Useful or useless? How to tell the good from the curious?

[Martial.Lore]

My inventory is pretty huge now (borderline lvl 13 party in the Wreckers Cave) and I know a lot of stuff can just be sold for gold. But how to tell whether I have an item worth its weight in gold? There are so many things in this sprawling game...I love it. But I do wonder if I am carting around trash. What are the essential classes of items to keep with my party beyond skills and obvious combat items? Or should I just not worry too much?
(Edited to remove typo.)

[Stabbey]

Sell all outdated weapons and armor. Anything which sseems to have value, but doesn't have "Combine" in the right-click menu has no use in crafting and can be sold.

As for crafting ingredients, you're best looking up recipes on the wiki and seeing if you want to make something with ingredient X. If not, sell it.

[Martial.Lore]

Originally posted by Stabbey:

Anything which seems to have value, but doesn't have "Combine" in the right-click menu has no use in crafting and can be sold.

That's a really useful piece of advice. Thank you.

[Chaoslink]

Food for the most part isn’t worth caring about, the heals and buffs aren’t worth it past level 5 or so when the single point boosts don’t change much.

Potions and mushrooms are generally useful. Resistance potions might not come into play for you much, they are most useful on tactician, but can be real game-changers in certain fights. Fight the scarecrows yet? That’s one of them.

Scrolls are useful depending on what you use them for. A fireball scroll is best used by a Pyro mage for their boost to fire damage. However buffs or some other skills like rain can be useful depending on your team though.

The rest of your inventory is likely crafting materials. Essences are pretty useful, as well as dusts for upgrading runes. Runes as well obviously. Otherwise, those claws, feathers and other random items generally are used for making scrolls. If you’re running mages, these can be incredibly useful. Remember, scrolls have no cooldown so you can use them when other damage abilities are not available. Or to spam. Superconductor spam late game with the 20+ scrolls you can get that late is pretty broken. Trivializes fights, but is entertaining.

[Martial.Lore]

Originally posted by Chaoslink:

Resistance potions might not come into play for you much, they are most useful on tactician, but can be real game-changers in certain fights. Fight the scarecrows yet? That’s one of them.

Thanks! Yeah I fought the scarecrows and (although Fane was knocked out early on) didn't have much trouble with them. Trying to find fights and quests that suit my party's level and my complete ignorance about how to fight well in tougher battles is making it a long slog in the driftwood area.

I have found a pyro witch that one-shot my entire party, and a pretty tough lamenting abomination. The bridge trolls... one of them looks do-able (the lower level one). There are lots of places I have explored to the maximum extent I can with a low-level party without getting into fights with much higher level enemies--the sawmill, the blackpits, Bloodmoon Island and Paradise Downs-- all of them pretty much no-go areas as far as I can tell. I think 95% of the open quests I have in my quest log are on hold until I level up more. That pyro witch! No enemy has one-shot my entire party before, and before I could do a thing (she got the first move)! My Beast had really high vitality and my Lohse had a good mix of armors. But both died instantly with the other two.

[Tarshaid]

Yeah, the driftwood area has some direction issues, since you're free to roam but higher level foes walk all over you.

The pyro witch can be considered as a special case of being exceedingly difficult for its level, though she is hardly tied to anything, so at worst you can easily ignore her or come back at a higher level (where she'll still pack a punch). The trolls (should you choose to fight either one, or both) are much more doable despite their level and stats, since they don't instagib your party as much as the witch, and can be stunlocked with relative ease as they're alone. You might also get very good loot, defeating a lvl18 foe.

[Chaoslink]

Yeah, the scarecrows are one of the fights that can give people trouble somewhat frequently on tactician. Usually its because of the terror aura that makes your party run if you have no magic armor. However, they deal earth damage with their attacks, identifiable by the brown damage numbers. So if you have each party member pop a medium (50% for 3) or large (75% for 2) earth resist potion, you mitigate a large portion of that damage for a few turns. Mix that with spot magic shells and the fight becomes trivial compared to what it is for many players. So its often good to keep resist potions and ingredients on each character for these rare but worthwhile uses.

[Chaoslink]

While some info might be out of date or not work (I remember a few that didn't for me), I highly recommend favoriting this guide for quick access using the overlay in-game to check for recipes or ingredients and see it things are worth keeping or not. I used it a ton and it helped me learn what to toss and what to keep or even buy depending on the use.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1137514488