EverQuesting: EverQuest II is a packrat’s paradise

    
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While some consider the acquisition of stuff to be distracting to gameplay, others of us know that it is actually a vital part of of the experience. Everyone needs a friend who is a go-to for whatever you need, their bags bursting with everything you can imagine, from obscure stuff collected forever ago to bushels of crafting materials. And I am that friend.

Hi, I’m MJ — I am a packrat, and I am proud of it!

And with all the talk lately about hoarding, I’ve come to better appreciate just how nearly perfect EverQuest II is for someone like me. EQII is truly a packrat’s paradise! Here, you are free to stock up on all the essentials (and you can decide what is essential) and non-essentials alike. And all this without having to resort to any microtransactions! Sure, there are a couple things that would make it even better, but I hold this MMORPG up as a model of item management. If only more games aspired to this.

The blessing of bags and boxes

Let’s start with the basics: inventory storage. When you start your life in Norrath, you only have six slots to store your items. But each of those slots can hold a strong box or a bag, which increases your carrying capacity significantly. And the game is no slouch about granting players various storage containers as you level, including a pretty hefty one for your bank (where you discover you get 12 more personal slots and eight account slots, each begging for a big bag or box!).

In the beginning, weight was actually an issue, meaning that weaker characters, like mages, had to use the smaller leather bags on top of watch how much was put into them. That was no bueno. You had to manage your inventory more carefully back then. Thankfully for all packrats, weight was totally done away with, so now anyone could tote around the largest boxes possible.

So how big are these storage containers? The largest common strong box has 44 slots, and the rare has 48. In backpacks, the numbers are the same unless if you get your hands on the rare Rallic Pack recipe or bag, and then you get 96 slots! Two larger packs, Gardener’s Backpack with 64 and Naylie’s Nebulous Newsbag with 68 slots, are rewards in game. Folks with the collectors edition of Terrors of Thalumbra have the 88 slot Bag of Dirty Tricks. In a fun aside, some backpacks are actual skins you can show on your back, like the Tinkerer’s Thaumic Powered Backpack. All of these can be acquired in game. The Marketplace also sells vanity backpacks with 66 slots.

But wait — there are also specialty containers. Quivers and sacks go in the ammo slot to hold arrows and thrown weapons, respectively. There is the Frostfell Shopping Bag that holds 56 stacks of Frostfell-specific fuel and ingredients. And there are collection and harvesting-specific containers as well.

Bonus: Did you know you could increase your organizational skills with these regular bags and boxes? You are able to set specific sort options that determine what types of items funnel into which bag. You can also mark an entire bag as not for sale to prevent any accidental hocking of things you mean to keep. When you are a packrat, the more organizational tools at your disposal, the better.

Now, if you are in a guild, you also get tons of new slots in a separate guild bank for items (whether or not you can access these depends on the permissions the leader sets). However, you cannot use any containers here. The number of slots available depends on the rank of your guild. If you make your own guild with the help of a few friends, you essentially get a giant shared bank you can give all your alts and friends permission to use.

The Bank of Alts

Now, take all those slots we have described (minus the shared account ones) and all those bags and boxes, and multiply by how many alts you have! I am not ashamed to admit that I made a few bank alts just for their storage space. With the eight shared slots, it is easy enough to swap boxes full of items between characters. I had one alt for all the collectables, and one for legends & lore, and one for crafting materials, while others held gear, housing items, and other assorted items.

Home storage solutions

Stash it! One of the best additions to game ever were stashes. These depots came in both guild and personal options. This decoration is placed in your home and holds a set number of stacks of that particular category, with an infinite number (as far as I have yet to see!) in those stacks. The personal collectable depot holds 1,000 (which trust me, you need with all those shinies out there), while the Lore & Legend depot can hold 100. For personal use, there are in total:

  • collectibles
  • lore & legend
  • fuel
  • food and drink
  • ammo
  • harvests
  • poison, potion and totems
  • white adornments

Personal depots are crafted in game, but you can also buy some from the Marketplace if you don’t have the rares to make them or the coin to nab them off the broker.

And then you have the guild hall depots. Bought with guild status and coin, there is a regular and a large version of all the personal depots as well as an additional scroll depot. The regular harvesting depot holds 1,000 separate item types just like the personal, and the stack size is nigh unto infinite (99,999). Boy, oh boy does this clear out storage slots! It also has the added benefit of allowing guilds and individuals to set permissions on who can put stuff in and take stuff out, allowing you to supply folks with the stuff they need without having to be there to find it and give it to them!

