Stash overhaul (or how to make GD an even better ARPG)

Grim Dawn General Discussion
18

One thing I forgot to mention. The logic of the limited stash forcing the player to make more deliberate choices of what to keep instead of keeping want the player wants falls short if you consider that the player can always mule all the stuff (as far as I know there is no character limitation?). You can unlock all bags and stash tabs for your mules quite easily. So we can have our infinite stash, wrapped in a very crude, primitive, inelegant disguise. The price of satisfaction of having the new potential builds in store is the tediousness of mule-ing.

I also think it’s a bit unfair to bring up the hypothetical image of hoarders to argue against the infinite stash.
Firstly, wanting to keep valuable MI’s, set items, or legendaries is one of the main appeals of a loot driven ARPG. Any such game wants the player to want the loot. And if players want to keep a lot the loot it means the game does great in the item department. Throwing a shade at ARPG (of all genres) players for wanting to keep the loot is pretty nonsensical.
Secondly, I am pretty sure that given an infinite stash, players generally won’t flood it with everything anyway. They will still sell junk, unnecessary loot and extra copies of legendaries that they will feel like aren’t needed anymore.

The point being, this issue should be viewed realistically. Extremes exist, but they don’t represent.

It’s pretty much a historical fact at this point: the infinite stash has always been desired. There can be pro and counter arguments. But would bringing the infinite storage to the game really mean negative affects that would outweigh the positives? Realistically speaking, how would it affect the players everyday experience? Would it be so bad if the part of players who want to have the infinite stash - would have it without 3rd party tools? Imo, realistically speaking, the infinite stotage’s positives will vastly outweigh the negatives and will be overwhelmingly welcomed by most players.

I just hope Crate will bring this topic to (yet another) discussion and maybe will make decision to change the stash this time. Imagine the community’s reaction. Along with 1.2 update and the upcoming expansion, the stash overhaul would just add to the momentum! Not for headlines, but for the regular players who given hundreds or thousands of hours to the game. :smiley:

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19

I’d rather they put all their effort into the game’s content into an infinite stash, where they then want advanced filters for their stash, which would hinder the expansion’s progress.
Also, Zantai already explained why an infinite stash is not implemented.

20

If you want to get a clearer image, just talk to me. I don’t use stash tools, but I have multiple characters. How does this work?
I enjoy gradual upgrades and earning every item that I wear. One time I collected a set with one character and put it on another, but it felt like cheating, like this character started playing from level 65. After that I sold all stashed sets and never wanted to do it again. I don’t care if GD gets infinite stash, though, because even current stash is too big for me.

Of course. We can’t protect players from themselves. But it is true. You’ll only learn which item you prize higher when you are forced to lose the other.

21

except it doesn’t “really”; because the casual loot player wont bother with mules exactly because of crude/extra hurdle it presents,
meanwhile the dedicated loot aficionado will likely use infinite stash anyway too and only the real true purists will bother with mules, and loot afficionados or hoarder goblins already dont’ care about the “item choice”, so either way the design aspect wouldn’t impact them; but does for the more regular or casual player.

as for char limit there is actually one, it’s 50 if using cloud saves for steam on PC, and 50 on xbox too, unsure about GoG

22

I think your described way of playing is pretty cool and surely is not a common approach. Cool, interesting, nice to see some variety!

At the same time, you seem to project your own perspective onto others. Why does anyone need protection? Protection from what exactly? The game showers quality legendaries, it’s a loot driven ARPG. Why do you assume that I don’t prize the copies of items I stored in mules? I stored them precisely because I value them. :slight_smile:

All this is about basically a quality of life improvement for the players who feel it’s needed. If others will benefit from that - great, if not - cool.

The casual player is an entirely different plain of existence. Meaning single playthrough, possibly not even reaching lvl cap, trying out a few different classes and dropping the game. Without having a fully fleshed out build with proper gear. I agree that this kind of player will generally not bother with mules. I wrote in the OP that the current stash is great for single character, or multiple characters up to 10. There is enough space for that imo. If anything, I’d say the casual player will not have enough scrap to unlock all the tabs - that’ll be the storage limiter.

