Resource piles

[shadowDigga]

Details of recent dev stream which shown chest upgrade that allows each slot of chest to accept items indefinitely popped up an old idea I had a while ago - resource piles. They would look like a pyramid of 1 item put on top of other 2, looking similar to meatballs.

Each pile would contain indefinite amount of resources and can only be interacted by player, structure-destroying entities would not be able to harm them, preventing them from inducing lag when destroyed due to releasing their stuff all at once. Hovering items over and left mouse clicking would add them to the pile, left mouse clicking on pile with empty hands will take exactly one instance, while holding shift as well will take a whole stack.

Prompt to make a pile would show up if a player hovers an item over full stack of items, allowing creation of piles easy, quick and intuitive. Additionally, piles would form automatically after a while for stuff lying on the floor, boosting performance due to less stuff having to be rendered separately and allowing players to collect stuff later without turning host red just by being nearby. Existing piles would also consume stuff that is dropped nearby in their detection radius, relieving players from hassle to manually put it to the pile after its formation.

I think resource pile would be more preferable than a chest with slots with indefinite capacity - despite only being able to fit one "slot", pile's visual appearance would immediately report what's stored inside of it without having to mark it with drawn minisigns, as well as saving extra clicks to open chest first instead of straight up taking/adding items to the pile.

Now I can understand concern that adding such feature would make chests obsolete, which would probably haven't been an issue if they weren't monetized beforehand by their skins - however, chests would still be useful for stuff that has durability or other properties which force the item to be unstackable. Just increase their slot capacity to like 5x5 and it will be fine.