PC Can we discuss stack sizes?

[Damocles]

Not really... could be an XML entry for every exception.  Make player inventory the norm and allow containers or whatever an exception to stack sizes for specific items.  If you wanted to put in a LOT of exceptions then you might have a point.

If you move a large stack to a container with that only allows small stacks, there would have to be logic that automatically splits stacks. That would complicate things.

 

[Gazz]

If you move a large stack to a container with that only allows small stacks, there would have to be logic that automatically splits stacks. That would complicate things.

Yes, we had talked about it a while ago.

Everyone who looked into details and potential issues of it went with a resounding "No!".

 

[FileMachete]

@Roland , @Gazz , thanks for the info, and it's nice to know it's been considered.

Just as a minor fyi, at 69 days into current playthrough my crafting room has 19 storage crates. 4 are unused 3-4 only have a few things and the rest are more than half full. And that's with modded increased stack sizes. Heck if I was using the default ammo/powder/brass/bullet stacks that'd take up another chest or two

So while I kinda like organizing things, 6 stacks of 10 for boiled water vs 1 just seems like clutter.

But it's readily modded, and I can 'resist the urge' (lol) to game the trader due to large stacks, so it's all good here

 

[OzHawkeye]

There are simply some people who like inventory management and some who don't.

True that, I'm one of the latter not the former, and quickly mod any new version of the game to use 20,000 stacks for everything that can indeed safely stack. Doesn't matter what game either really (Factorio, the very first mod I made, bumped all stack sizes to 200,000).

 

[hotpoon]

There is an old program a former member made that I have been using for the last 2 or 3 years (at least) called Advanced Recipe Editor. It says recipe but I use it mostly for editing stack sizes. It is so old that it still has the grid where you use to have to place the items in certain slots to make something. I find it still works very well for me though.

It takes minute or less to set up and then it has a nice gui to look through to edit stacks or recipes and has a search filter if you are looking for something in particular. With the move to new forum it may have gotten cut but I can have a look later and see if it is still around.

Thank you for the offer. That's super kind of you, but I did manage to find a mod that stacks everything to 20k.

I suspect this is a workaround for how traders operate.   They'll only buy 3 stacks of an item and since water is easy to make in vast quantities and sells reasonably well they wanted to limit how much money you could make from it.  Selling 3x250 stacks of water to each trader would allow you to break the economy on day 2.

That's a very good point, but the devs could fix that exploit.  When you go to sell a whole stack, there's a slider where you input how much of that stack you want to sell. If they devs just make it that the slider caps at the number the trader will accept from you, then problem solved.  I'm sure the coding is more involved than I've imagined, but it's not like the devs are amateurs. look at what they've made already. 

There are simply some people who like inventory management and some who don't. That is what this all comes down to. TFP as a company want a degree of inventory management in their game so useful items like water, medicine, and food are going to have smaller stack sizes because that is the way they want to enforce some semblance of inventory management. They could go a lot more hardcore in this regard if they wanted to do so but they are happy with the pretty casual and abstract rules they have in place right now.

...

I can understand wanting a bit of inventory management. My argument is you're going to have inventory management even with a 20k stack mod because there are so many different kinds of items in the game at this point.  Small stack sizes only make sense for inventory management when there's a lack of variety of things to carry....at least to me.

 

[meganoth]

Now that the food system is more fleshed out water is more of a crafting item (lIke murky water) than a consumable. Especially since it has a risk of dysentery. This doesn’t mean it needs to stack to 125 but it also isn’t equal to the teas and other drinks. 

That is the first (and maybe only) reason in this thread that I would imagine could convince the developers to change the stack limit of water. With all the benefits of teas and other drinks the value of water jars as a drink has decreased a lot and there is a very small window of time where I take water with me. BUT on the other hand an alternative playstyle could save that one slot and rely on finding glasses of water while out looting (and substitute that with murky water once the purifier mod was found).

And that people even think about ways to save one measly slot in the inventory shows that the game is really providing an inv management mini-game.

That's a very good point, but the devs could fix that exploit.  When you go to sell a whole stack, there's a slider where you input how much of that stack you want to sell. If they devs just make it that the slider caps at the number the trader will accept from you, then problem solved.  I'm sure the coding is more involved than I've imagined, but it's not like the devs are amateurs. look at what they've made already. 

I can repeatedly klick on "W" (the sell key) with a speed of >6/s. But they could make water unsellable like murky water. Or decrease the value of a water jar in the same relation that they increase the stack size. I.e. double the stack size and cut the (sell) value by half.

 

[Gamida]

Thank you for the offer. That's super kind of you, but I did manage to find a mod that stacks everything to 20k.

Not a problem. I might not find it again anyway as it got culled in the move it seems. It was a good program though. Not only could you edit stacks on individual items but you could edit other things like damage, range etc. And it had a separate spot to edit recipes. Very easily I might add.

