How do you sort/name your labeled chests?

[Kreeate]

I always find it fascinating how different people organize their items in games like these.  When watching some YouTuber's play VS, I'm often horrified at the disarray when it comes to housekeeping items and storage.  For early game, of course it's fine to dump anything and everything in the nearest chest.

I must note that I play with a mod that extends the chest inventory, so I don't require 9999 chests for stones, for example.

How do you organize your items and storage?  How do you categorize the different items?

 

Below is my current (early) setup.

Edited July 21, 2025 by Kreeate

[Never Jhonsen]

I'm a hoarder (The dragon? a hoarder?) in this game, so my storage is a little bit larger

I have a 14^3 room for all of my stones. Two floors, and each rock type has two trunks for the main blocks, and 4 dedicated crates for the stones. In my (much smaller) wood storage room, for each wood type I have a trunk for the main stuff, and then 4 crates for seeds (x1), logs (x1), and planks (x2). And when possible, I have matching crate materials for it. I also have a dirt room, which is full of crates for dirts and clay. Then there's the wall of trunks in my smiting area for all the metals and ores, along with a pit for the charcoal (it's more fun to store my charcoal in a large pit). Lastly is another 14^3 room for the extra stuff. 

When I get home from work (and I remember), I will share some photos. For now, here's an already-uploaded photo I can share of the Charcoal Pit. The glass block is there to show that it's 3 blocks deep

[cjc813]

Mine's more location based.

For example, there's always a trunk next to my greenhouse with all the "farming shit" in it. (Seeds, compost, rot, items that I'm waiting on to rot, good soil I haven't used, etc.)

All the raw materials from mining (ores, gems, quartz, bauxite, flint, etc.) end up in my forge, which always ends up at the bottom of my windmill. Building materials for windmills end up with their own trunk, too. Obviously keep my stockpile of (char)coal there, as well. Bars/plates end up on the ground in a corner, somewhere along with bricks.

I usually keep a supply of peat and firewood stacked at both the kitchen and the forge.

Food is all together in a cellar area. One vessel tends to be my "refrigerator" with all the prepared food in it, then other vessels store raw food long-term.

Then I have an established "leather stuff" area -- same deal.

Beyond that, I really just have a few random trunks for whatever's left. One's usually a "dirt" trunk. Then a "wood" trunk. Then a "plants" trunk for flowers, saplings and tree seeds. A "flax/linen" vessel for fibers, twine, linen, and bandages. Then I have one "misc" trunk for literally everything else.

If a playthrough is long enough, I'll end up with a trunk just for temporal gears and/or Jonas parts.

In my "bedroom" I also keep "my" stuff, like my favorite weapons and armor, rusty gears, and any oddball knick nacks that I just think are "neat."

At the entrance to my base, beside the door, there is usually a few tool racks too for "sometimes" tools like chisels, pro-picks, shears and usually a hammer. And ofc in the forge area there's always a hammer and tongs on the wall.

I'll usually set up some crates and a single trunk outside for stones/cobble. I dump all the stone-type shit in the trunk, and once there get to be several stacks of the same kind of little stones, I'll load them into a crate.

Edited July 22, 2025 by cjc813

[Vratislav]

My general rule is to have a central storage, mostly for building materials, but if the stuff is used somewhere, it should be stored locally. Like cjc813 does.

It also developed with the gameplay and expansion of the base, the most extensive storage system is in my actual gameplay (5th. year and continuing). The main storage contains dozens of crates with stones, rocks, soils, gravels, sands, logs, then trunks separated by building rock type and main woods types, and specific trunks dedicated to roofing, glass, interior stuff, wallpapers, etc.

Then there are separated storages:

• Smithery ( ores, ingots, peat, coal, tools ) and chests for dirty cooking ingredients (candles, glue, etc.). 
• Kitchen ( fat, flour, also lime to be mass-cooked because there is biggest capacity ).
• Mill (limestone, bones, bonemeal, and so on)
• Food cellar, wine cellar (separated)  
• Study (Jonas parts, temporal gears, resonator + cylinders, cupronickel ingots, metal parts, etc.)
• Leatherworks, coloring, compost making in the particular workshop,
• Seeds and saplings in agriculture barn,
• Favourite summer and winter clothes are stored in main bedroom,
• large trunk for products to be sold to traders.

I like to have consumable stuff visible (especially wood and peat), so fuels are mostly piled close to its use. Also bricks and shingles look nice when piled outside trunks, but I have so much of it that actually I don't show them. Maybe I'll dedicate some less tidy area for a purpose of purpose.

Some further storages are rather illogical, developed by abandoning early game parts of the base, with items I use rarely and that I do not want to move into main storage, as this brings some purpose to otherwise unused rooms. 

Aside of these storages, there are "storages" of stuff most probably not to be used anymore:

• Exposition of nice ore samples or rare finds from ruins and lore locations,
  • Armory / cloakroom, that serves as deposit of mostly used or leftover mid-tier tools, weapons and armors - If someone wanted to join the world by LAN .

The MOST IMPORTANT trunk in the main storage is the one I throw away stuff that cannot be quickly put in proper place, when I need to clear the inventory. 

The system is reasonably organized, the stuff is mostly close to the place where it will be used, and chaos rarely occurs. The disadvantage is that some particular things are stored in pretty weird places. Like the main bulk of hay is stored next to the cementation furnace (because of pit kilns). 

(And yes, the least useful are two trunks of chiseling duds that hopefully I will rechisel once into full blocks).

In the picture below, about one third of the main storage is visible:

 

[idiomcritter]

kinda like the source acting as a type of self labeling

in combination with this mod (blockpick) I'm able to shift+cntrl+click the selected bit that sits on the ground

 

[Kiko]

I have chests for specific operations I'm working on. everything I need for steelmaking goes in the steel ops chest, everything I need for that building goes in the chest near the building, etc.

[Thorfinn]

Not understanding the question. What is this "labeled" thing of which you speak?  

I, too, organize by function, toss excess that won't fit, and try to remember not to collect any more.

[NyeteyN]

I usually create a 3x3xn underground tunnel and put chests on the side. It's always underground because it's easy to expand and I usually make it as early as possible, together with the cellar. The chests are organized depending on the materials they contain, I always use the same logic so I don't need signs to remember which chest is which (for example, first on the right is always dirt, above it stones, then stone blocks, next column wood blocks, then wood derivates, wood items, minerals, clay, etc...). When I build specialized rooms I end up moving the material or part of it there (for example a forge). After a while the initial storage chests are not enough so I end up creating some sort of backroom where I dump excess materials, I don't mind every once in a while to move items from the secondary storage to the main one, the idea of the main storage is to have all of the items easily available, so that I can build stuff without searching.

[Echo Weaver]

I want to label my storage, but I believe you need papyrus to label crates, and I don't have any of that . 

I started with a central storage area. Now I've outgrown it, so I'm sorting things into chests near where they'll be used. 

I don't think I'll ever have the kind of storage systems pictured here, but we'll see what it's like in a couple more game-years.

[Scorpixel]

Labels are a hoax created by big writing in order to sell more signs.

I sort related items in the same storages and expand/separate those as they get filled. The "stones chest" becomes the "stones chest and granite crate". Once the early game shack resembles one of those cave diving videos is when i get a room large enough for most items to have their exclusive storage