A lot of work done in Star Citizen is transient at best. While I despise re-doing content, Star Citizen is the one game that has made me come to terms with the reality that nothing in a video game is permanent, and that if you gained a reward once, you can do it again. With the impending cargo and inventory refactor coming Soon(tm) in alpha 3.23.2, it seems pointless to be talking about my inventory habits in 3.23.1 (soon to be .1a), but I’ve never been one to shy away from pointless talking points.

I remember the days when Star Citizen didn’t even really have inventory. Actually, scratch that; I have no recollection of what we used to do in the game before the current inventory system. What we have now, though, it better than nothing but only just.

Our armor is modular, and when we equip a full set of armor and a backpack, we can have up to three different containers with us, represented by the three panels on the left. Under most circumstances, we only have one column, “Personal”, but if we’re on board a ship we sometimes gain another tab, “External”, and when we’re at a ground location or LEO station, we can get a “Local” tab. These can also be combined, so we could have a “Personal”, “External”, and also a “Local” tab, all at once. In the image above I’m standing in the lobby at Port Tressler in orbit around microTech with a full set of armor and backpack on. All of the inventory I am not carrying is represented (in a small part) on the right in the station’s “Local” inventory. Here you can see clothing, some weapons, a few grenades, some armor, an undersuit, and various ammo. It’s kind of a mess.

Although there are tabs on that station inventory panel, you should be able to understand what a massive pain in the ass the inventory situation is in Star Citizen. We can only filter by type and maybe subtype; armors can be broken down into helmets, core, arms, legs, backpacks, and “flair” which does help a bit, but there’s also no way to search. Searching would help with visibility when trying to put together a unified look by armor name or color, which is why I’ve started taking matters into my own hands.

A somewhat recent patch allowed us to buy personal cargo boxes in 1/8, 2, 4, 6, and 8 SCU (standard cargo unit, I guess) sizes. 1/8 boxes can be hand-carried; 8 SCU boxes need to be moved by industrial tractor-beam. Since we do not yet have the ability to organize a “wardrobe”, I bought some 2 SCU boxes and put them in the station inventory.

Then I set up “armor sets” with various undersuits, armor pieces, weapons, ammo, utilities, and sustenance items. Each of these “builds” went into it’s own cargo box so that I no longer have to hunt for a decent armor combo. More importantly, I never have to forget to bring along a tractor beam, medpens, or medguns, which are the things I most often forget when equipping for a day out in Star Citizen.

Patch 3.23.2 is going to change how we interact with our inventory by making almost everything physicalized. We won’t be working with global inventories surrounding our characters any more, at least not in the way we do now. Instead, we’ll need to access our stuff through kiosks that appear roughly every three feet in every location in the current build. The “warehouse” section you see in the screenshot above will be taking the place of the right-hand column in the original inventory screenshot. The “Elevator” will be the cargo elevator we access from our own personalized hangars. I’m hoping that when 3.23.2 hits, I won’t need to organize my stuff into discreet boxes, and that I’ll have more insight into the kinds of junk I have at my location.