History Main / GridInventory

* While most items in ''VideoGame/DanballSenki'' use a traditional menu-style inventory, each [=LBX=] has its own Core Unit that houses things like CPU's, motors, and batteries. Its grid starts off relatively small, but expands at certain character levels.

* The first ''VideoGame/DeusEx'' game has this (although ammo was mysteriously stored elsewhere), while the second switched to a list inventory. A bug in the first game allows one to exploit a glitch and stack inventory items on top of each other.

* The first ''VideoGame/DeusEx'' game (although ammo was mysteriously stored elsewhere), the second switched to a list inventory. A bug in the first game allows one to exploit a glitch and stack inventory items on top of each other.

* The inventory in the ''VideoGame/{{Geneforge}}'' series has a set weight limit, dependent on the Strength stat, beyond which you become encumbered and start losing action points per turn. Earlier games in the series had backpack items count towards the limit too.

* The VideoGame/MegaManBattleNetwork series features something similar with the Navi Customizer. While not literally an "inventory," the Navi Customizer offers power-ups for Megaman such as increased HP. The catch is that each power-up takes up a certain number of slots on a grid, and if the grid overflows, Megaman starts to glitch out.

* The ''VideoGame/NeverwinterNights'' and ''VideoGame/NeverwinterNights2'' series have both a grid system ''and'' a weight system, although in ''NWN 2'' you almost never run out of grid space. They don't have a size limit, so as long as you can carry items to the weight of ten full-plate suits of armour, you can carry ten full-plate suits of armour, even though any one of these is almost as big as you. And ''NWN 2'' does have a defragmenting button (?Arrange Inventory?). The key difference between both games is that ''VideoGame/NeverwinterNights'' takes different sizes into account: An armor set requires much more space then a potion although you are still given enough grid space to carry around several sets of full plate armor. In ''VideoGame/NeverwinterNights2'', every single item takes up exactly one space on the grid and containers such as bags can hold an absurd amount of items, rendering the GridInventory fairly pointless.

* ''VideoGame/{{Chrome}}'' is not a RolePlayingGame combo, it's not a stealth game, it doesn't require particularly smart tactics. It's just a FirstPersonShooter. So it wouldn't make sense for it to have a GridInventory, right? Well, tell it to the game designers. It's even worse than usual, too, because the inventory is not one large rectangle - it's a medium rectangle, two small ones and a square (or thereabouts). This makes it virtually impossible to carry anything more than two weapons (and even that becomes a problem if you have to wield a rocket launcher) and some ammo.

* ''VideoGame/Subnautica'' features an automatically-organized grid inventory. There's no stacking of items, which makes inventory management an important part of your strategy, even with the larger-than-average grid.

* Subnautica features an automatically-organized grid inventory. There's no stacking of items, which makes inventory management an important part of your strategy, even with the larger-than-average grid.

** The ''VideoGame/BattleTech'' turn based tactical game by Harebrained Schemes features a three-level arrangement similar to ''Mechwarrior Online''. Equipment on a 'Mech is limited by the slot type (split between energy, ballistic, missile, and anti-personnel), the size (ranging from small 1-slot gear to enormous 4-slot equipment) and weight limit (as low as .5 tons for things like small lasers all the way up to the whopping 14-ton [[{{BFG}}} AC/20]]). For instance, this keeps Locusts from carrying ballistic weapons as they're just too heavy for it. It prevents players from stuffing 12 lasers onto an Atlas along with lots of heat sinks and just trying to cheese their way through the combat.

** ''VideoGame/DragonQuestVIII'' was developed for Creator/SquareEnix by Level-5, and also features a grid inventory.

* ''VideoGame/EVEOnline'' has a grid system. A display option is for inventory items to show icons in a grid pattern of the same size. However, Each item has an m^3 associated with it. So your ship can only hold so much.

* The ''TabletopGame/BattleTech'' boardgame (as well as its computer equivalent, ''MechWarrior''), did this for 'Mech construction and outfitting. Each part of your 'Mech's chassis had a finite number of slots that you could plug stuff into, each item taking up a varying number of slots. Being that this included weapons, armor, heatsinks (to keep the 'Mech running in battle), sensors, etc. this made fitting out a 'Mech [[strike:almost]] a minigame in itself. Where you put things actually mattered in combat, as different areas have different armor, and all of it is tracked. If you put all your guns in your arms, and that arm gets blown off, no more guns.

