I really want to like crates, but...

[Thorfinn]

...they only really serve one purpose -- charcoal, because gravity. Arguably they might be good for sticks or torches, but why are you accumulating them in those kinds of quantities? Your other high volume stackables, like boards, peat, firewood, firebrick (raw and fired) stack to worldheight, presumably.

But interfacing with crates is cumbersome. With a chest, you open your inventory and the chest, and shift-click stuff between them. With the crate, you have to move all the stacks you want to store into your hotbar, then right-click, scroll wheel, right-click, scroll wheel, etc., reload hotbar and repeat.

And for that clunkiness, you get only 4 more storage slots.

Long-winded way to say, "Please give crates a chest-like interface."

[Maelstrom]

You ever use sticks for roofing or flooring?  Takes a crapton of sticks my man.

Otherwise, not everyone has the same resource management philosophy you do.  I prefer to have excess resource on hand before I start a project.

[Thorfinn]

You mean layers of sticks? Sure. Worst case, they stack to 64, so a single stack stores over 500 sticks. Two stacks of them is almost as many sticks as you can cram into a crate. 

It's how I store sticks early game anyway. Usually not in a house, because I don't build a house until July or August at the earliest, but I place layers of sticks out by the pit kilns so they are handy when I need them. Once I had the brilliant idea of roofing over my pit kilns with them. Once. It can probably be done at some height, but I've never bothered to find out because the long-term plan is to use them all up as needed anyway.

Re: project management, I make sure I have enough on hand for the phase of the project I'm working on. I don't need to have every block ready before I commence building a mill, just enough to get one set of sails going and keep the critters out. I don't wait until I've got enough linen for even 4 full sails, let alone the 8 I'll eventually have in the completed windmill. If I only have enough fat for half the needed axles, I'll place axles until I run out, then build a temporary floor wherever necessary and set my quern there until I hunt up enough fat to get clear to the ground.

You can save about 1/3 of the storage space by converting slate rocks into slate roofing, and save it completely if you just place it where the roof is going to be. Same with rocks. Rather than have a trunk-full of claystone rocks, turn it into fences and use it around your farm and critters. Or into cobblestone for a 7/8 storage savings.

But generally, yeah, if I don't have a need for something in the near future, I prioritize collecting resources I will be using shortly. I still have a few hoarding issues. Like food. I'm piling it up like I'm expecting a village of hobbits to come to visit all winter.

[Booker42]

I like the crates, but yes, I would like the "add all" option to grab from the rest of your inventory too instead of having to add one stack at a time. I have, or rather had, a ton of stone saved because I had a few projects in mind and ultimately decided on a large road project that certainly went through all my slate, and now i am trying to decide if i want to deplete one of my other stone reserves or just go mining again so i can finish the last bit of road (only another 100-150 blocks to go but my road is 2 blocks wide) 

[LadyWYT]

Personally, I really like the crates because they hold a lot of stuff without getting disorganized due to the one-item-type limit, and they can have handy pictures on the front to look at. I've even shoved my temporal gears into crates a time or two, just because it was a prettier way to store them. It's not that I can't just label my chests--it's just a lot easier and faster to find what I'm after by glancing at pictures.

The couple of things I've found to be issues when working with them--there's not an easy way to stack crates on top of each other when empty, unless you have some sort of wall at the back. Attempting to stack them without a wall will result in shoving one crate into another, which is a little frustrating if you're just trying to pile them up for whatever reason. The other thing is that it's difficult to remove stuff that you've put in the crate, unless it's either a single item or a full stack(or however much is in the stack "on top"). It'd be much less frustrating removing specific amounts of stuff if there was a way to open a small dialogue box asking how many items you want to remove.

[ifoz]

I'm a huge fan of putting logs into crates since they normally only stack to 16 and can quickly clutter regular chests.
Still, a menu would be appreciated.

Edited June 1 by ifoz

[ArgentLuna]

I have a ton of Crates and they are great for how I like to organize stuff.

[Thorfinn]

Yes, @Booker42, an Add All (that will fit in the crate) and Remove All (that will fit in inventory) would be great. I'd also like that to work with chests. That would actually serve my needs better than my suggestion, as it would not only save clicks and time, it would allow me to sort trunks. Though I would not shed any tears if the game added a sort button like @Spear and Fang's Sortable Storage mod, one of the few mods that makes the cut into my Vanilla+ install.

@ifoz, not really seeing how that helps all that much. Two crates will hold 640 logs. One trunk will hold only 576, and costs half an ingot more. 4 more slots are not nothing, but neither are they much to get excited about

@LadyWYT, agreed, those who think in pictures will have an easier time with crates. I've never wanted to freestack crates -- my storage is always against the wall or glued to the ceiling, and occasionally serves as the floor. I can see the point of having rows of freestanding crates if you use a lot of them.

@ArgentLuna, I organize by function. So the leatherworking trunk has oak logs, ground lime, partially treated hides, maybe a few spare (possibly filled) buckets and barrels, etc. the automation trunk has resin, logs, fat, sticks, the quarried block I'm going to use in the crusher, linen, spare axles and angled gears, sometimes chisel, saw and hammer if I set up away from my toolrack, etc. Metalworking has ore, blooms, borax, ingots, spare crucibles, various molds, etc. I get that is not appealing to everyone. I just like to be able to open a trunk or two and do what I set out to do, rather than run around gathering materials every time. Yes, I have dump chests, but try to keep that to a dull roar.

