Quote Originally Posted by Solarra View Post
I understand the need for demolition but cannot see any reason why furnishings should be treated differently from gear, mounts or minions, all of which the game will save indefinitely if you take a break.
Mounts and minions are part of collections once learned instead of being items in inventory storage. They work differently.

Items stored on your retainer or in your chocobo saddlebags "belong" to the retainer or chocobo with you having sole access to retrieve the items stored there. No other player will ever own those specific retainers or chocobos so the items are still there if you return from a long break.

Likewise, items placed in a house "belong" to the house plot and not the owner of the house BUT a house plot can be owned by multiple players over time. As long as you remain the owner of the house, you're free to retrieve the items as you like. If the house gets demolished, the items "belonging" to that house are sent to the Resident Caretaker for storage pending reclamation by the previous owner.

I suspect the programming code isn't set up to allow tracking of all previous owners of a plot and separate out which furnishings belonged to which previous owner. Without some sort of separating factor, any previous owner of a plot would be able to claim items still in storage that had belonged to that plot. Come back from your 8 month long break and - sorry, the guy who bought the plot a month after you left and let it demo 3 months later came back 5 weeks ago and claimed every item that had been in storage for that plot.

To at least give players a chance to reclaim the items they had placed in a house when they were the owner, SE sets a time limit less than the length of time it will take a house to demo. That way the Resident Caretaker will have a empty list of items for the plot before it can be demolished again. That's guesswork, of course, but it makes sense with what they've told us about how item data storage works.

Is it a great system? Of course not. Could they reprogram things to attach storage to the character instead of some other "container"? We don't know the limits of the code they're working with and how it might break other things in the game for them to attempt to change it. You can search google and find all sorts of fun developer stories about how seemingly small and innocuous changes related to one part of a game ended up severely breaking another part.