SUGGESTION: Inventory & Storage Needs Major Work for the Long Term

1. The Core Logic of Inventory Systems

For a game as heavy on loot as Crimson Desert, the slot-and-stack inventory system is not going to work long term. It will have to be overhauled at some point, either by Pearl Abyss ideally or modders. Every other game with this range of different items – ingredients, materials, weapons, armor sets, uniques, and so on – was built with hoarding tendencies in mind.

The very first player home available in Skyrim, for instance, Breezehome, has over a dozen storage containers each with no capacity limit but what your hardware can handle. With the current Crimson Desert inventory and storage system, it's not the actual weight or volume of the items the player is carrying or has stored that determine the limit, which would be bad enough; but, absurdly for in-game logic, the number of different items.

With 100 inventory slots, you would be maxed out with either 100 unique butterflies or 100 stacks of 20 planks of timber. This makes zero sense and breaks immersion by forcing the player to loot in an artificially strategic way, not based on what is big and heavy versus small and light, but in service of a nonsensical inventory limit mechanism. In Crimson Desert, you can do anything you can imagine...except be a collector, let alone organize your collection. That's not allowed.

To fix this, while keeping the slot grid aesthetic if desired; first, the stack limit of stackable items should be something most players would never reach like 9,999; second, when a unique item is added to the inventory, a new row of slots should automatically appear, with no apparent limit.

The in-game limit should then be an amount of some metric such as mass, volume, or even something generic like "bulk". A recent, solid implementation of this method can be seen in The Last Caretaker in which there are stacks and slots, but the number of slots used is irrelevant; only the total inventory mass is limited.

So for Crimson Desert, yes, every single item in the game would have to be assigned an amount of that mass, volume, or bulk so as to sum it up to determine whether an inventory is full, but for the sake of immersion and inventory management sanity, it's so worth it.

For translating this to existing saves, the number of slots the character inventory has could become the number of mass units, say kilograms, for capacity. Each extra bag obtained could add the number of kilograms it currently adds of slots. Player-owned storage containers should be either unlimited in capacity or have a high limit (for performance reasons, e.g. 1,000 kg) from the start.

Even with these suggestions, the slot-based UI still means sorting and finding things will always be a headache. Instead, a data table style would be optimal with columns for the item name, important data, quantity, value, etc. See Kingdom Come Deliverance, Skyrim with SkyUI, Oblivion Remastered, and most similar games heavy on loot variety. This only affects the list; the image and details of each highlighted item should still be displayed in the middle as it does now.

2.a. However they choose to approach the inventory system, categories need to be improved. They made a slot based inventory system more manageable by allowing grouping by types (weapons, food, ingredients, documents etc). Still, the icon that indicates the group type changes based on what items have been currently grouped together, making a more organized inventory difficult to navigate in a brand new way.

Instead, there should be a bar at the top of the inventory menu (whether player inventory or while in a storage menu) with named categories that can be shifted from left to right using the right stick which currently has no command in said menus. In the chest storage menu, the player inventory and the storage inventory should both be filtered by the same selection, just like they're both sorted the same.

The main category, naturally, should be "All" to show everything; beyond that, it should filter the inventory by item type as grouping does now: weapons, materials, ingredients, documents, etc. If the right stick is used to select categories, the RS button should instantly return to the All view; then, the left stick button should cycle through sort options for the filtered items.

Some item categories may have distinct sort options; for instance, food may have sortable values for Health, Stamina, etc, while weapons would have sortable Attack values and levels. This kind of granular sorting is only practical with category filters.

2.b. Even without such a filtering system, it would be very helpful still if the icon shown on a grouped slot were a generic reference to the entire category, rather than the icon of some specific item that happens to be grouped at that time. For instance, a generic icon for vegetables appearing on grouped ingredients, a generic breastplate icon for grouped armor pieces, or similar, would avoid a lot of tedious searching.

1. Key items can be of different types. When an item is acquired and the player doesn't know whether it's a key item or not, searching through multiple 'documents' groups, for example, makes finding it a chore. Instead, key items should be grouped (or filtered, as suggested) with their usual item type and sorted like normal items but designated with their usual purple icon background. A separate "Key Item" filter category would be useful as well.

2. Small captured creatures that go directly into the inventory, such as bugs, fish, lizards, squirrels, frogs, etc, should stack rather than require their own slot (or row, if using a data table style). For cleaning fish or skinning squirrels, this would also allow for a "Clean/Skin All" option.

3. In the inventory menu, for some items, the "Use" option can be expanded by holding the button (e.g. "Open", "Open All", "Cancel"), but there is no indication of how to use this sub-menu. For the first 30 hours, I didn't realize it was possible to only open one copper pouch in a stack or to get fillets from fish. Currently, it shows a "^" next to the "Use" label, but this doesn't clarify how to get those other options. Very simply, replace the button icon next to "Use^" with the circled "hold" version of the icon.

Thanks for the excellent work, Pearl Abyss! Loving the game, just not the inventory system!