But it’s not the casual players who typically ask for the infinite stash. It’s requested by seasoned players with hundreds of hours, when the stash becomes too small for the valuable loot. Who have one or another problem with either mule-ing or using tools or anything else. Sure, many veterans use the tools, but there are many who don’t.

I mean, your explanation surely makes sense in some cases. But you’re forgetting about the veteran players who do not use the infinite stash tools. Hi, we exist! I, for one, am not a purist, I just don’t want to become tool-dependent and don’t want to get into the technical aspects of 3rd party solutions.

I’ve explained this more than once by now, but apparently it’s hard to understand that some (many) players don’t enjoy the “item choice” philosophy (in a loot driven ARPG) when it means game giving the long-time player steady income of end-game quality items which cannot be stored without pain in the butt. And they would like to voice that. And hopefully be heard.

And thank you for the headsup about the character limit. Apparently I am about to reach it, will know to disable the cloud saving. :+1:

23

makes you a stash purist by definition :smile:
whatever reasons you have for not wanting to use tools or mods and only using vanilla methods is that very thing

so has the devs :grin:
You’re also conflating casul (1x playthrough players) with casual endgame players
Again, devs are fully aware of loot goblins and hoarders; their stance for those are you should use mods - that’s literally the official stance. They want there to be some form of a choice/decision in item keeping, infinite storage would not serve that vision, infinite storage would only serve us loot goblins “you’re doing the same mistake of only seeing your own perspective here” that you’re saying my argument falls short of :smile: (which isn’t mine but the devs remember).
And yes, even for regular endgame players i can see their idea having a place, because unless you’re a goblin like me, you wont actually need to hoard everything, there is enough space for what you “need”, even if it’s not enough for what we “want”. And more casual endgame players will then only “struggle” with that space limitation on a surface level, as they quickly realize “oh i’ll never use that item anyway because i’m not interested in making 10 different builds to try out this specific item”
If anything you could say the real flaw in the limited space/item choice philosophy “as it pertains to a looter game” is that it can then potentially either highlight or detract from the item pool, as one could get the notion there are too many trash items; so why should they be in the game in the first place if from a design perspective i’m meant to discard them (tho many loot games has that issue too anyway imo)

remember to make manual backups (and also that the game changes save location on your PC so you need to move the saves if using Steam)

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24

Someone not wanting to use 3rd tools doesn’t necessarily make them a purist. I’ve already given the example of it not being convenient since I play on both PC and Steam Deck and using tools just isn’t convenient. I’d rather have something integrated into the game so it can easily be synced across devices. If they do have their principles where they want to prevent players from hoarding but have officially said that if they want more storage use 3rd party tools, which makes 0 sense to me, then just add a hidden setting. Make people use a save editor to enable more storage so that us that want it, can enable it “through hidden means” leaving the new players to limited aka “envisioned” storage, which does make sense to me. Since okay, your vision is to have limited storage for gameplay purposes and “protecting” players against themselves, cool. Then it DOESN’T make sense that the official statement is telling people to use 3rd party tools for more storage, it just doesn’t compute.
And don’t get me wrong I’m not here to attack anyone or talk smack. I’m just sharing my opinion on this topic. My reasoning for asking for increased storage is so I can easily have it synced across devices as I play different characters and builds on PC and Deck, sometimes I get items on a “PC” char that are good for a “Deck” char, so I have to use a mule which is just not enjoyable. This is a single player, offline game, I think there should AT LEAST be a hidden option or something similar so that us hoarders don’t have to spam the forums every 2 weeks with new “Increase storage” threads.