[-Glue-]

I'm still pretty new, so far the only thing I have used crates for is coal storage. I love the ability to just pull out items I need without having to use any sort of interface.

But the fact I can take coal out of a box, place it and my ore into a forge, light it, grab my tongs and hammer off a rack, then take the heated ore and place it on an anvil, all without using any form of user interface is incredible. I hope to see more seamless interactions like this in the future, honestly.
I can see how crates could get cumbersome when storing larger amounts of items, but using them as a utility, or excess storage is great! As others have suggested, an add all option would be nice, so you don't need to full your hotbar.

[idiomcritter]

I like the free crates found in the tl rooms and ruins. early game a cheap storage.

the usage for me is stones, and dirt (making stone pathways when enough inventory of either/both)

and oak logs by the leather curing barrels. 

also keep several crates by the growing fields to allow quick dumping of grains in inventory while I gather up more of the harvest.

ctrl mouse click or

shift ctrl mouse click 

is quick enough (for me) most times to push/pull stacks as needed.

[Thorfinn]

1 hour ago, idiomcritter said:

ctrl mouse click or

shift ctrl mouse click 

Maybe I'm not using them properly. Doesn't the first just move the currently selected stack from the hotbar? And the second retrieve one stack into an empty slot?

 

8 hours ago, -Glue- said:

But the fact I can take coal out of a box,

My bad. Coal, charcoal, anything that ground stacks that is subject to gravity are great, in that they save a quarter of an ingot which can be important in early game, though at the cost of being more cumbersome to initially load than a chest. It's not like you come home from a mining expedition with brown coal in all your hotbar slots. Getting the parchment much before the second flax harvest is a problem, unless you delay either the mill or armor, but on obvious things like the crate next to the forge, you don't ever need a label.

I could also see the value for firewood in the kitchen -- running 4 ovens takes 24 firewood per round, so you need more than 1 stack if you are going to do it twice. If you tend to do lots of baking all at once, like making up all your berry or meat pies before the ingredients go bad, sure. Maybe peat, if you tend to store meat and berries as meals.

 

1 hour ago, idiomcritter said:

the usage for me is stones, and dirt (making stone pathways when enough inventory of either/both)

But that's exactly where chests really shine. Open up your stone chest and your dirt chest (or maybe you combine them) and pull full stacks straight into the crafting grid rather than pulling them into inventory, opening inventory, moving them to the crafting grid, close inventory, repeat. When using chests, when you are done, press Escape, and whatever was remaining in your crafting grid returns to the chest(s) rather than you having to place them in the hotbar and push them into the crates.

[EDIT]

Another simple solution occurs to me -- treat emptying stacks the same way as broken tools. When you get rid of the last of a stack, pull another stack from inventory if you have one.

[/EDIT]

Edited June 3 by Thorfinn

[Maelstrom]

16 hours ago, Thorfinn said:

...rather than pulling them into inventory, opening inventory, moving them to the crafting grid, close inventory, repeat.

I pull directly from crates with my inventory open.   Pull from crate, open inventory (or vice versa), craft stuff then dump into trunk or crate (if it's inventory is open) or esc to close all inventories.

[Thorfinn]

Not sure I'm following, but I'll try a few more variations on the theme to see if I can figure it out. It looks to me as though you are saying open a chest, press "e", Ctrl-R-Click on the crate that has stones (say) 8 times, Ctrl-R-Click on the crate that has dirt 4 times, transfer stacks into the crafting grid, craft into the chest?  And if you have excess stones or dirt or both in the crafting grid, when you press Esc, they return to their respective crates?

[Maelstrom]

Yeppers!

[Thorfinn]

Huh. Not getting that to work. Unused components in the grid will return to open trunks if there's a stack there, but I can't for the life of me get them to return to the crates. If the trunks don't have that component, when I "X" out of the inventory/crafting screen, they go into my hotbar or inventory, depending. Have not run into a single case where they went back to the crates.

Edited June 11 by Thorfinn

[Maelstrom]

Wait.  I re-read your comment and realized the last part is wrong.  Left overs need to go back to hot bar and placed back into crates.  I must have been tired or *ahem* something when I read your comment the first time. 

What I was trying to confirm is that you can have your crafting grid open, any number of chests (or firepits, cookpots, etc) open and then grab things from the crates to craft.  Putting stuff back into crates?  Nothing special there.

My apologies for the confusion.  I don't know what kind of shrooms my seraph smoked while reading your comment.

[bluespruce786]

On 6/2/2024 at 8:49 PM, Thorfinn said:

Another simple solution occurs to me -- treat emptying stacks the same way as broken tools. When you get rid of the last of a stack, pull another stack from inventory if you have one.

 

This would also be nice when roofing, building roads, long walls or anything where you might be going through multiple stacks of the same block.

Maybe easier to code than an add all button as well.

Either one would be nice though, the whole; empty hotbar, move stuff to hotbar, move hotbar stuff to crate, refill hotbar... is pretty cumbersome.

That being said I love the crates! It really is brilliant to grab a couple of stacks of material without having to open an interface,

 

[Thorfinn]

Just found out crocks are also worth crating. Yeah, its only 20 at a time since they don't stack, but nothing is better space-wise, which is important if you are cooking/baking in your cellar. And, seriously, how many crocks of meals do you need to get you through the winter? Particularly when you can bake more veggie pies any time you want. The berry pies you made with the last of the fall's berries will store for over 3 months, so you won't need that many of the meat stew with veggies and berries crocks and none of the jam you put up.