventory will create more busywork than it already is. The challenge will stem from new mechanics that will be created.

 

For example, there could be different kind of packs, where each can carry lots of single type of item. You could carry lots of wood or lots of stone, but never at the same time. Or you could mix and match bags in limited number of slots for different ratios of carried items. There could also be different tiers of bags, each being harder to make, but being able to carry more.

 

There is also huge thread about infrastructure. Limited inventory will create bigger need for infrastructure. Roads, rails, work animals, etc.. will have much bigger impact on the gameplay. Right now there is no need for them other than aesthetics and "just because" reasons.

 

Yes. They cannot just limit the inventory, they need to implement new mechanics that will "fix" the problem that will be created by it.

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i think the best possible inventory system i can think of is a resident evil inventory management style.

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You are right, but you are not looking deep enough. Yes, limiting inventory will create more busywork than it already is. The challenge will stem from new mechanics that will be created.

 

For example, there could be different kind of packs, where each can carry lots of single type of item. You could carry lots of wood or lots of stone, but never at the same time. Or you could mix and match bags in limited number of slots for different ratios of carried items. There could also be different tiers of bags, each being harder to make, but being able to carry more.

 

There is also huge thread about infrastructure. Limited inventory will create bigger need for infrastructure. Roads, rails, work animals, etc.. will have much bigger impact on the gameplay. Right now there is no need for them other than aesthetics and "just because" reasons.

 

Yes. They cannot just limit the inventory, they need to implement new mechanics that will "fix" the problem that will be created by it.

 

First, regarding your backpack idea. Will you still need to go into an inventory screen to retrieve these items from your pack? If so, how does this solve the problem of frequent inventory management?

 

Second, I already addressed infrastructure. The problems I outlined show up at a local level, hence my direct mention of local stockpiles. Ie, your materials are already as close as can be without you actually carrying them on your person.

 

Third, a limited inventory cannot be crippling early game. Remember that you have to be able to build a shelter before nightfall, and that you have to be able to stave off hunger while you weave your first backpack. The most likely material for backpacks, leather, will not be available to you until you can build barrels, which require planks, which require metals, which require clay, which require wood, which requires tools, and the process takes time, which requires you to be foraging, hunting and/or farming, which requires tools. Already, you need quite a bit to even begin to expand your inventory, and I often find that early game I run into inventory problems.

 

One of the most useful things you can do in designing a game is to play-test your ideas. In this case, install a backpack mod, and play the game as if your idea was implemented, with different colored backpacks serving as your different backpack types, and limiting your slot usage. Is it interesting and engaging, or is it just busywork? 

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I would think weaving a backpack would be interesting, depending on how hard it was to do.  Maybe if it's made out of wool or some kind of plant fiber?

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I think backpacks would add another level of believable to TFC.  

 

They could even be woven out of wood.  My mom makes woven oak baskets.  A lot of game play could be added here.  

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Who needs backpacks when you can carry an inventory full of clay vessels, it's like having an extra 3 double chests. Vessels are OP.

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I like the idea of further limited inventory.  Doing something monotonous, placing blocks, mining, chopping trees, planting/harvesting crops, et cetera; for an extended amount of time is something holding the entire game back.  Sometimes you need a break from doing something for so long before you start thinking you can be doing something better with your time.  Having to stop, think, and do something else (key word here; THINK) is primarily what this game is missing and this would be a step in the right direction.

 

Also; Dying.  When people die in minecraft it seems that people tend to be very upset, usually because they're carrying between 30 minutes to an hour worth of work on them, then they spend a half an hour looking for where they died to only find that they have lost all of the work they have done today, not to mention tools, armor, food, etc. because players have such a large inventory space they do not feel it is necessary to take the small amount of time it would take to put their items away.  so a smaller inventory would help alleviate this a bit I feel.

