Item space suggestion for Retainers

[PretzJG]

This also doesn't include Fish, Spare Gear, or Miscellany items. I still have a lot of mats to make from other mats and could just keep them in the base forms, like keeping all my Cloth mats in just Yarn instead of in both Yarn and Undyed Cloth. I was just looking at it in the form of trying to find a way that a player could work for the space instead of having to pay real money for it. Still also yes I know I'll end up filling this all up including my chocobo bag by the end of it just so I don't have to go farm anything or port around to different vendors. Also with how the MB prices can go on things I'd rather just have a nice stockpile like a good merchant would instead of hoping to catch it cheap on MB, cause someone could always price hike it if they wanted to.

[Vhailor]

Ok here's where I'm sitting at, with 7 total Retainers, to show why I'm worried with space. Now yes I know a lot of people are just saying, "sell what you don't use much, or what you can get at a vendor." The Vendor stuff I can see, but I still like having it on hand so I can just Search Item and know exactly how many I got and where. But here's my breakdown of stuff:

Retainer 1: Ingredients, 140/175
Retainer 2: Stone/Metal, 158/175
Retainer 3: Wood/Lumber, 40/175
Retainer 4: Leather/Bone, 82/175
Retainer 5: Cloth, 38/175
Retainer 6: Reagents, 109/175
Retainer 7: Materia/Dye/Gardening 50/175

Now yes I have plenty of space when you just look at the base numbers, however I have yet to get hardly any of the lvl 50 ARR items, and still have to go into Heavensward and Stormblood content.

You're holding onto way too much stuff. Get rid of / sell anything you can easily get back (i.e. anything at all Gathered that doesn't come from a timed node; anything farmed from open-world monsters; anything available from a vendor) that you aren't planning on using over the next couple of days / for the next round of recipes.

Hanging onto cheap / easily reacquired crafting materials or ingredients is the difference between a crafter with plenty of inventory space, and one needing tons of Retainers.

[Vstarstruck]

Ok here's where I'm sitting at, with 7 total Retainers, to show why I'm worried with space. Now yes I know a lot of people are just saying, "sell what you don't use much, or what you can get at a vendor." The Vendor stuff I can see, but I still like having it on hand so I can just Search Item and know exactly how many I got and where. But here's my breakdown of stuff:

Retainer 1: Ingredients, 140/175
Retainer 2: Stone/Metal, 158/175
Retainer 3: Wood/Lumber, 40/175
Retainer 4: Leather/Bone, 82/175
Retainer 5: Cloth, 38/175
Retainer 6: Reagents, 109/175
Retainer 7: Materia/Dye/Gardening 50/175

Now yes I have plenty of space when you just look at the base numbers, however I have yet to get hardly any of the lvl 50 ARR items, and still have to go into Heavensward and Stormblood content.

There is only like 10? dyes you really need to hang on to, assuming you use those colors. Everything else (npc dyes , crafting) just get rid of them, all retainer 7 should be able go in 6 at the very least.

Put cloth and leather together as they overlap a lot, depending how much trimming the fat you can do, combine lumber here too, since there is leather that does use logs. Never hold on npc bought mats and the like.

So just from that easy letting go of 2 (maybe 3) retainers.

ores/ metal/ ingredients do suck though, I wish SE would narrow down how much items you need for those.

Super heavy item space use does not come from crafting alone, but those that craft and really heavy into glams, even with the dresser of 200 items, does not help much when there is only 10 plates.

[KisaiTenshi]

Retainers have classes that level up when you send them out on Ventures. So since they can level up let's add in where you get a permanent 5 spaces per every 10 levels a Retainer gets in any class.

That's a non-starter primarily because you can reset the retainer, and they can only have one job.

It would be far simpler to get rid of the NQ/HQ distinction in the first place. However that would require an overhaul of how crafting and gathering work, so I don't think it would happen.

A lot of "space issues" in the game are a result of not wanting to lose data, so it's frequently synced to disk.

Like the quickest solution for the retainers is to actually give them separate "gear" and "materials" inventory. Where the crafting inventory can be accessed whenever you are crafting in-city or in your house, but not on the field. (eg you "summon retainer to my location") and they stand there while you do crafting, and you have access to their crafting inventory while they are there. You could even theoretically summon all of them. The gear inventory would work as per usual and be the same size as the players inventory. The crafting inventory would list every crafting item available in the game, and what quantities you have of them. It would also list the "current best marketboard price" and allow the retainer to either sell the items, or buy them without searching the marketboard. While your retainer is summoned, they aren't registered on the market board to sell. They would still be limited to 20 items, but they could be told to only sell from the crafting materials in stacks of X. To keep an incentive to have more than one retainer, there could be a "total item" (eg all items from all stacks) maximum of 10,000 (basically 10 stacks of 999 and one stack of 10), so you could have 5000 logs and 5000 ores if you wanted to. Which would also keep the potential for data loss down.

But really the problem is data loss, and incentives (have you ever had a "unable to access marketplace at this time" or similar sounding errors), there clearly is issues with the "market" part itself, but the inventory doesn't have to change unless they are summoned, and therefor doesn't need to be any larger than the player inventory. I don't know what the underlying issue is, but it's likely why you have to manually place stacks of sizes you want to sell instead of just having it "sell in stacks of X until all gone"