How do you organise your chests from nothing to late-game?

[QuQuasar]

My storage is starting to overflow, so I thought I'd open up a discussion.

I usually start with a row of three chests just under the alchemy engine, one each for animal, vegetable and mineral. I then expand this to a 3x3 square. Finally, I add a fourth row: two chests for clothing, and one for rare tools.

I also have a standalone chest by the farms for farming equipment and another standalone chest by the fires for fuel.  This tends to be enough for me to maintain a reasonably clean solo base for a couple years, so long as I avoid storing more than stack of anything (eg. silk can be left in stacks on the ground near the spider nests, logs at the wood farm, hounds teeth by the tooth traps, etc).

But eventually my base gets too big or my companions insist on storing multiple stacks of garbage and NEVER THROWING AWAY ANYTHING EVER and it overflows, soooo... I'm in the market for a somewhat more expandable system.

[ALCRD]

Just like i do in Terraria and Minecraft 

I don't organize it at all i just make more chests when i run out of storage 

[zacqiang]

I usually use this method to place stuff that are too much for chests.

Logs, twigs and grass are fairly abundant once I have setups to farm them.

Rocks, flint and gold are very much unlimited too (Pig King trades for spoiling meats, stone fruit farms), and I find that keeping them in chests is just waste of chests, so I also leave them lying outside. Hounds' teeth also accumulate once your world surpasses 200 days with friends. I personally find nitre to be uncommon since I usually use them for salt licks for my pet beefalo, but I'm not taming a beefalo just yet in this world.

The exceptions in this photo are the weather pains, silk and glands. As I am playing as Webber, I tend to get multiple stacks of silk and glands (and monster meat > jerky > gold) every day if I wish to start a spider war, so these loot are not viable to be placed in chests. As for the weather pains, well, I was too lazy to make a couple chests just to place them, so I placed them where the down feathers were supposed to be. You can tell from the minisign.

I also have two areas which are designed similar to the one in the photo, where I stack all my tools, weapons and armor (and the occasional telltale hearts / life-giving amulets from Klaus).

Anything else would find their way into a chest marked with a minisign, and that's about it. I usually compile boss / mini boss drops in a chest, and everything else in their own chests, or compiled with other thematical / relevant stuff (eg. gunpowder + rotten eggs + charcoal + nitre = 1 chest, or eg. moon rock + marble + glass shards = 1 chest) just to minimalize the storage area size.

 

Tip: if you want to store unstackable stuff / stuff that you won't be using much and you think that it's an eyesore when you leave them around, a piggyback + relevant minisign is a cheap way to store them. I usually store beefalo horns and spider queen hats just because I don't have a use for them, and I can stack the piggybacks together in one of the corners of my base with the help of a couple of walls, and the base will look nice and clean. Plus, a piggyback can store up to 14 slots of items, which is 5 more than your usual chest.

Spoiler

 

Oh, and just to showcase the horrors of hoarding too much food:

Yes I am gluttony 

 

 

[LinknAllie]

I only start organizing when it's inconvenient to look through 30 chest to find some damn logs.

[Scrubsbarry]

If I'm playing solo I usually don't bother with chests early game and make a huge mess making a bunch of piles near a temporary base, usually in ~4 big piles for common materials, mob drops, equipment/armors, and miscellaneous. If I'm playing with others we usually have 4 chests organized the same way.

Once I have enough wood to build a ton of chests I usually put them in a 3x3 square with some room in the middle for a glowcap at night later down the line. I usually don't bother with signs and just drop a twig in front of the twig chest and so on. Any tools or armor are put in a separate pile nearby since its not worth putting them in chests if they're not stackable.

[Yuuko]

I usually build a chest for stones / gems quick b/c I don't like chasing mole holes to find my flints lol.  That usually expands to one for gold, 2nd for other stones, 3rd for gems.  I always put extra lanterns in chests so I can quickly see their percentage for refueling, and gauge whether I need to refuel or not yet.  Besides that a lot of things just stay dropped on my base floor until I need to move them...

If you have something that always seems to overflow a chest you can always store the extras inside a lureplant XD

[zacqiang]

22 minutes ago, Shosuko said:

If you have something that always seems to overflow a chest you can always store the extras inside a lureplant XD

The Asian in me makes me hoard things that I am not proud of 

[Parusoid]

On most chest zones i saw there is categorization goin on to find the things you looking for nearby (like grass next to reeds next to papyrus next to rope).

Also consider not using chests for tools etc, instead dedicate an area of ground for it. In some screenshots below you'll see there are separate strips of land usually split into armor / clothing / wepons / tools / magic
 

Spoiler

 

[kiwikenobi]

When I play solo, I usually keep my chests organized vaguely by certain categories. Such as:

 

raw materials (grass, twigs, rocks, etc.)

monster drops (silk, pig skin, feathers, hound teeth, etc.)

healing stuff (glands, salves, poultices, ashes, booster shots, nitre, stingers, razor/beard hair because I main Wilson)

refined things (ropes, boards, cut stone, papyrus, etc.)

special rare things (gears, gems, nightmare fuel, living logs)

clothes (vests, hats, sewing kits)

light (torches, lanterns, miner hats, fireflies)

 

Then if I have more chest space, I'll sometimes toss extra tools and weapons in there, but I'll usually leave them on the ground since I need them all the time, and they feel like an inefficient use of chest space. Although if the swamps are generous, I'll sometimes make a chest just for tentacle spikes and whatever other weapons there's still room for.

I don't usually need more than one chest for each category, since I play solo, and I don't usually gather more than one extra stack of stuff that I think I'll need, like grass. Though there's a special exception for logs, since Deerclops and Bearger knock down trees for me, so I often have many stacks of those, sometimes enough to justify an entire log chest. And I usually have Chester hang out near my farms to hold onto my various fertilizers.

