Seems like inventory management quickly becomes a pain

[Tungsten Whitmarsh Cadow]

I've got some tames. I can gather tons of berries quickly, but I really only need the narcos. I've started throwing out the rest. Wood and stone quickly encumber everything. When I get the tames back to the main camp its a real job getting to the inventory page of each creature and transfering stuff to a chest, fire, smithy or whatever.

I'm comparing to factorio. You could have 40 furnaces and you just clicked and dragged over all of them and gathered all the products. You could load stuff easily without having to find a page.

Ark should have dragonflies that work like the factorio flying robots so you could just walk into your base and the flies would do all the work of moving stuff around.

Astroneer was another game that suffered from this late in the game. You'd go out gathering and then spend an hour and a half moving things around.

Another thing missing is conveyor belts and inserters to automatically take stuff away.

[🦊 Hermit]

The inventory management isn't nearly as bad as some games imo. However if it's a problem, Structures Plus or one of it's derivatives have a pulling system that allows you to pull items from nearby inventories, or sort stuff with the press of a button. Perhaps that would aid in this case?

[Violeta]

You can search what you want from dinos/vault either for taking or inserting or dropping so its not that bad. Like if I go kill an alpha and come home. I can search "prime" on my tame and transfer all with that filter to my inventory. Then open the industrial grill and search "prime" on myself to transfer all I can into the grill.

Of if I'm out killing with say an ocean mount and its overloaded, I can search "meat" to drop all its meat. Or I can just drop all at once if I don't care about its drops.

In reguards to smelting, the industrial furnace is there to take away the woes of managing 20 different regular furnaces at a time.

And equus with a saddle can serve as a morte and peste with a vastly larger inventory. Or you can upgrade to the chemistry bench.

One thing I like to do is use a single vault just for blueprints. Bookshelves are nice, but hold too little in just 1 of them.

You can make wood/metal signs and place on your vaults to signify what you've put in them.

One way to move many heavy items like wood or metal all at once, that gets around your character encumbrance pick up limit. Is say drop all the metal off your anky with the O key. Then use F key on the pile of dropped metal to pick all of it up at once. If you've dropped it all near say your industrial forge, you can quickly deposit all of it in, in one go.

Using O and F to move bulk metal around can be very very useful when you go full craft build for a day and only have 100 carry weight.

[mayhem]

Here are steps I take to make moving around material easier:

1. Use the Search-Filter a lot. Want to move one specific material? Filter and move all. Want to drop certain materials? Filter and drop all. Often you don't have to type out the whole word. For example "W" will usually only find Wood in the inventory.

2. Get used to the quick keys (hover over materials) for the inventory like "T" to transfer, and "O" to drop, hold Shift and click+drag (or press T) to transfer half a stack.

3. Inventories are a lot more manageable when set to Alphabetical.

4. Build your crafting areas with storage so you can access as many as possible without having to move, so you can fill yourself up (like when taking materials off an animal), turn around and reach all the inventories to move stuff over. I also prefer smithies over large storage boxes because they can hold more in about the same amount of space (before moving on to vaults).

5. I pump my weight stat the most out of all my stats so I can move a lot at once.

6. Eventually Tek Storage boxes can make things easier too, they take 1 specific material but with a huge amount of inventory-space. You walk up to one, hit E on it, and if you have that specific material on you it will move it all over to the box at once.

That being said, I do wish you could access multiple remote inventories at once, like a tab system to see all local storage boxes or crafting stations.

[Tungsten Whitmarsh Cadow]

Use dragonflies the way flying robots are used in Factorio. Make the chests like they are in factorio, some are active requester, some are general storage and uh, I can't remember all of them, but anyhow you walk into your storage area and the dragonflies come out and automatically remove stuff from your various dinos and put it in chests. Its fast and it can be programmed. Each space in a chest can be reserved for specific items.

Need inserters too and belts to automatically deliver ingredients to furnaces, fabricators etc. Doing all this stuff by hand is extremely tedious for people who've played factorio.

Yea, i probably should just F off back to Factorio. This is a different game but standards have changed. The bar has been set higher. Things are expected. If you want to sell lots of games you do what the predecessors have done but you do them better or invent new things to be done.

[Harmless NPC]

I think all the previous advice is outstanding and makes the issue a lot less tedious, but in addition I'd like to add that - if it really bothers you - you can use mods like a stack mod to allow you to carry more of everything without encumbrance, and also S+ which allows you to transfer items to containers with a handheld device.

That said, weight and inventory management are part of the "survival" aspect IMO. Sometimes you have to make tough calls and sometimes you get greedy and pay for it.

[Chew]

Inventory system overall is terrible. But it's not far off from being good, though they will never take it there.
What bothers me most about the inventory is I create subfolders in my inventory to clean it up, and everytime I die, I gotta redo them.

I want folder view on some things, but on others I wanna see all the engrams, but it's a universal everything or nothing folder view button.
I could go on and on about all the little things that are just not good.

Cryopods not sorting in cryofridge is one I recently started to run into as I'm starting a Pokemon type collection. Sorted my ABC's, they are not. Random empty containers spread throughout, even though with the same name, they should all be next to eachother.
So many little things, but they have what could be a decent foundation.

I think a lot of your problem is just wanting a berry collector to collect the one berry you need in the moment, which I don't agree should happen. And when a berry collector also can get wood and thatch, it's a lot of opening inventory and dropping stuff, but that's not an inventory problem to me, it's just an inconvenience of using a dino rather then your own hands and tools.