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25

imo the diablo2(+shared tab) style of stash is outdated… i don’t expect anything for GD, but when they make GD2 with the same stash design then i would not get it…

with such an diluted item pool as GD, SSF chars are painful to me… but i get you can’t balance that, a lot of different items are great, but getting them gets increasingly harder… so you just dump them in stash and deal with it later… anyone enjoys stash management ? i prefer playing the game instead of staring at stash tabs, which results in more items faster…

then if items can have different rolls you want to obviously keep the best of them, which takes more time to manage stash.

stash design has to respect the time of the players… but i don’t think any ARPG will ever have native infinite storage, even though i would just rip that band-aid off and be done with it, begone mules, begone 3rd party tools, begone human monkey brain not able to deal with sorting limited stash and good riddance.

but if stash is limited then it should not include the fallowing in its limit
dedicated stash tab for components crafting mats
legendary collection tab
maybe epic collection tab

or just sell out and sell stash tabs gg mwaha

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26

The one part I like about your suggestion, is to access the stashes of other characters all at once.

If Crate takes one thing from this thread, I would hope that it is implementing some way to move items from a character to multiple other characters without having to: Put items in shared stash → main menu → open character 1 → grab items from shared into personal → repeat steps for characters 2-x → main menu → start game back as farming character.

Shortening that process a little bit would be amazing if it were in the game to begin with. Even if there were a separate menu item that was like “Stash Management” and was basically a way to just distribute items to multiple characters from shared stash all at once.

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27

Thank you for helping, again :slight_smile:

Ah I see. By that definition of yours, I am indeed a purist when it comes to item storage. To me, purist sounded like a very conservative player, who would dislike stuff like mods, tools for self and others who use it. I’m cool with others playing the way the want. I also played Reign of Terror mod. Whatever that makes me be.

I would prefer not to go into 50 shades of a casual GD player. Point being - if players spends (loosely) under 100 hours in GD, the current stash is generally enough. If hundreds of hours - it generally is not.

You and I feel the same pain, Mr loot goblin. :smiley:

I hope Crate will note this, a very valid angle on why the leave-infinite-loot-problem-to-mods solution shows real cracks.

Sadly the stance on the stash just doesn’t include a lot of care or thought for the long-time players. Of course, we are hardly majority, but it we are the ones who gave the game the most time, a little care would be very welcome. The storage tools’ existence just reinforces the point of the current stash being way too limited in a long run.

Fingers and toes crossed that Crate hears us :slight_smile:

28

does, the underlying reasons doesn’t really matter imo, you refuse to modify the game; you’re keeping it purist’ist’ish

item assistant has cloud, another tool literally expands your stash,
a third utilizes sorta mules in the background and keeps a ledger for you, since it’s just mules steam clouds should be able sync those and the tool detect the stuff on them(i’m assuming it can since it’s an actual purist tool made for purists :sweat_smile:)

legit don’t get what’s hard to understand about that?

no such thing, if it’s in the game it’s in the game and then it’s a vanilla default feature, and people will use it even if it’s “intended” for them…
similar arguments have been made for loot drops “just make an optional setting for people that want 100% drops/increased drops”, or increased game speed, and it doesn’t work because when it’s in vanilla it’s part of the base design and then things have to be designed or balanced “around” that feature existing default, when it’s a mod you don’t have to consider it in the same way “even if you know it exists/people use it”

again, i’m all for it, i use unlimited storage and have for years after using mules first, i’m just saying devs made their position clear, multiple times, and i kinda understand where they are coming from “even if i’m a loot goblin myself”

29

I am a veteran player in the game and I only had storage problems when I was still a newbie, now I have 0 problems with the stash, I only keep really valuable items in a couple of mules and for the rest I use dynamite.

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30

It’s a game, you know the rules and you chose to play this specific title. It’s not a job, but an optional activity. If it’s a time-waster, then try something more fulfilling.

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31

I’ll just link this from another thread re stash infinite storage. The first reply is by Zantai during a dev stream, the second by Medierra, founder of Crate Entertainment.

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32

I have a suggestion that would help us have more space, but without being something that already exists in mods, like infinite storage, which apparently the developers have already taken a stance against.

Factions could have a chest or NPC with storage, the same style and capacity as the character’s storage.

So, instead of switching mules with the game’s UI, we would just travel from faction to faction to store our items.

