Team Droid: Inventory Management

Wednesday, 27th December 2023

This is a rather grandiose term for robots that have at the most one inventory slot. But sometimes isn't not possible to pick up or put down items when you need to. And there are tips to help with this.

The most obvious tip is to choose Carrier as your robot. This means that you can always pick up an item if your inventory is empty. It still leaves you with the difficulty of putting the item down again if the Drop Item action isn't available right now. There is one game mechanic and one strategy that, when used together, can help with this.

The game mechanic is the robots' Sokoban-like ability to push a single item that is in front of them with the Step Forward or Sprint action. Multibot has no inventory, so this is Multibot's only way of moving items around. Other robots can push items if the Pick Up action is unavailable; sometimes a valid strategy is to push the item for several turns until the Pick Up Item action becomes available.

Timing comes to the fore with the Drop Item action, which appears in no robot's ROM. All robots have to wait for this action to become available to drop an item from their inventory. But let's say you're carrying a Data Card to the Card Reader, and the Drop Item action is available. But it's low down in the available actions list, and it probably won't be there by the time you reach the Card Reader. What do you do? The best answer is to drop the item now, or at the last available moment, and push it the rest of the way.

Sometimes items are intended to be pushed or even shot. Crates that appear to have no other purpose than to get in the way can be dealt with this way. In the next post I'll talk about the guards.