Houses also provide another type of specialize storage in relation to trade: sales displays. Players can set items for sale from their house vault, but why waste that space? The specialty sales displays can be set in your house as a decoration and sell items right from there. You have display cases and salesman’s crates for anything as well as bag stands for storage needs, pantries for food and drink, potion cabinets for consumables, furniture shelves for decorating needs, armor and shield racks for gear, scroll stands for spells, jewelry boxes, and weapon racks. There is a sales display for everything!

Homes AS a storage solution

Besides your bank and inventory, you can also place bags and boxes in your home vault to store goodies (sadly, it is one combined vault accessed from any, not one per house!). This adds six more slots of storage. But that’s not where the real storage is. You see, you can have however many houses you like, on however many alts as you like. There was initially a 10-house limit, but that was abolished long ago. It is true that the rent-free prestige housing is bought from the store, but you can also buy property in the town and not worry about rent unless you need to get in since your homes will never disappear. Certain expansions also came with a free prestige house that is claimable on every single character. These can easily become decoration warehouses! I have more than one EverFrost Summer Home stacked high with various furniture, building block, pets, and other knickknacks.make all your alts admins and make a home or 10 your “dumping” grounds. Bonus: You can totally sort and organize items this way — as long as you remember which home you put what in!

Of course, there is a housing item limit, but that can be increased with item limit expanders that can be crafted in game as well as purchased on the Marketplace. (You can even craft expanders for the house vault!) The totally free way to circumvent your item limit is to pack items away in the house. If you pack something up, it goes into a moving crate you can set anywhere in the house. The benefit of this is you can cram an untold number of items in there and they will be listed in alphabetical order when you look through it to find what you need.

Non-physical storage

EverQuest II also gets it right when it comes to “storing” things without having to actually store them. Once you claim a pet, a mount, or a familiar, it is added to an element of your UI to call upon. You have pets in your abilities and mounts and familiars in their own tabs on your character page. This is such a huuuge blessing when you love to collect all the cute and cuddlies in the game. (Hey, don’t be judging me for calling my creepy crawlies cute.) Thankfully, mercenaries are also in  their own tab instead

This same principle applies to currencies; EQII has a special tab that stores currencies without having them clog your inventories. The game goes one awesome step further in making many of these coins account bound, so you can actually pick them up off that tab, put them in your shared bank, and then grab them up on another alt to use. Once in your inventory, you may need to click the stack to put them in your wallet.

The third, and an oh-so-necessary storage, is the new wardrobe system. Here you can drop in favorite outfits to be used in your appearance slots. Warning: Putting an item in wardrobe does indeed delete it and clear out your inventory, so be sure of what you drop in there; you might be pretty upset to lose a piece of really good gear!

As much as I had been wanting (and needing) a wardrobe feature, it unfortunately missed the mark a bit, especially considering how generous the game is with other storage options.

What EQII still needs

EQII may be a packrat’s paradise, but it isn’t perfect. One current aspect of storage definitely needs work; as much as I love a wardrobe system, this one was not implemented as well as it could have been. To start, the wardrobe is not free and cannot be obtained through in-game means. No, you either have to buy the Kunark Ascending expansion or individually purchase rows of slots from the Marketplace. And remember, there are 11 separate slots of gear to get! Even if extra slots must be bought, some should definitely be acquired through gameplay. I’d really like to see a melding of the systems in Secret World Legends and Lord of the Rings Online. Ideally it would take SWL’s unlimited storage and couple that with LOTRO’s ability to let your alts have access to all the items. As it is, both the unlocked slots and the items put in them are character specific!

I have to admit, I would also love to see a search feature like the one that exists for the inventory/bank/vault used for the housing. When I want to know where my 50 ice pillars are, I’d really love to be able to do a search and learn they are in Synnae’s EverFrost summer home. For this to be really successful, it should encompass all your alts. And while we are on the subject, increase the inventory/bank/vault search to include atls as well! That would be so much better than swapping between 20 characters to check. I’d even (temporarily) settle for the in-house housing interface having a search feature just so you can see what all is placed there; you might have to run around to find it, but at least you know it is in that house!

The EverQuest franchise is a vast realm, and sometimes MJ Guthrie gets lost in it all! Join her as she explores all the nooks and crannies from Antonica to Zek. Running biweekly on Thursdays, EverQuesting is your resource for all things EverQuest, EverQuest II, and Daybreak. And keep an eye out for MJ’s OPTV adventures!
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