More details in the post:

33

I’ve got over 2,000 hours and I’ve never used a stash mod and still have empty space in my stash.

I am absolutely one of the players who would stash everything if it was infinite and then never want to look at the unorganised mess once it got to a certain size, case in point my PoE standard stash is over 600 pages and I just don’t want to deal with it. Also, I know this is anecdotal at best, but I do have a friend who stopped playing precisely because his GDIA stash got so big he didn’t want to deal with it.

I’m quite happy with the current situation. If you want infinite stash space, there are mods and for everyone else, there are choices to be made and a cap on the “mess” that you can create.

I honestly don’t understand this aversion to using mods that already do exactly the thing you want to do.

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34

my new favorite solution would be to have a reverse engineer NPC, you give the NPC 1-5 identical epic or 2-10 identical legendary items and get a blueprint for that item.

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35

This… actually makes sense. :thinking: If an item drops this often, then might as well be made craftable. But I would rather lower the drop rates to the point, where collecting these amounts seems like a challenge.

36

Fair point actually. At the same time players expressing their bad experience about a specific rule is equally fair, and if there are many of them, this rule might need taking a second look.

A very appropriate link, thank you.

I’ve already addressed Medierra’s points, here are thoughts on Zantai’s (who was being a nice guy, as always):

“Borrowing infinite stash” from modders would be unfair to them - let’s be honest, that aged rather poorly since the upcoming expansion will borrow prefix rerolling from season community mod (at the very least) :stuck_out_tongue: . But sweat not, lord Zantai! I don’t think the modders will feel bad if their ideas and creations would make it in the official game. Quite on the contrary - that’d be an honorary achievement, I imagine. It’s cool. :slight_smile:

Genuine reasons for the bags being like they are - I would assume that at least partially it was the Medierra’s points and perhaps more. Would love to hear them! For now, all I can say is that on one hand I have mad respect for Crate on the other hand - given that I dared to question Medierra’s (quite ancient) points means that the I might have questions to the unnamed ones . :thinking:

Splitting the player base - it is very understandable that players with mods cannot play the vanilla players. But this point is not really relevant in the reasoning of having or not having an official infinite stash. In fact, if there was an official infinite stash, there would be less player base splitting since a lot of players just use infinite stash mods.
Also the actual multiplayer is really a tiny part of the game, so there isn’t much to split to begin with. Modders and vanilla players get along just fine without ever joining each other in-game. Tinkering builds, pushing endgame and sharing with others - that’s the multiplayer aspect of GD imo.
On the last point, though, it looks like Zantai moved from explaining why there’s no infinite stash into technicalities, so I hope he’ll forgive me for dragging this into the infinite stash area. But it’s a full response and I’ve simply addressed it fully.

To be fair, Zantai’s points were made 5 years ago and things have changed. Crate stated that there won’t be any expansion and that changed. And players are happy. (Being a broken record) Crate, please make MOAR changes to make people happy. :smiley: Like stash :grin:

An interesting idea. To be honest I think the teleporting between chests would eventually become its own tediousness. But that’s far better than mule-ing, so I’d take it. I’d take any of the solutions that were posted here really. All is better than mule-ing. :slight_smile:

A valid angle. It’s cool that there are players like you who can manage within the current stash and be happy.
I also find the story of your friend to be quite funny :smiley: . But… did he use filtering and searching…? :smiley:
Regardless of being a different player, I believe your points.

About the aversion to mods - that’s put way too strongly. I don’t dislike them, I just prefer not to use them. I’ve mentioned them a few times. In short - there can be different reasons for different people. For me it is not wanting to deal with technicalities and risks of the stash tools, as well as not wanting to become tool-dependent. Lihvar has another angle - he plays on different devices and using tools is very inconvenient.

Yeah, that’s actually one of the best and cool ideas yet. I would also like crafting materials along with the blueprints. :ok_hand:

37

I use Grim UI and have for several years now…

That mod provides plenty of storage without me needing to resort to using GD Stash
(But, I’m not a “super-hoarder” like some ppl)