 

TFC has gone in this direction just a bit as wildwestusmc talked about plank blocks being limited to 8 to a stack.  The amount of items to stack is limited but that's compensated by the fact that you can take advantage of vessels to hold 4 stacks of certain items such as ore and minerals.  So while you have to deal with smaller stacks you still have the same amount of inventory space and stacking ability compared to vanilla minecraft while working with some items such as ore.  And you have even greater inventory space when working with saplings, seeds and food items as they still stack to 64 AND you can put them in vessels, therefore quadrupling the amount of space you have on vanilla concerning these and certain other items.

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Who needs backpacks when you can carry an inventory full of clay vessels, it's like having an extra 3 double chests. Vessels are OP.

 

You'd think that, but if you've ever carried large numbers of clay vessels, it gets difficult figuring out where everything is, and you can't carry certain items in vessels, period. This rather limits their usefulness.

 

 

 

I like the idea of further limited inventory.  Doing something monotonous, placing blocks, mining, chopping trees, planting/harvesting crops, et cetera; for an extended amount of time is something holding the entire game back.  Sometimes you need a break from doing something for so long before you start thinking you can be doing something better with your time.  Having to stop, think, and do something else (key word here; THINK) is primarily what this game is missing and this would be a step in the right direction.

 

How does limiting inventory keep things interesting here?

 

 

Also; Dying.  When people die in minecraft it seems that people tend to be very upset, usually because they're carrying between 30 minutes to an hour worth of work on them, then they spend a half an hour looking for where they died to only find that they have lost all of the work they have done today, not to mention tools, armor, food, etc. because players have such a large inventory space they do not feel it is necessary to take the small amount of time it would take to put their items away.  so a smaller inventory would help alleviate this a bit I feel.

 

TFC has gone in this direction just a bit as wildwestusmc talked about plank blocks being limited to 8 to a stack.  The amount of items to stack is limited but that's compensated by the fact that you can take advantage of vessels to hold 4 stacks of certain items such as ore and minerals.  So while you have to deal with smaller stacks you still have the same amount of inventory space and stacking ability compared to vanilla minecraft while working with some items such as ore.  And you have even greater inventory space when working with saplings, seeds and food items as they still stack to 64 AND you can put them in vessels, therefore quadrupling the amount of space you have on vanilla concerning these and certain other items.

 

You seem here to want to limit inventory on one hand, citing that doing so softens the impact of death, but on the other hand you mention of clay vessels that actually increase your inventory even past the vanilla levels! I'm having a hard time figuring out what you want to argue.

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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....

 

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.)

 

I agree to this: limiting the space in the inventory per se is not funny. That said, I feel that implementing the right mechanics along with limited inventory space will result in improving greatly the gameplay. Your main concern is that even with infrastructures that allow storing many items, local work would be slowed down significantly. Let me adress this problems, I've got some ideas.First of all, what's the point of having a small inventory? First this lack in space (or an even stricter restriction) is not minor problem, resolving it would require various solutions attainable through challenges, and this game really needs some new challenge aside finding ores, ore even better, some challenge that can only be won by finding ores. Second, I feel that some players (or at least I), would like to have a better and more meaningful exploring experience: having access to many resources without having to plan anything doesn't reward smart thinking and at times feels like cheating (if I find myself in the wilds at night, I can just make a bed on the spot and sleep to prevent mob spawning, or I can make an high column of straw and just wait for the day to come). Of course nerfing the inventory alone won't add much to the challenge of surviving in the wild far from home, but it's part of the solution. So how do we take away something like inventory space without making the game too much of an hassle to play? I say that not having access to many resources is only meaningful if you are far from home: if you are just exploring it makes sense that you are travelling light, if you are moving around big amounts of materials for some reason (building a new settlement, bringing ores back home from a far away mining site) actually having animals and carts to move things around and having to defend your convoy from wild beasts and such could actually pose an interesting challenge. Having to haul back and forth from your cart or from your chests to get materials when you are building new structures just next to your home (or your carts) is menial and boring. Here's my solutions:A) more kinds of placeable items (like wood piles and ingots): you are mining ore and at some point you have your inventory full of native copper, what do you do? why, you just toss it in a pile next to you in the cave, then you come back with a cart to take it back.B) Settlement: there could be a block that marks a settlement, while you are inside a certain radius from that block, you always have direct access to any chest inside the same settlement. For example, you are just building a new building in your village and you don't have enough smooth stone in your inventory, what do you do? as TFC an MC is now, you would have to go inside you home, reach the right chest and grab the stones you need, go back to the building place etc... if this idea gets implemented though, you just open your inventory and select "chest 2" where you have stone, then you directly use it from there, without moving from the building place.C) Carts would work the same as "settlement" but they would work on shorter radius, except carts close to each other would link together, so you just have to be close to one to be able to access every cart in the convoy.What do you think?

