I started playing LiF yesterday and I really like the game so far now, especially the potention it has for the future. Ofc this game still needs many tweaks before you can actually call it a full-release game, but until now we (community+devs) need to do what we can to assure, that this game gets to a point, where it easy to use for everyone, without (to many) frustrating gamemechanics.
One of those frustrating/annoying mechanics right now is the inventory. I DO love that the items are free and that they can overlap, but there are some possible improvements that would make it really awesome. Here are my suggestions:
First:
Background: The first job I tried out is alchemist. An alchemist needs to gather many herbs and after a short while, half of your inventory is full of those. Ofc I tried to rearange them in a way, that I have a good overview.
Problem: When you gather herbs, they get randomly placed into your inventory and sometimes they overlap with your rearanged sorted herbs...
Solution: Give us players the option to create "fields" where gathered items won't be placed by random chance. Only dragging an item into this "field" allows the item to be placed there.
Picture:
As you can see, there are 2 ways to reserve place for non-random-placed items.
The first one (top) is to rightclick an item and reserve the space. Reserved space for a certain item are gray and only THIS herb can be placed and will be stacked here. So if you find another "Acerba Moretum" it will be stacked here. But if you find any other herb, it will be randomly placed outside. Also you can't drag any other herb into this field, because it is reserved for "Acerba Moretum".
The second option is to draw a field into the inventory. Those fields are green and you can place any item into this field that fits (so you can't place big items into small fields). The good thing: If you pick up any new item, it won't be placed into the green field, instead it will be placed outside. The only exception is if you already have an item of the same kind inside of the green field, then it will stack.
Second:
Background: When I gathered herbs, I often found multiple herbs of the same kind. And then I realized that they don't stack... I had to manually search for the new gathered herbs and then I had to search if I had this herb already, so that I could stack them up...
Problem: This is annoying as hell. Especially if you sorted your herbs already, then searched for new ones (an hour for example) and then you have like 60 randomly arranged herbs in your inventory and some of them you have multiple times, but not stacked
Solution: Just let multiple items of the same kind automatically stack instead of randomly lay them into the inventory
