Hey guys, I've recently come back to play 1.4.4.9. One thing I've noticed is that item storage and sorting is way more annoying than it used to be. The restock and chest rename features are nice, but they only work well if the player already organised their chests correctly, but in practice this is really hard to achieve. This is largely caused by having so many item types, which increases as the game goes on. When the player sorts their current items in a certain way, e.g. Consumables, they will inevitably find out in a few hours that actually there's more than 40 types of consumables, so perhaps they sort them into Potions, Food, etc. Then they may find out there's more than 40 types of Potion. This is not to mention all the items with many different cosmetic variants like wooden items or statues where the player inevitably finds more and more of them over the game. These clog up the player's chests. It frankly feels like a lot of work to sort through every item and recategorise them because the old ones don't fit anymore. It also makes crafting with chest a lot less useful because many recipes require items from more than one chest because of the chest subdivisions you need. Sorting the items doesn't feel great either because the sort isn't a setting you switch on, it's somethiing that happens once, so inevitably as you use the chest you forget to click Sort every time and it soon becomes a mess anyway, and as items move about as you remove them, it still involves a lot of looking at every item to find the one you want even if they are sorted.
Really, the biggest issue is that the player cares a lot more about sorting between chests than sorting in a chest, but there's no option that sorts between chests. Therefore, I simply suggest eliminating the need for the player to have multiple chests as their main storage at all. Through some wiring shenanigans, or just by virtue of being located close together, chests should "merge" into a single larger inventory. This completely eliminates the need for the player to sort items between chests at all if they don't explicitly want to, and would make expanding storage easy and painless. Chests should be filterable with a few basic built-in categories that can be refined, like Blocks, Ores & Bars, Containers, Consumables, Potions, etc for when the player needs to take items out. Sorting should be a toggle, not a one-off, so when the player requests to sort, the chest should just stay sorted. As a bonus, crafting from chest becomes a lot more useful.
Really, the biggest issue is that the player cares a lot more about sorting between chests than sorting in a chest, but there's no option that sorts between chests. Therefore, I simply suggest eliminating the need for the player to have multiple chests as their main storage at all. Through some wiring shenanigans, or just by virtue of being located close together, chests should "merge" into a single larger inventory. This completely eliminates the need for the player to sort items between chests at all if they don't explicitly want to, and would make expanding storage easy and painless. Chests should be filterable with a few basic built-in categories that can be refined, like Blocks, Ores & Bars, Containers, Consumables, Potions, etc for when the player needs to take items out. Sorting should be a toggle, not a one-off, so when the player requests to sort, the chest should just stay sorted. As a bonus, crafting from chest becomes a lot more useful.
