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[Valguris]

Problem: It feels cheap to be able to just drop the storage item under your feet and gain all the energy/matter immediately. Also, forgetting to pick it up later is annoying.

Some ideas included getting the resources over time at some rate, e.g., extract energy at a rate equal to your power generation or perhaps at a rate depending on the battery used.
Another idea was to disallow extracting resources from storage on the ground and forcing you to equip the part. However, swapping the part in doesn't seem less cheesy than just dropping it on the ground and extracting all the resources immediately.
Why don't we explore the other direction: making energy/matter storage inventory type items (instead of utilities), so they increase your energy/matter capacity as long as they are in your inventory. This is pretty much how people are using them currently, but without that weird "drop it on the ground" part. Maybe they'd need to be nerfed a little, to compensate for, uhh, time savings from not requiring to drop them. (I imagine part of the reason why nobody has 3+ of those in their inventory is because it feels so cheap to use them from the inventory. Once it is fully embraced that they work from inventory, I'll bet people will use them a lot more. I expect nerfs to capacities will be necessary.)

Do you have other ideas to solve said problem? Or are there other problems with those items that could use some solving, too?

[Kyzrati]

Yeah we discussed this topic a lot on Discord, many times, as well as a lot in the Beta 11 overhaul thread, but there aren't really any good solutions, so it hasn't changed yet and no other changes are currently slated.

The biggest recent change that did happen was to nerf their capacity, because the base numbers were very high due to being set way back in 2012 for the 7DRL and then simply never being updated despite the rest of the game changing

That alone I think makes it a lot more reasonable. Were you aware of this change? Like energy capacity got nerfed big. Matter capacity currently remains the same, since the numbers were lower anyway and you can't fill it nearly as easily as energy.

Already a bunch of suggestions have been made, but every approach has its drawbacks, and nothing has come out as clearly superior, so unless someone has some great idea that others can't poke a bunch of holes in, it's probably staying the same.

The unique characteristics of the current method are just side effects of the other mechanics combined with wanting to allow people to conveniently store some resources for more flexible builds and situational potential, not really avoidable without also taking away other benefits, or adding other wierdness. (Note we've also already had a time when you could not extract from the ground, or even keep resources stored in inventory, and you had to keep the part attached.)

I will say right off the bat that items working from inventory is not a thing, and will never be a thing. It violates a very fundamental Cogmind design principle and leads to all kinds of other issues.

But anyone feel free to add more proposals for consideration

[Kyzrati]

That alone I think makes it a lot more reasonable. Were you aware of this change? Like energy capacity got nerfed big. Matter capacity currently remains the same, since the numbers were lower anyway and you can't fill it nearly as easily as energy.

To this I should add that I think the biggest issue was that it wasn't balanced before (like a number of things which are now being addressed in Beta 11), but is a lot more so now due to the number changes and especially in the context of having hard inventory size caps due to <no_stack> storage. Whereas earlier it might've been a no-brainer to pack a bunch of extra energy wells for swapping, now you will have to weigh the importance of that more directly against the other uses for your valuable inventory slots, and as a result only so much extra energy will be available to you.

(The whole dropping thing as one way to access it is just a side effect of being allowed to store energy in inventory, which I think is fine overall. Number balance was the main problem.)

[Xii]

Why don't we explore the other direction: making energy/matter storage inventory type items (instead of utilities), so they increase your energy/matter capacity as long as they are in your inventory. This is pretty much how people are using them currently, but without that weird "drop it on the ground" part.

I like that. It doesn't actually change much, just makes it less tedious and prone to silly mistakes. ("oh whoops there already was an item underneath me").

[Kyzrati]

It changes more than it seems to on the surface, because it's a fundamental shift in the game mechanics to be allowed to use items directly from your inventory without attaching anything, and that's not a road I want to go down here. There are other tactical side effects of the current behavior which I don't think are all that undesirable from a balance POV, and after the Beta 11 rebalance so far it's already much less of an issue, something which I don't see needing any further adjustments.