inventory Pouches and Gubbins, a feature idea.

[Walrusst]

Update concept: An update which improves the behaviors of small specialized storage pouches that fit in an inventory slot to be more genuinely convenient, and tries to address the DST issue of people becoming permanently married to backpacks and forgetting chest armor. This also in a way addresses the item variety bloat dst has inherently which can cause new player confusion and fatigue by guiding them to carry items with certain theremins.

Items which are pouches (think ammo pouch, the song canister, the fishing tackle, but I would also add warly's hat to this,) get a new equipment slot slot which holds them open, pouches have two slot types available to be in them: Their primary slots which carry their specialized items, and loops which I will explain later. Some may be opposed to any inventory buff, but a pouch slots literally a single slot that just makes the ergonomics of what should be a fun item class slightly less annoying.

There would be new pouches which is where I imagine the real fuss would be, some new pouches would include:

• Messenger bag: A grassy canvas like bag. Has three slots that fit navigation themed items, like compasses, moon lenses, flares, maps, and papyrus. Comes with three loops, a high number. This being babies first science machine pouch. 
• Flask Band: A bandolieer of flasks made of pigskin, gold, and charcoal. Has 3 slots for liquid or powder items (Ash/slime/snot/gloop/niter/honey/fistfulls of jam/tree jam/guano are examples,) Preserves edible liquids very slightly, two loops. Its supposed to be a broadly useful alchemy engine level item which can carry a mix of weird stuff to some pretty valuable things.
• Slurper fannysack: Has two slots for morsel type items (Foods with no more then 15 hunger.) It has a loop. An exploration reward which  is especially small and generally applicable.
• Possibly a first aid themed one for medicine items, and medicine ingredients. Made of bunnypuffs as a funny thing to make newbies anxious when building it.
• Wilson gets a beardhair bandoleer as an additional bonus to beard storage, which has four loops for everyone, but gains extra loops for all beard havers as their beards grow out. Wilson also can simply fit better items overall in loops than other survivors simply due to being used to loops as their inventor as a bonus.

Loops hold gubbins, Gubbins is just a very weird word for devices/tools, I chose a british word for this because wilson sort of being someone I imagined as the inventor and master of loops. Think of them as small or rod like objects that you could easily keep holstered on say a belt (So not like a hambat, the lantern, a beef bell, or a dark sword, but a torch, pocket scale, and the freshwater fishing rod are trivially gubbins.) Its a property, a tag for minor items which are either early game, off meta but are useful for survival, or are criminally underutilized, so long as they visually fit the theming of being on a belt loop in some way. Essentially loops buff powercrept utility items, and are also applied to thematically more newbie focused pouches as an additional direct buff.

Few items lines which are meta and popular would be gubbins if the items simply fit the theming I'm going for too well, and almost no proper weapons would be gubbins, but the two I will highlight as being a prime candidates for gubbin status is the mourning star, being the exotic torch weapon upgrade nobody uses, and the walking cane, as its too fitting thematically. Outside of this, if an item feels like a gubbin it is.

A final thing I would add to close this off is a filter for items that fit in your current pouch, and a filter for items that are gubbins for your current character, that way pouches introduce players to feature sets, and players don't need to wiki this.

Why have this? Well, to drive interesting player behavior, and make people less married to their backpacks. Loops are also intended to sort of guide new players to carry certain basic tools like torches more, to forage more as being less penalized for carrying a freshwater fishing rod would likely lead to engaging and beneficial long term behavior. Yet, to do this in a way that's intrinsically less cheat-like than just having dedicated slots for clothing/armor like mods do it.

Wearable pouches have character, and communicate player intentions, they give you a slight nudge to feel less penalized for wearing something like a raincoat or a breezy vest without replacing backpacks entirely due to backpacks being better.

Its a risky change, but the goal is simple: Drive interesting and engaging behavior whenever possible, and to make the very large cast of DST items bloating the game fit in the almost static inventories we have had.

[lowercase skye]

The idea itself is good, but the items proposed here are way too hardcoded for a DST mechanic, imo. For example, Slurtles and Moleworms know what to eat by checking for foods with the "elemental" tag, Composting Bins accept anything edible that isn't elemental and decide if it's wet or dry compost based on if it has the wood/roughage tag or not, the salt box accepts only items that have a "_cooked" or "cooked_" version of their prefab, etc. On the other hand, stuff like ashes, slurtle slime, phlegm, glommer's goop, nitre, honey, fistfuls of jam, tree jam, and guano have nothing in the game's inner-workings that connect them in any way, so there's no way to intuitively figure out what would go inside with game mechanics, and each container would need to have a manually entered list of items that has to be updated every time new items get added (and mods would have to hook into it too, rather than their items automatically working). I'd prefer if it were broader categories that the game already has some concept of, like existing tags, as that would prevent all of these issues from arising.

[Walrusst]

Its understandable, but I got the idea from what I saw of how properties are defined when I was reading to try and understand something I wanted to do.

Since, kleis way of tagging things seemed fairly dynamic. The flask pouch was simply an idea for "Well, what would be a more broadly useful pouch than just flares?"
Something for all the goos and dusts we have is what I settled on because there are a lot of them cluttering peoples inventories.

After all, they added new property lists to help woby work recently, I'm not going to sit around baby sitting what klei is and isn't capable of. I'll let them decide even though I assume they would chuckle if they read this and settle for something simpler/better in the end.
I'll have fun writing, because I can.