 

[hotpoon]

...

Or decrease the value of a water jar in the same relation that they increase the stack size. I.e. double the stack size and cut the (sell) value by half.

That's clever.  The bigger the stack, the more you're flooding the market, so the lower the unit price.

 

[Sellsents]

I hate the inventory management in this game. And when I say I hate it, I mean it. You got so little space for so many items. And I am not a fan of running a hundred times back and forth just to get neccessary items home, specially not in early game where you don´t have a vehicle yet.

I don´t play without certain mods anymore, I have to admit it. Because otherwhise I would go crazy with the game. I always got at least an ui and a bigger backpack/space mod. This also includes vehicle space. All my friends use storage mods in 7dtd. They all say the same when it comes to inventory managment. I personally don´t know a friend who actually likes the vanilla settings. Makes no sense to me that you need to spend a great amount of your playtime running back and forth to bring items home instead of having fun doing quests or exploring the worlds and slaughter zeds.

 

[canadianbluebeer]

Bigger backpack, storage boxes, vehicle storage. yup. I use'em too.

Even with the absurdly large backpack, if I clear say, shotgun messiah, I have to put a storage box down

just inside the entrance.

Managing inventory is one thing, micromanaging is something else.

same with 3 slots for the forge. even with that it still takes a long time (or a lotta forges) to make things in quantity)

I'll also change a few of the stack sizes later, more for consistency.  (concrete/cement to 6k from 1, and I changed iron darts to 1500, since that's how many it takes to fill 1 dart trap.   Bullet stacks I also changed. Mostly since I make those in absolutely insane amounts)

Bandages/FA kits etc, I left alone. Had a box full of those in a18, but  I did like the lower stack numbers.  Although upping them to 10 from 5 just to keep them the same with regular bandages... maybe.

just my 2 coppers.

 

[Gamida]

I think everyone has their own stack story. One of mine was I use to have an obsession with having tons of jars of water. I had to "adjust" my stack size for them as I would end up with chests and chest of them at the default size. Same with stone...I would have chests everywhere in my mines filled with stones. It wasn't about being able to carry more on me either. Was more of a storage problem for me.

 

[Liesel Weppen]

Hmm, while looting i usally struggle with many different items, instead of stacksizes. And depending on my game progression i usually drop bioled water, murky water end empty jars to free up slots. From one point in the game i have enough water and jars, so why carry around them to get even more of what i don't need anyway?

When it comes to base inventory managment, stacksizes become more an issue. However i realized if stacksizes kick in, i usually have enough of that item anyway. When my base storge shows i'm starting the 5th 250 stack of feathers i usually sell or drop them. (or i craft and fill my arrow stacks and sell the rest). Doesn't give you much dukes, but at least a little and frees up storage room.

Items i will keep multiple full stacks, like e.g. first aid kits or especially ammunition, are really important and worth their storage use even with the given stacksizes.

Imho from that point of view that is not just inventory managment, that is what to keep and what to drop. Or build many storages and deal with them. That's also "survival".

Some stacksizes may be worth discussing them. But especially for boiled water, imho there is no problem. You don't need hundrets of them in advance, jars are easy to craft (if you don't have enough in storage already anyway), murky water is accessible easily and you can craft boiled water very quickly, when you need some. For drinking i go to tea as soon as i can anyway. They have the same stacksizes, but i don't need 100 of them on storage either.

If you live in the dessert and there is really no source of water or a water tower nearby, you have choosen to play in that environment, and it's common that water is rare there. So their storage use becomes important again but worth it.

(And if you choose so, got to snow biome once, dig a full stack of snowballs (iirc 6000?), go back and have a lifetime supply of water just costing one storage slot)

BTW: iirc stack size for boiled water was already at 10, at least in A18.

 

[Maharin]

If you move a large stack to a container with that only allows small stacks, there would have to be logic that automatically splits stacks. That would complicate things.

Even with that you could have it only move a stack worth based on the receiving container.  There are solutions and they're not all complicated.  But, as Gazz hinted at, there are a lot of edge cases that might take a while to iron out.  I still think it is very doable. 

Personally, I've written routines to do this sort of thing and it pretty much amounts to making a function that "moves an item from container A to container B" that understands the stack sizes might be different.  If you make it smart enough then you use that function EVERY time you move items around and the logic is all in one place.  But I'm not a programmer anymore, I'm a farmer, so what do I know? 

 

[Gamida]

Hmm, while looting i usally struggle with many different items, instead of stacksizes. And depending on my game progression i usually drop bioled water, murky water end empty jars to free up slots. From one point in the game i have enough water and jars, so why carry around them to get even more of what i don't need anyway?

When it comes to base inventory managment, stacksizes become more an issue. However i realized if stacksizes kick in, i usually have enough of that item anyway. When my base storge shows i'm starting the 5th 250 stack of feathers i usually sell or drop them. (or i craft and fill my arrow stacks and sell the rest). Doesn't give you much dukes, but at least a little and frees up storage room.

