Item Auto-Sorting

I do love contradictory titles.

My build cycle came around last weekend. The first since Incarna 1.1 was released.

Since this is the only real time I pay much attention to the arrangement of the items in my cargo hold, I hadn’t noticed a small change that came with this patch. Lets take a look at a couple of images.

Nicely arranged items

Doesn’t look like much does it?

Imagine for a moment that each item from an Antimatter Reactor Unit to trusty old Zydrine is arranged in alphabetical order. You carefully copy and paste the values for each item in order for each factory until your freighter is full of building blocks for whatever-the-hell you are building. Now imagine that you have about 10 different sets – one set for each notional POS factory – and you know that each set ends with Zydrine in the cargo hold, so you can quickly select everything for each factory and drop everything in just as swiftly.

And then you undock.

Items alphabetically rearranged without warning

Oh how handy, its re-arranged everything alphabetically for me!

So which item stack goes in which factory? Damned if I know. I have to cross-reference every cell to make sure its in the right place.

See? Annoyance.

In future of course, I’ll just drag everything out there and split the stacks at the POS, so its not a major thing.

I had a quick look at the 1.1 patch notes and couldn’t find anything about this fix. Is it a bug or a small fixer-upper from Team BFF?

I also had a quick loo at the 1.1.1 patch notes for tomorrow and didn’t see any mention of it being fixed or any mention of it at all actually.

This isn’t really a bittervet post. I’m not going to rage-anything over it; its just… annoying.

So, can anyone think of an instance where this would be a useful thing to have? Because I’m struggling to think of one.

Comments for this Post

5 thoughts on “Item Auto-Sorting”

  1. Joe Smith
    13th Sep '11 at 2:50 am

    Incarna 1.0 gave us this little gem, “Inventory windows will now re-apply the user’s preferred sorting method after executing a “Stack All” command.”  Ever since then, pretty much anytime items are moved around they automatically resort themselves instead of staying in the order you left them.  I’ve found it massively annoying myself…glad to see I wasn’t the only one.

    • 13th Sep '11 at 6:44 am

      Ah, 1.0 did it. I’m sure I would have noticed in my July and August builds… Unless I did something different then for some reason.

      All I know is this month was the first time I encountered it. Though that said, I do recall seeing items re-sort upon stacking. I just wish it didn’t do it with every session change.

    • 13th Sep '11 at 5:20 pm

      I was thinking about this on the way back from work. -after- executing a “Stack All” command. Chances are I only stacked stuff recently then, and before that it was just using the old behaviour.

      Curses!

  2. 13th Sep '11 at 8:22 am

    In the meantime you can you gsc’s to seperate everything out. Atleast you can drag and drop items straight onto the can. We can thank incarna for that one also.

    • 13th Sep '11 at 5:18 pm

      Alas, containers are no good on freighters, because you can’t open them when you’re undocked. 🙁

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