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AFAIK, B would be near-impossible to code without some sort of way of "linking" all of the chests together manually so the game recognizes them as a single inventory system. Currently, each chest is an individual tile entity that only stores its contents within the memory of itself.

 

The same goes for carts, but restricted even more so since it would be a move-able entity, and not a tile entity that is stationary within a single block.

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I think limiting your inventory is a great idea if there's any good way to replace it.

I don't use minecarts or donkeys in Minecraft usually. Why? Because I don't need to. There are backpacks, pouches, enderchests, even tesseracts. That's for travelling, there are many other ways, less problematic ways. But TFC is not that way of game. If you want to carry things, you could get a great way to do it, but it wouldn't be so easy.

 

For example: More intelligent donkeys (animals usually). Less accidents... Like that sweet animal with full inventory walks into a lava pool just for fun... or in a stream (I mean when a water source starts to flow down and the animal stucks in it and drown).

I need less elastic ropes, and a way to connect donkeys to each other, making a caravan. Or connect horses to minecarts and minecarts to each other.

You've made 6 minecarts full inventory of ores, connected to 4 horses or mules, what can pull the whole thing out of the mine. That would be great i think.

 

You've told about low-level gamers. Well if I get wood or somebody build a great house and/or give me interesting machines, magic utilities to research, I'd like to mine and carry stuffs all the day. Everybody has needs, but not everybody want to suck with crafting things. Others love them. I play with some guys who love to build fantastic buildings but I have no patience to do it. But I like to try new stuffs, research, creating that kind of stuffs what he would like to use for building, and this is what I call multiplayer.

 

By the way lesser inventories should be in config, so you can choose. That's what I think.

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My ideas for inventories would be completely Backpack based

 

Without a Pack, you could hold maybe your hotbar worth of items, and you would start with a pack about 1/2 or 1/4 the current inventory.

 

you would then upgrade said pack as you progress, giving it more room, thus making large projects easier when you have a high tier pack.

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hm..well packs have been used much in the days since we stoped living in caves, but what kind of makes me scratch my head and go huh, is that our current storage options are just....clay jars and chests.

 

i feel we could work better (with or without a smaller inventory) if there were more options.

chests realy should be the end game version of storage. if you look at what goes into making a chest, from the basic wood ones with very little metal in them, to the grand chests with huge iron locks you see on antique shows....it took a LOT to make a chest. only rich people in the past had chests to themselves. Priests and nobles and freemen workers had proper chests, while the poorer people had more basic things like boxes and jars and baskets.

 

while a basic backpack could be woven from straw and string/wool, there could be other options for managing your space.

right now we have the clay pots/vessels and those are great for carrying the small things. we have the pot (that may be turning into a cooking pot) but i would like to see multi part pots and baskets added for lower level storage.

flat baskets for carrying crops and foods (inventory only basket) and large round/tall ones that are blocks you can store small/medium items in your home. same with pots, you could make them from multiple parts that have to be added together (ie bottom and top parts made from clay forming a bottom shape recipy and a top formed clay recipy, then merging the two parts in your inventory crafting grid)

you could also make things like fish traps from baskets too, and crude packs and animal packs would be makeable.

