To start, I’m glad that your ship inventory follows you when you switch home ships. It would be a pain to have to transfer everything manually and end up with multiple ships housing forgotten inventory forcing you to search ship after ship in your fleet to find specific items. However, my primary ship is built out to have an armory with cool things I’ve found displayed in weapon cases, on racks, etc. When you switch your home-ship, everything is dumped in to main inventory on the new ship, and even if you switch back to your original ship, the items are again dumped in to the main inventory. Not only does this hamstring the coolness of being able to display gear on a ship, but it can screw you over if the display items put your total inventory overweight in main storage. Over the course of certain questlines, you need to switch ships for the story, or maybe you come across a ship you decide to “liberate”, or maybe it’s a ship is a quest reward, regardless, your inventories get jumbled up. It seems to me, that your items could be tagged by the game to indicate which storage they were in (main, captain’s, other, display) so that as they move from ship to ship they can be better located. Additionally, I think the game could save the state of your inventory items and when they go back to a ship you’ve already set up, they would default to where they were before. I guess we’ll have to see what the modders can do.
TLDR: Why would I take the time to display my items if it’s all going to get thrown in to main storage anytime I switch ships…?
I’ve put more thought into this and I hope how ship items/cargo is being handled was not intentional, or at least I hope they plan to work on it.
Changing the name of your ship or changing the color should not do anything with the items on/in the ship. That’s ridiculous.
When setting a new ship as your home ship, it should be optional to move the cargo over. It would be really nice to have checkboxes to move over certain categories; captain’s locker, weapons, spacesuits, resources, etc.
I realize things get tricker when you are changing ship modules and all the stray items in the rooms get put into the cargo hold. But the game already knows all the items and where they are in the ship. What if when we finalize changes to a ship the game goes through all the items in the ship, and if they are outside the ship (like if you delete a room entirely) it puts them in the cargo hold? If after the edits they are clipping inside a ship module, put them in the cargo hold. If they are floating in the air like when a door was added and the desk/bed/shelves/whatever they were on is no longer there, put them in the cargo hold. That is what would happen during a real ship outtfitting. Otherwise leave them be, let us decorate our ship like we want and leave the stuff alone.
I think a lot could be solved if there was one ‘crate’ in each location/ship, that was your ‘shared access storage’ for your outposts, ships, and ‘constellation apartment storage’ (that doesn’t connect to anything and is inconvenient to use). That way, all the other storage boxes, displays, random stuff laying around would be ship/location specific. If there ever was a conflict, it could default to shared storage and because there’s already a ‘new items’ inventory filter, you’d always know what was new in the storage.
That sounds good, and the Captain’s Locker would probably work well for that.