Materials management

[Amiculi]

I think materials should be treated like a currency. They're just clutter and frustrating to deal with most of the time.

I realize there's a material stack size upgrade but it doesn't really fix it.

You have to gather materials, you need a ton of them and for the most part all that their taking up space does is force more trips back to deposit them OR for you to jettison/skip over them. Then what you do keep ends up taking up 90% of your bank.

Basically they just create a little patch of annoying busywork, not their inclusion, just shuffling them around and managing them.

Were they simply flopped into currency piles, the same ones you can see when you're looking at upgrades, it would be far less of a speed bump in the game's flow, it also wouldn't detract from anything in any substantive fashion. The biggest impact would be that the stack size upgrade would become meaningless, but that wouldn't be a huge deal and could be pruned or replaced with something more interesting no doubt.

Maybe all of this is fixed later in the game, I haven't had as much time to put into it as I want. (Also, the Steam Deck performance is massively improved now, ought to see more time on it now that it stays above 30fps almost always.)

[JoeShmo]

Yeah I don't feel like having them as physical items that take up space adds anything to the game, other than inconvenience and frustration. That also includes having to divert time and resources into the upgrade path for it to stack them higher .. which some runs you can acquire fairly early on, and other's you can't find one type of material and so you never actually get higher than the first upgrade by the time you reset .. which is very frustrating.

And in that regard, having such a small stash space makes this feel even worse when you do put in all the time to store them; but having all of these different types of materials taking up your inventory space is very painful .. especially when it's mixed in with your ship parts and you're having to reorganize it constantly.

It really should just all be sent to a currency section.

[Weaver]

I also found this to be a small annoyance in the early game, but eventually you'll have so much money to buy all the stack size upgrades that materials aren't really a problem. I do agree that interacting with the materials UI is annoying. If I could transfer all materials into my stash at once, that would be a nice QoL.

While you don't get more ship storage (i.e backpack space), you can filter items so they don't show up, once you unlock the Item Filter. That will "feel" like more inventory space, and helped my loot goblin brain.

[Weaver]

Originally posted by Weaver:

I also found this to be a small annoyance in the early game, but eventually you'll have so much money to buy all the stack size upgrades that materials aren't really a problem. I do agree that interacting with the materials UI is annoying. If I could transfer all materials into my stash at once, that would be a nice QoL.

While you don't get more ship storage (i.e backpack space), you can filter items so they don't show up, once you unlock the Item Filter. That will "feel" like more inventory space, and helped my loot goblin brain.

yeah, I played another ~10hrs and I think I'm coming around on this idea of materials not taking up inventory space and being treated like a "currency". Or maybe some other kind of material sink could be interesting. Or a setting on the Loot Filter to stop showing different materials. Either starting to agree with OP :)

[IamSagittare]

Good idea IMO. One thing I've noticed with the stash is that it gets laggy (significant lag when adding/removing or fate-rewriting items in stash) if there's a lot of materials and items in there. Not sure if it's the materials that are the problem, but not having those in stash at least shouldn't make the problem worse.

[Theonden]

while not an ideal solution this

Increased the default Resource stack size by 100%, and doubled all of the stack size Specialist Upgrades as well.

is from the beta branch patch notes for patch 2, which should be a good enough solution for the moment.

[Dhaos]

I was about to post this. Either make stack sizes 1000, or better yet, treat them as currency.