Topic: Inventory Management and Hording

[Zerahan]

This quickly becomes the most tedious part of any survival game. How to fix this problem?

[Zerahan]

If your character had a map and all found items were automatically added to a loot list for that point of interest, in a searchable format, then you wouldn't have to haul it all back to base. If you stopped playing for a few days, you'd forget where everything was. This setup would let you just search the found loot list for places you can hit up for whatever you need instead of trying to remember whatever organization system you had within your base. This has a 2-fold benefit: A) It gets you out of your safehouse into the fun part of the game right off the bat, and B) Offloads remembering where everything is in case you spend weeks or months away from the game.

[Zerahan]

It feels like the hording problem is mostly a consequence of randomized loot. You can't know if the shotgun ammo you need is in any particular location before thoroughly searching it. And once you do search a location, there's no real way to mark that location as being specifically depleted of shotgun ammo. So the best course of action is to loot everything, even the trash, and haul it all back to your safehouse. In 7 Days to Die, I'd set up some chests at the front door of a dungeon to mark it as searched (and filled with the trash items that I might never use). In Project Zomboid, I'd put an X over a buildings on the town map I had completely cleared of all items.

And hording is only really a problem for the non-essential items. Hording food and medical supplies in your safehouse is basically required, aka, hording the materials directly used for managing hunger/thirst/health. Having a decent supply of those basics is just good management. That said, having 60 pounds of reusable bandages is not.

EDIT: One thing to mention about 7 Days: all locations now have a "vault" room that contains 50-90% of the value of the dungeon. So, once you know where that vault is, you can bypass the entire dungeon and just get that loot. Then sell if for whatever you actually need. For example, the gigantic dungeon that is the Shotgun Messiah Factory can be mostly ignored. Just build a ladder to get up to the roof, specifically to the top of the tallest smokestack for the majority of the value contained within the POI. Then sell that loot for what you actually need. This game is actually evidence that having the ability to know for certain that something is at a location is a good thing. If you need something, plunder an untouched vault, sell the contents, and use that cash to buy what you need. This means you don't have to haul it back to base. Though, even then, I end up hauling it all to the nearest trader, and then hauling the raw coins back to base. Which results in hording hundreds of thousands of Duke Tokens. Which is arguably better than having a hundred chests filled with thousands of random items...

[Zerahan]

It's possible this only becomes tedious once the number of items in your stockpile grows past a certain threshold. For example, In the early days of Project Zomboid, I'd be moving from building to building, and would only carry what I absolutely needed - scraps from radios would get left behind, and even most food for that matter. I'd carry a can opener, two water bottles, 3 sterilized bandages, an empty sauce pot (for sterilizing), a few weapons (plus one spare), scissors, needle, a few cans of calorie-dense food, then a saw, axe, and a few boxes of nails. Then I'd mostly live off the resources at the new location. If clothing needs repairs or replacement, can use the needle and scissors to either patch up my current clothes or repair some new ones from the zombies. The saw/axe/nails allows for putting up some barricades at the new location to remain safe while asleep, but this is largely optional.

Problems start when I need to start farming. Farming means settling down at a location. Which means you can start storing an infinite amount of items (so long as you build or haul back enough boxes to store everything in). Which rapidly converts the game into a checklist of buildings that have not been completely looted. I probably notice it when a large storage box reaches its weight capacity and requires a second box.

[Zerahan]

The Last of Us solves this by giving your backpack a limited capacity for each type of item, then regularly letting you restock the basic crafting ingredients. In fact, the game never actually lets you run out of resources unless it really wants you to be running dry. Which means the game could just give you the items instead of making you manually pick them up.