* ''7.62 High Caliber'' uses a grid inventory, but divides it between various carrying methods. All characters have 8 inventory slots (divided into two four-slot pockets) on their clothing no matter what uniform they wear, while various backpacks, tactical vests, and belts provide slots of different size and configuration; all carrying equipment uses bold lines to divide inventory slots and represent smaller spaces, so a particular backpack may eschew a large central space for more small pockets suitable for holding a single rifle magazine or grenade. Only the character's main pockets, tactical vest, and belt can have their items accessed without going into the inventory screen; an important part of preparing for combat is loading your ready pockets with magazines, first aid kits, spare ammo boxes, grenades, and other important items so you don't have to go scrounging through your backpack. It also subverts the usual caveat that weight doesn't matter, and even includes gradual slowdown over a certain load.\\
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The one downside to the method in terms of realism is that items cannot be rotated; a pouch with two horizontal slots will fit a first aid kit or cleaning kit perfectly (as it's a horizontal item that takes up two slots), but a vertical two-slot pouch can't fit it at all. The very popular Blue Sun mod was unable to code rotation into the inventory, so they tried to compensate by making copies of a handful of items (like first aid kits and cleaning kits) that were vertical rather than horizontal. It ends up creating an even odder situation where you may have a choice of only horizontal cleaning kits and no horizontal slots to fit them!

* ''VideoGame/DeusExHumanRevolution'' brings back the grid inventory, and even allows you to upgrade inventory space, but now makes ammo take up space. The game will automatically reposition items for the best fit, though.

* There is a tongue-in-cheek Flash game with this as the primary element - you play as the put-upon squire to a larger-than-life adventurer knight, and have to play inventory Tetris with the loot from his adventuring to equip him for the fight with the MonsterOfTheWeek.

[[quoteright:350:[[VideoGame/DeusExHumanRevolution http://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/rsz_deus_ex_human_revolution_inventory.png]]]]

** The first ''VideoGame/DeusEx'' game (although ammo was mysteriously stored elsewhere), the second switched to a list inventory. A bug in the first game allows one to exploit a glitch and stack inventory items on top of each other.
*** ''VideoGame/DeusExHumanRevolution'' brings back the grid inventory, and even allows you to upgrade inventory space, but now makes ammo take up space. The game will automatically reposition items for the best fit, though.
* The ''VideoGame/{{Diablo}}'' series. The first also had the rather painful restriction that ''gold'' (in stacks of up to 5,000, though double this with the right and otherwise useless amulet in the unofficial expansion pack) took up precious inventory space. Few items were actually worth more than their gold worth, which made them that much more precious.
** And its {{Spiritual Successor}}s ''Mythos'' and ''VideoGame/HellgateLondon''.
** In ''VideoGame/{{Mabinogi}}'', gold only stacks up to 1,000 per square. However, there are items called Gold Bags which occupy four squares each, and can hold up to 50,000 gold each. Also, your bank account can hold up to six million gold per character, and any of the characters can access it (useful for kitting out a new character with no money of their own).

* ''VideoGame/ResidentEvil4'' included a version of this trope. Not only did it include it for just about every item you could acquire (including the special final-boss-ass-kicking-gun), but you were able to purchase new cases of increased size. Now, how a rocket launcher takes up as much space as a few handguns is a WHOLE other issue...
** It at least granted the player the mercy of being able to rotate items. A 1x2 item could fit in a 2x1 slot with a single rotation, whereas other games (notoriously, ''Diablo'' and its successors, as mentioned above) provided no such option.
** Another great thing about the ''Resident Evil 4'' inventory grid is that while organizing one's inventory, a separate grid would appear to the side for you to temporarily store tiny items while you rearranged the more cumbersome ones, instead of forcing you to move everything around with what little free space was available.
** By the end of the game, it was trivially easy to store a handgun, a shotgun, a rifle, a submachine gun, a rocket launcher, a mine thrower, ''and'' a revolver. It almost qualifies as HammerSpace. That's one ''hell'' of an attache case.
** ''VideoGame/ResidentEvil5'' has an irritating variation on this which was one of [[WebAnimation/ZeroPunctuation Yahtzee's]] complaints about the game. All items were shrunk to a single grid square (unrealistic, but good), but you only had 9 squares (unrealistic and BAD). Basically, it didn't matter what items you were carrying; you could only carry nine items...or types of items: some objects stack together into one inventory space while others don't, so in ''Resident Evil 5'', 81 incendiary grenades take up as much room as 9 smallish herbs.
*** Worst of all? There are two vests that provide you with more health (melee and bulletproof), each of them taking up a space.
*** Although there's a positive trait for it: one can exploit the inventory for speed reloading, you'll need it for weapons with slow reloading speed, such as Hydra shotgun and Smith & Wesson M500 magnum revolver.