Once I make enough gunpowder to get some scales from the Dragonfly without having to actually defeat it solo, I go make myself a deconstruction staff and make a bunch of scaled chests, still organized in the same vague way as before, just with more overlaps since the chests are so much bigger.

 

When I play with other people, the answer becomes "what organization?" ^o^;>

[Cheggf]

[GelatinousCube]

15 hours ago, Cheggf said:

As a console player I will forever be jealous of unweavable chest skins.. 

Oh the additional organisation and decoration I could do =( 

[HowlVoid]

16 hours ago, Cheggf said:

Interesting! I have something similar to this but I place my monster materials in the halloween monster chest.

I grass/twigs/rocks materials in the traveling chest.

Boss items go in the white with gold accents chest.

Climate gear (eyebrella, feather fan, thermal stones, etc) goes where you have monster stuff.

Poop/rot/gloomer poop/guano/misc goes where you have rocks.

I also have the granny looking chest that came with sheep chester. For now it has pearl and moon island stuff.

All weapons/tools/armors are on the floor on a carpet or wooden tile. When they're in a chest where I can't see them I end up crafting more by accident.

26 minutes ago, GelatinousCube said:

As a console player I will forever be jealous of unweavable chest skins.. 

Oh the additional organisation and decoration I could do =( 

I have these except the chest where he has wood stuff. If you're on ps4 I can sweep them for you. I also have most if not all of the paid chests. I think you can get the unweavable ones from daily rewarfs.

[Owlrust]

17 hours ago, Cheggf said:

That's a very beautiful arrangement for chests. Excuse me while I steal this picture for later use.

Also, I myself still haven't gotten the metheus chest (cuz I'm suck at the puzzle) so to offer alternative for those who don't yet have the chest, and what I like to use for most generic magic stuff, is the Brute Case.

[blizstorm]

I think that a late game chest system, should have some groupings to ease up for other people to search for stuff. Looking at 100+ label just for an item would be tedious. A good expandable system would then be a chest that is initially used for the group, expand to a chest that is dedicated to a specific item. This reflect the initial difficulty in getting mass amount of logs and pencil, and the late game requirement of using 10+ slots per item.

Storing on the floor is cheap, and the excess items are highly visible. I would recommend storing overflowed resource on the floor rather than in other dedicated chest, If excess gold are stored in a dedicated rock chest, would others think of checking that rock chest when the gold chest run dry? My policy is also that if you do not know which chest to store, then just drop it on the floor to avoid rainbow chest. If the things cant be found in the rainbow chest, the base has pretty much lost the resource. Some neat freak, in their zeal to pack all the things on the floor into rainbow chest, pretty much threw the resources into a blackhole

On the other hand, I would still recommend using chest to store rather than a pure floor system. Chest helps in auto stacking and getting the durability information of the equipment

The dedicated chest are fixed and permanently allocated. The allocation does not change simply because I have 0 gold or 400 gold. This build is repeated across the worlds, so before pencil are mass produced, my regular friends know the dedicated chest based on their experience.

My major groups are:

Resources

Equipment

Food bundle

Farm related resource/equipment

For my resource major group

1. grass twig group - twig, grass, rope, reeds, papyrus, stone fruit, light bulb bundle

2. wood - log, board, board, board, board, pine cone, twiggy tree cone, charcoal

3. fertiliser - rot, manure, guano, rotten egg, bone shard, ash, glommer goop

4. mineral - flint, rock, gold, nitre, moon rock, marble, moon shard, trinkets

5. animal products with at least 4 legs - silk, gland, spider egg, stinger, hound tooth, beefalo wool, volt goat horn, steel wool

6. animal products with less than 4 legs - pig skin, bunny puff,  black feather, azure feather, saffron feather, walrus tusk, lureplant, cookie cutter shell

7. magic - nightmare fuel, living log, beard hair, blue gem, red gem, purple gem, tentacle spot, gear

8. boss - deerclop eyeball, moose feather, desert stone, thick fur, dragonfly scale, bundling wrap, toadstool skin, malbatross feather

These would pretty much fit into a 8x8 chest grid. I initially start building in a column, so all the items in the same group would share the first chest of the group, like all the flint, rock and gold would be using the first chest. When there are enough boards and too much gold, the dedicated gold chest will be built and all gold would henceforth be stored there

[Baark0]

floor

[prettynuggets]

544 days still no chest zone  yes im that lazy .. usually chest zone is the last place i made when megabasing XD

but the organization of stuff would be like that more or less.. 
-minerals . anything mole would steal . 
-farm items . grass twig log reeds and their refined . 
-mobs drop  boss drop 

[Notecja]

I prefer to have chests fairly quickly. 

I used to have increased size (and price) for chests to avoid... 1500 100 900 chests, as I am collecting anything that looks valuable on my way (also cleaning world from rots, manure, guano and sticks), so it was like animal loots chest, two mess chests,  wood chest (most empty anyway), rocks chest... 

[Horsheen]

You guys are making chests?

[BeeClops]

same as others here, I only store minerals in a few chests and rest on the floor for a very long time, I eventually make a chest zone with mostly scaled chests and minisigns. I don't have that many chests skins either (console).

[Gi-Go]

[MrNaxeros]

At first: No organisation at all. Shove in anything that can be lost/stolen into chests. Everything else is just thrown around until we get more chests.
Non-stackables are often left on the ground for the longest amount of time.

Only after it takes ten chests to find what you need do I start organizing that mess. Placing signs on them, putting some standalone chests near the farming areas, maybe even place chests dedicated to tools.