Items i will keep multiple full stacks, like e.g. first aid kits or especially ammunition, are really important and worth their storage use even with the given stacksizes.

Imho from that point of view that is not just inventory managment, that is what to keep and what to drop. Or build many storages and deal with them. That's also "survival".

Some stacksizes may be worth discussing them. But especially for boiled water, imho there is no problem. You don't need hundrets of them in advance, jars are easy to craft (if you don't have enough in storage already anyway), murky water is accessible easily and you can craft boiled water very quickly, when you need some. For drinking i go to tea as soon as i can anyway. They have the same stacksizes, but i don't need 100 of them on storage either.

If you live in the dessert and there is really no source of water or a water tower nearby, you have choosen to play in that environment, and it's common that water is rare there. So their storage use becomes important again but worth it.

(And if you choose so, got to snow biome once, dig a full stack of snowballs (iirc 6000?), go back and have a lifetime supply of water just costing one storage slot)

BTW: iirc stack size for boiled water was already at 10, at least in A18.

You are speaking rationally...sure you are not an android . Anyway ,in game, for some reason I have to have my over abundance of certain items...water, stone and wood are my main things. The more I have of them the happier my brain is so I collect and collect and collect. Just the way some of us are wired I guess.

 

[Damocles]

Even with that you could have it only move a stack worth based on the receiving container.  There are solutions and they're not all complicated.  But, as Gazz hinted at, there are a lot of edge cases that might take a while to iron out.  I still think it is very doable. 

Personally, I've written routines to do this sort of thing and it pretty much amounts to making a function that "moves an item from container A to container B" that understands the stack sizes might be different.  If you make it smart enough then you use that function EVERY time you move items around and the logic is all in one place.  But I'm not a programmer anymore, I'm a farmer, so what do I know? 

A function that moves the right amount is not that hard to make. Its mostly how to represent that on the UI, that its not confusing and seemingly random for the player.

Also all those side cases such as how to handle a stack when it switched with another item. (what to so with the remaining stack, as a new item is in hand) etc.

Even simply additional functions will add to the complexity of the project, and thus the codebase is getting more and more unwieldy.

.. Not really worth it, since the solution is as simple as making more storage boxes in the base. And vehicles should not have unlimited capacity also.

 

[FileMachete]

@Roland , do you know whether game data will be collected from _modded_ games?

Just dawned on me that if the answer is no, then how will TFPs know if a significant percentage of all players use modded stack sizes? Or large backpacks, etc.

 

[Roland]

It’s not that modded games are ignored, it’s more like the results will be sorted into modded and vanilla. The developers could look at data from modded games. Probably just a matter of setting search filters I would think. 

 

[FileMachete]

It’s not that modded games are ignored, it’s more like the results will be sorted into modded and vanilla. The developers could look at data from modded games. Probably just a matter of setting search filters I would think. 

Good to hear, thanks.

And I imagine there's an 'hours played' or somesuch so they can create buckets based on hours.

Just to clarify my early post: I'm all for new players not modding out of the gate. Bigger backpacks and stacks would ruin (imo) some of the learning challenges for new players. After a few playthroughs folks will know what's worth keeping & what's worthy of a drop chest. Even later they can make an informed decision of whether or not their fun factor will be increased or decreased by increasing slots/stacks via mods.

So in this particular, if data shows lots of new players modding slots/stacks then, maybe, that'll spark an internal discussion.

 

[FA_Q2]

Because dyes are mods and installing a whole stack of mods is not supported.

If you consider boiled and murky water the exact same, go ahead and just drink the murky variant. If for some reason boiled water seems worth more to you, there's your answer.

It does not seem more valuable.  As soon as I get a purifier I switch back to murky for that exact reason, the stack size of boiled water is simply unreasonable as boiled water has very little value.

 

[Synvastian]

maybe all the stacks should just stay as is? even if we toss logic out the window for those "but zombies aren't real so nothing should be" peeps...inventory management in this game is pretty forgiving, especially since a lot of items come in stacks and not 1 at a time
 

imagine this... in reality someone wouldn't likely carry 10 glass jars of water with them through a zombie infested wasteland...some could break, or get dirty again due to contaminates, not to mention, most mason jars of a size big enough take up a LOT of room for 10 of them. (nor would they add 10 glass jars to a toolbelt, where falling would be inviting disembowelment via glass shards)

but since this is a game, 10 jars takes up only 1 of...I forget the bag's actual size.

you can carry a stack of 6000 wood in 1 slot, if we imagine that as a stick of about 1 inch in width and 3 inches in length...it'd still be more than we could ever carry by hand

TLR: stack sizes are fine to me, I see no reason to make the game ANY easier...but thats just me