 

then chests could require metal parts like iron, brass or bronze parts like locks and hinges, and would need you to work harder to make them, or in multiplayer need a villages blacksmith to make.

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This should solve the a part of the problem?

 

 

What about creative mode like inventory or inventories simmilar to it ....This sistem should work deppendant on the collective weight of all of the items in your inventory ,you can place a chosen amount of various items in the inventory so that the sum of their weights is less or equal than the sum of weight alowed to be carryed(same for volume) if it is greater the inventory will not accept the item .... that makes it so that you can carry very large quantaties of smallon and light items or small quantaties of very large and heavy ones ....

this should go for every type of inventory ....

 

(the system is like creative you use the search bar or the scroll to navigate)

(voulme and wieght .... when one of these are at the maximum you cannot put items in the inventory anymore)

(you get "infinite"(number of items in the game)or less slots in your inventory deppending on the item weight)

 

That fixes the problem about inventory management (slots) that is limmiting the cappability of the player to pick up smaller things .....

 

The castle building problem can be fixed by not restricting the weight too much so that the house can be built after a fair time ...?

 

There might be a problem with the ability to carry so much flowers ...

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Okay, maybe this idea of backpacks would work . . .

 

But it raises the question: How does the player get a backpack? Do they have to build it? What out of? How easy is it to get those materials, say, wool cloth? What happens if a player's world spawns so they don't have access to it without incredible work, such as not having a biome nearby for sheep? If it's wood planks or sticks, that's great! Now how are they supposed to get that far to get a saw ready with only a hotbar? 

 

I could only assume it would require two people, at the least, to get a cursory settlement up and running on the first time a world is generated. Great on multiplayer servers, in theory. Of course, it winds up kind of even more of a problem for single players . . . 

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Okay, maybe this idea of backpacks would work . . .

 

But it raises the question: How does the player get a backpack? Do they have to build it? What out of? How easy is it to get those materials, say, wool cloth? What happens if a player's world spawns so they don't have access to it without incredible work, such as not having a biome nearby for sheep? If it's wood planks or sticks, that's great! Now how are they supposed to get that far to get a saw ready with only a hotbar? 

 

I could only assume it would require two people, at the least, to get a cursory settlement up and running on the first time a world is generated. Great on multiplayer servers, in theory. Of course, it winds up kind of even more of a problem for single players . . . 

You would spawn with a backpack, albeit a very basic one, and the materials to make the upgraded backpacks would be simple like leather or string/rope, maybe some metal pieces for the higher tier ones. so they wouldn't be all that difficult to get, and ideally, would be the first thing you make once you advance a tier.

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Okay, maybe this idea of backpacks would work . . .

 

But it raises the question: How does the player get a backpack? Do they have to build it? What out of? How easy is it to get those materials, say, wool cloth? What happens if a player's world spawns so they don't have access to it without incredible work, such as not having a biome nearby for sheep? If it's wood planks or sticks, that's great! Now how are they supposed to get that far to get a saw ready with only a hotbar? 

 

I could only assume it would require two people, at the least, to get a cursory settlement up and running on the first time a world is generated. Great on multiplayer servers, in theory. Of course, it winds up kind of even more of a problem for single players . . . 

well, lets see, you need one slot for sticks, one for stones, one for an axe, one for a knife, one for a shovel, one for clay, one for straw, and one for logs, one for an unfired vessal, and 1 for a unfired mold, and one for an axe mold. that's 11 slots we need, but logs and clay molds/vessals can be placed on the ground so that's fine, getting 10 ore bits isn't that hard, and once you get clay, you can carry a vessel or two, and you can take care of sticks, straw, and stones, the three needed but most space consuming things. I'd say you can get a backpack with a hot bar. maybe it'll take a bit of time, but you can do it. 9 slots is more than you think.

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I'm also counting the need to have a shelter going for nighttime, and not starving to death in the meantime. 

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