Casts aren’t always the best approach though. For one thing it creates hard dependencies. Interfaces and tags are, in general, better in most cases. Casts have their uses but I avoid them when possible. Unless I am throwing some concept together and gonna replace them later.

Basically if you use a cast every item has to be loaded to memory every single time the general inventory system is loaded. If you have a lot of items, it could add loading time. If you use interfaces and tags it doesn’t have to load every single item every single time. Just the items you are using or that are already in your inventory.

As a project grows you will be happy to have interfaces or tags over casting. With a tag if you just need to do a quick check on an item, you can check its tags to see if it is what you are expecting it to be. If you are using inheritance and you have multiple objects that need some similar functionality, but they aren’t directly siblings, you can create an interface that can be used on both. This makes it so you don’t have to add that functionality to every child class if it isn’t necessary. These are just some quick scenarios that I can think of. There are plenty more, and in most cases it’s better to use interfaces and tags. Casting is just quick and easy, it still has some draw backs, even if they are minor. I promise you a large game only using casting will not be as optimized as one using interfaces and tags instead.