Picture it. Pelican Town, 2016. A lone farmer sits on the bridge, fishing pole in the water. Not a bite in hours. She reaches into her bag to try some bait, only to realize there’s no bait to be had. Frustrated, she digs deeper into her backpack, hoping for some bug meat with which she can craft some bait. Not a whisper of bug meat to be had, either. But she was just in the mines yesterday! Where is all her bug meat? She reels in her line and trudges, exhausted, back to her farm on the outskirts of town. A collection of chests and boxes sits in a corner near a fence, and she begins to root through the first one. Bug meat, bug meat…not there, not in the next box…where is her bug meat? How is she supposed to craft bait when she can’t remember which box she left the ingredients in?
This is one of my biggest video game pet peeves: no ability to craft from my storage. Most games that involve crafting and storage tend to have a limited inventory system, only letting you carry so many things around with you at a time and requiring you to store any other items you want to keep in a chest or a box or something. That’s fine. I get it. I don’t want all that stuff in my inventory at all times. I also understand why, realistically, it wouldn’t make sense for you, standing in the middle of town, to be able to craft using a bunch of logs in a storage box back at your house.
But like, who cares, man? It’s a video game. And it’s not just about having to run back home and get stuff. Usually if I’m trying to craft out of my storage, I’m juggling a bunch of crap from storage box to storage box. I gotta get the logs out of the tree products box and the iron ingot out of the mines materials box, and then after I make my barrel or whatever the heck, I gotta figure out where that’s getting stored so I can put it away. Most of these games tend to have so many ingredients that I end up juggling three, four, five, six, or more chests of stuff trying to make sure everything is organized, and most of my time spent playing is dedicated to inventory management. This sucks! Crafting from storage doesn’t solve that, but it does make it a hell of a lot easier, and makes hunting for materials eat up less of my time.
Until recently, this was an annoyingly common problem in a lot of video games with systems both for storage and crafting. Stardew Valley was (and still mostly is) a big offender. As was Animal Crossing: New Horizons and Pokopia. I don’t play much Palworld but I hear good things about that game on this subject. But I’m happy to report that all these games, and many others, are coming around to my point of view. Stardew Valley added a Workbench item in update 1.4 that lets you craft from adjacent chests. It’s not a total fix, but it helps. Animal Crossing: New Horizons‘ 3.0 update earlier this year added both bulk crafting and crafting from storage, which is a huge bonus. Pokopia only lets you craft from storage that’s touching a crafting table, but its latest update now has a universal storage container that can make that process a bit less fraught.
And then there’s Fields of Mistria, which inspired this post. Fields of Mistria just hit its full 1.0 release, and I just started playing a little over a week ago. And boy, this game lets you craft using anything you have anywhere, anytime. It rules. I don’t have to haul 50 eggs to the mill to make mayonnaise. When I go to the inn to chat with folks in the evenings, I can pop behind the bar and whip up a Berry Scone without worrying about having the ingredients in my tiny inventory. I can go to the forest, chop down a bunch of trees, haul the wood to the crafting table in town, and use it to make all sorts of decor using the wood in my inventory and other things from my storage, no hassle at all. Shoutout to Fields of Mistria, and shoutout to crafting directly from storage.
All this tells me that more and more video games are figuring out that I don’t ever want to have to sit there and think for minutes at a time about which box I left my various crafting supplies in just to slap a fence post together. Thank you, developers, for giving me the power of crafting from storage: please never take it away.
And for everyone who hasn’t implemented this yet: get with the program. I got ingots to smelt.