So, I just started getting back into this recently in peaceful mode and noticed one small oddity regarding crates and their respective volumes. I ran a search and no one else has mentioned anything similar, but the volumes are slightly out of balance when placed given their size.
Reference:
Small Crate
1x1x1 (holds 8 items)
Large Crate
2x2x2 (Holds 32 items)
Leather Bound Chest
2x2x1 ? (Holds 16 items)
At a glance, without knowing the amount of space they take up in the world you would think the large crate would be better suited to store many more items versus a few small crates. And normally you would be correct to think that. Except when you stack 8 small crates into a 2x2x2 cube they effectively hold 64 items versus 32 of a large crate at the cost of selecting 7 more crates for sorting.
As for the leather bound chest, I haven’t attempted to stack multiples of them on top of each other as I don’t see them as being particularly useful as they are decorative. Perhaps more varieties of storage and how items can be stored/stacked would be great. But as it stands, the storage capacity of small crates either needs to be cut in half or the capacity of large crates needs to be doubled.
Considering the additional work required to make Leather in the first place, I think something needs to be done to make them more valuable to the player. Otherwise, why wouldn’t you just use the Large Crates, which hold twice the items per container and are cheaper time- and resource-wise to make?
The greater group quantity of the smaller crates currently is the only thing making them debatable to use over the Large crates; while they overall hold more items in the end, they take longer to make to reach this ratio advantage and split your inventory into smaller groups, potentially making it tricky to find certain things. So right now, it’s a question of whether you want the simpler-to-manufacture and -maintain Large Crates, or the more space-efficient Small Crates that take up more time in the workshop and splits your items up more. (For now, the Chest doesn’t even factor in to this debate for me–it’s strictly for pomp and decoration.)
From what I can tell, at the moment you can’t actually sell any crates unless there’s only a specific trader which I have yet to see that will buy them. So once you build them you’re stuck with them which can prove rather painful
The small crates capacity at the present is fine, as it does cost 4x more wood to construct 8 of them to double over the capacity of a single large crate. The large crate however could use an increase in capacity to balance things out a bit; eg drop the capacity of small crates to 6 (6x8 in a 2x2x2 config = 48) and raise the capacity of large crates to 56 or 64. Perhaps a construction modifier where building a small crate yields two for every block of wood while a large one costs 4
The leather bound chest could get a bonus for holding gold coins or something where normally it might hold 24-32 items it could hold double it’s weight if filled with coins and metal bars.
I believe it’s possible to undeploy them when they’re empty, then use the Destroy command when they’re on the ground/in a stockpile. I haven’t personally tested it, but it should work like all other objects as of now.
The wealth bonus concept with the Chest sounds pretty feasible. I would have suggested limiting it to only Wealth items, but then you might be stuck with empty containers that stupidly refuse any other type of item, as if the universe would implode if such a thing came to pass. The next big issue would be how both wealth and other items could work in tangent with this sort of container with a size bonus. For simplicity’s sake, I’d say have it that you can either put only wealth in or general items with wealth (mixed content), where the bonus would be lost.
The other issue is that we don’t have a way to manage the current chests of gold in-game (combine them, split them, etc.). Before any sort of bonus to containers could be created, Radiant would likely need to sort this out, along with the “value” of other resource items like wood and stone–issues arise when the blocks use a fraction for building structures and ladders but use “whole numbers” for recipes; what’s each unit’s value at a given point in the game? There’s a lot of numbers and values hidden to the player in the crafting and building mechanics, and I’m concerned it’ll cause problems down the road if they don’t revamp it in some way.
Right, I know you can simply destroy almost anything, but the part I truly dislike about that function is that you don’t get anything in return. Not even a shred of resource. Given how random the traders are at times. there may be one that does a crate trade for other items so hanging onto it at the moment isn’t too big of a deal.
On the flip side, the small crates combined with the larger ones can also help create a functional staircase in addition to being a storage medium. So there’s that.
the issue with small crates comes when you reach that higher volume. for example, look at my farmland from build 447 http://puu.sh/jzNiX/c6706ef16a.png
do you know how long I spent modifying each and every single one of these crates to make sure they only accepted crops and plants? do you know how many nights I spent crying due to the insanity of micromanaging these crates? thankfully, 0, but that’s not the point! lol
if I had simply used large crates, not only would they have been crafted AND placed in 1/8th of the time, while they only hold have of the storage, I could be done with the farmland quickly after setting it up. instead I decided that I have time and suffered because of it lol
while 8 small crates holds 64 slots, you have to ask yourself if you NEED 64 slots. while you would generally say “yes”, when designing a warehouse, you’ll be dealing with that on a magnitude 10s, 100s, maybe even 1000s of times larger. managing that would be a nightmare, one that would easily be solved by simply cutting the storage capacity from 64000000 to 32000000, reducing the number of crates you need to mess with from 8000000 to 1000000.
… hopefully you don’t need to place a million of ANYTHING though lol
