[2023] Summer greetings and upcoming changes

I'll copy what I posted on the announcement comments:

First of all, thank you for all the feedback you've given in the comments! This is precisely why we want to let you know of our plans well in advance; so we can hear your opinions and adjust things accordingly. A lot of the concerns raised here are things that we've already taken into account in the stacking/storage changes we've done, but many of the points are something we need to put more thought into.

I would like to stress that our goal is specifically to make inventory management more convenient, by making it more viable to store items directly in cabinets. Currently using storage containers is basically the only feasible way to store items in your submarine, and that's not ideal: I think the number of mods in the Workshop that add stuff like labels and icons to storage containers to make using them a little more tolerable is a clear indication that the current system doesn't work that well. And what we're aiming to do is make storage containers unnecessary by doing various changes to the way items are stored. In the current unstable build, those changes are significantly increased stack sizes and increased capacity of the cabinets, but we will be doing further adjustments to make sure you can manage items easily without having to resort to these kinds of "nested containers".

To address a couple of the concerns mentioned in the comments:

1. Looting wrecks/ruins, carrying items around

We are well aware storage containers are often used to carry items (especially loot) around, and we don't want to make this any more tedious. Rather the opposite, personally I feel having to swim back and forth between a wreck and the sub is quite tedious even with storage containers, so I agree we need items you can carry loot in - one possible solution that we've considering is some kind of a backpack item you could take with you on wreck/ruin expeditions. Or, perhaps keeping storage containers after all, but limiting their use as a way to expand storage capacity as absurdly high as 2910 items per cabinet.

2. Not enough space in cabinets if storage containers are removed

With the larger stack sizes and larger cabinets, you can store over 1000 items per cabinet without having to use any storage containers. Based on the feedback we've been getting from people who've tried the unstable build, it seems most players seem to agree this is more than enough capacity per cabinet. However, we do see that a large number of different items can be a problem (even if there's lots of room in the stacks, there might not be enough slots for lots of different items). We have addressed this to some extent by increasing the number of slots in cabinets, but further work is definitely still needed to make this work smoothly.

3. Material IO, colored storage containers, labels, etc

I agree that mods that improve the storage containers make managing storage much more convenient, but the way I see it, they're kind of a band-aid solution to the underlying problem: that managing storage is just very clunky in Barotrauma, and that there isn't enough room to store items in cabinets directly, which forces players to resort to these kinds of "workarounds". As said, we hope to improve inventory management overall so these "workarounds" wouldn't be needed in the first place.

4. We don't listen to players or don't play the game ourselves

I personally find these kinds of comments very disheartening, because the way I see it, we do spend a ton of time reading through players' feedback and comments and addressing issues raised by the community. We also make the unfinished features available in the Unstable branch specifically so we can listen to your feedback and do changes before the changes go live.

I do think there is somewhat of a split between the community though - it often feels like the sentiment in the Steam discussions (and perhaps to lesser extent, Reddit) is different from the sentiment of the active unstable testers, the Discord server and the discussions in our GitHub repository. I think the latter tend to be people who've played the game for a very long time (many all the way back from the free legacy version) and have a somewhat different view of it than most other players, and it can often be tricky to find a middle ground that pleases both these "veteran" players and newer players. And it seems like in the dev team, and among the more "veteran" players who've tested the changes in unstable, the reception to the changes has been mostly positive - you simply no longer need storage containers.

That being said, I think that us devs play the game in a different way than most, and the same is probably true for many of the very long-time players who've tested the changes in unstable and found them to be an improvement. There have been a lot of concerns raised in this thread, some of which we are already aware, but also many that we hadn't fully considered; for example some of the more niche uses of storage containers. Personally I did assume they are mainly just used to increase storage capacity of cabinets, which does not seem to be the case. So I'm very glad we made this post well in advance before the release, so we can react to your feedback and address these concerns! One potential option we're considering is that we'd just prevent storage containers from being put into cabinets, but adding a handful of extra slots specifically for storage containers as I described here.

Also, as a final note, no matter how we'll end up going about this, we are not removing the item completely, it'll still be in the game, just not available through normal means, and it can easily be re-enabled with mods. However, I'm hopeful that after you've played around with all the other changes we've been doing and seen how well storing stuff works without the storage containers, you won't even miss them. :)

I don't think we've "acknowledged the idea is sh*t"; we've acknowledged that there are people who will not be happy with the changes, and that this will definitely be a very contentious change. The feedback we've been getting from people who've tested it in unstable has generally been positive. I have to admit though that I didn't expect such a huge backlash - although to me it seems a large portion of the people criticizing this have not tried the changes, and might be overlooking all the other changes we've done to storage that are intended to make storage containers unnecessary. There are definitely a lot of valid concerns that people have raised too, and I admit many of them are things we hadn't really thought through properly.

But in any case, performance is not really the only concern here, and switching to solutions like deep storage does not address the issues we're aiming to address. We have several goals here: one is to reduce the capacity of cabinets from the absurdly high 2910 you can achieve with storage containers - it has never been the intention that you could store such enormous numbers of items in your submarine (excluding maybe the biggest cargo subs). In a sense the storage containers make your sub have a practically infinite storage capacity.

Another important goal is to _remove_ the need for using these kinds of nested containers in cabinets, and to just increase the stack sizes and the capacity of the cabinets so much you wouldn't need to resort to these kinds of "workarounds" and could just store items directly in the cabinets.

I don't mean to dismiss anyone's criticism, I'm just saying many of the concerns that have been brought up have been addressed in the unstable build, and I think it'd be easier to provide constructive criticism if you tried the changes and saw what works and what doesn't. I'd like to note that this announcement was written some time ago (to get it localized to several languages in advance), and that there have been a bunch of changes to stacking and containers in the latest unstable builds that aren't mentioned in the announcements.

I would argue the changes do not make stocking up impossible nor even more difficult. A single cabinet can still store well over a thousand items, which should be more than enough to get you through the less inhabited areas.

How about something like this (note the slots in the cabinet)? ;)

https://youtu.be/0eLde1FwG-o

Possibly: we're currently testing these changes in the unstable branch, any feedback is more than welcome!

I don't entirely agree with this, although I do see where you're coming from. Many people feel the challenge (and overcoming it!) is what makes a game more enjoyable - and all the way back from the legacy days, being a very challenging game has been a part of Barotrauma's identity. And actually, we do get quite a lot of feedback about Barotrauma being too easy once you get past the initial learning curve and figure out the best strategies for different situations (which I don't entirely agree with either). So finding a good middle-ground isn't easy!

That being said, I'm not entirely sure what the difficulty has to do with the storage container changes. If anything, it should make things a little more convenient since the larger stack and cabinet sizes mean fabricating a ton of storage containers to expand storage capacity is no longer necessary.