I have just encountered for the first time, the town inventory limit. I was prepared for inventory, or so I thought, having around 100 stone chests placed and planning more. Then I hit a ceiling at 3900 and… WTF?
I cannot for the life of me figure out how having larger quantities of items would slow down the game. A rock sitting in inventory is two units of data, the item and the quantity. Adding an extra rock simply changes the number, it does not (or at least ‘should’ not) add any extra processing cycles. The chest itself is simply a data structure with maybe 64 entries for item types, plus a quantity and a function that sees to it that the chest cannot exceed it’s storage when it is accessed.
Hitting this unexpected limit and after a half hour of micromanaging reducing my inventory, I had reason to shut down the game for a short errand. Now the errand is done, I am suffering a SERIOUS lack of interest in opening up the game again.
This inventory limit MUST be addressed. If the current way of handling inventory requires extra processing because integers have gotten larger, you are doing something wrong!
The inventory limit was mostly added so people wouldn’t complain about performance from stockpiling crazy large numbers of items. As @illdred points out, there’s a setting to disable it, but the team’s said they don’t have a responsibility for problems caused by doing so.
The limit increases as you get more Hearthlings, and you can shrink the amount of stone and wood items you have on hand by a factor of 18 by crafting them into piles. And of course you can sell excess items for gold coins, which can be stacked to fairly high numbers in one item.
I’ve personally never managed to run into the limit myself, though. I’m just curious, what sort of large scale operation are you running to get that many items?
There is nothing that strikes me as overly excessive about my inventory. I have too much coal, tin and copper at around 200 each. I built a second blacksmith forge to turn that into saleable bronze gear. I have around 200 each of wood and stone, which I do not consider excessive, as I can burn through that much in minutes if I go on a building spree. I’d need a lot more than that if I build city walls. If I’d known about this item limit, I likely would never have built 140 picket fences. I am using the jewellery mod which has added ~300 items from gems and the like I’ve accumulated. I’ve got around 300 food items total, but the game actively rewards you for accumulating food (and deployed items), so it never occurred to me that it would then return later to slap you down for it.
From those things mentioned, that’s ~2000 items tight there. Then there are lamps, windows, chairs, beds, tables, etc., etc., plus weapons, tools, and all manner of sundry. There are no excessive numbers, just what I would think would be normal. I ditched a bunch of things like superfluous furniture and the like to get about 400 spaces of grace, but I don’t think it would take much to fill that. If my people collect the stuff they’ve already gotten from mining basic rock, they’ll fill that.
Anyway, I do understand that the game has this limit because of performance issues. The point of my post was that such items should not pose any performance issues at all! The fact that they do means that the developers have done something seriously weird, something unnecessary, that has resulted in an extremely inconvenient cap on the game’s potential. Items in storage should be nothing more than number data sitting in memory, it should involve absolutely zero processing.
I second this. I never got this high of a stockpile, but I don’t think any number should cause an issue particularly if it’s all in chests. Why not report this as a bug and post save game info? Even if there is a hard cap it shouldn’t cause game play problems.
There’s a better way to do it than @illdred posted. It can be found easily here;
As @coasterspaul stated, this isn’t supported, but at the same time isn’t causing problems either, as I’ve had infinite inventory on for a while with no problems.
The cap was implemented back before we had a lot of storage items. That being said, it’s original idea was for stockpiles, and thus to limit the number of items needed to be rendered, thus lessening the CPU load. A lot of optimization and storage options have happened since then, so may this will be an item that will be retouched with everything else.
If you do a search, there are MANY MANY MANY other posts about all this.