* ''VideoGame/ArcanumOfSteamworksAndMagickObscura'' does this with both weight and space, but you never really seem to run out - until you have to haul buttloads of treasure back. That's why God invented party members. Also, it features a defragment button which neatly tidies your inventory.
** There's also something of a cheat: in order to assign an object to a hotkey, you need to place it in one of the ten slots at the bottom of the screen, thus removing it from the grid. These slots ignore the dimensions of the item, and you can assign any item to them, which means that you can save a lot of space by assigning armor and weapons to them.
* The ''VideoGame/NeverwinterNights'' and ''VideoGame/NeverwinterNights2'' series have both a grid system ''and'' a weight system, although in ''NWN 2'' you almost never run out of grid space. They don't have a size limit, though, so, as long as you can carry items to the weight of ten full-plate suits of armour, you can carry ten full-plate suits of armour, even though any one of these is almost as big as you. And ''NWN 2'' does have a defragmenting button (?Arrange Inventory?). Ha!
** The key difference between both games is that ''VideoGame/NeverwinterNights'' takes different sizes into account: An armor set requires much more space then a potion although you are still given enough grid space to carry around several sets of full plate armor. In ''VideoGame/NeverwinterNights2'', every single item takes up exactly on space on the grid and containers such as bags can hold an absurd amount of items, rendering the GridInventory fairly pointless.
* The ''{{VideoGame/XCOM}}'' games made heavy use of this, even giving the characters separate grids for each body location (and separate Time Unit costs to move things from place to place).
** Most slots were never used. A gun in hand, ammo and grenades on the belt, and ''maybe'' an additional gun and ammo in the backpack. That still left shoulder and leg spots available, but, considering the fact that there was nothing useful to put there, ''and'' the fact that the weight of equipment is an important factor in how far your soldiers can move, they were almost always left blank.
*** However, it's marginally faster to move grenades (and high explosive) to the hands from the shoulders, rather than the default belt slot.
*** The [[VideoGame/XCOMEnemyUnknown 2012 remake]] does away with inventory entirely, letting you choose a main weapon, backup weapon, armor and supplementary equipment. However, they do give a shout-out to the original game, as changing your weapon from bullet to laser to plasma will change the soldier's shoulder pads and knee pads to accommodate the ammunition of the weapon.
*** SpiritualSuccessor series ''UFO'' does much the same thing. Starting with the second game ''Aftershock'', certain units had larger or smaller inventory grids (humans had the largest, with cyborgs slightly smaller and psychics the smallest). In the third game, ''Afterlight'', the type of environmental suit worn by the soldier determines the carrying capacity, with more protective armors resulting in smaller inventory grids (usually).

* Many games fail to account for different sized objects properly. In ''VideoGame/{{Diablo}}'', six sheets of paper take up as much space as a breastplate. ''VideoGame/BaldursGate'' is even worse, since all items take up the same amount of space, a character with maximum strength could carry sixteen suits of full plate, but they still couldn't hold more than sixteen pearls (unless you get a jewel bag, ''good luck finding one''.)
** Most mods, particularly mods developed by one of the ''game designers'' fix this by allowing identical items to be stacked. Additional mods (of even the same ones) can allow items to be stacked infinitely, making the game ''much'' less annoying for inventory management.

* The furniture in the ''VideoGame/AnimalCrossing'' series turns into leaves for easy transportation when picked up, so every item from a tissue box to a UFO will fit equally in your inventory. Furniture can also fall out of shaken trees as leaves and fall down slowly just as a leaf would no matter what it is.
** Possibly justified by the fact that the furniture is from a {{tanuki}}, a creature that, in Japanese mythology, can create illusions with leaves, and, in some variations, magically transform the leaves into real objects. In other words, [[AWizardDidIt a tanuki did it]].

* ''VideoGame/DeadSpace'' and ''VideoGame/DeadSpace2'' have a simple system of inventory with most things taking up on square but ammo and stasis refills stack. Weapons have their only separate section, as do plot items. Getting better suits increases you storage space.
** Though in ''VideoGame/DeadSpace2'' weapons go int the same inventory as the rest of the items, and only take up one space like everything else.

* ''7.62 High Caliber'' uses a grid inventory, but divides it between various carrying methods. All characters have 8 inventory slots (divided into two four-slot pockets) on their clothing no matter what uniform they wear, while various backpacks, tactical vests, and belts provide slots of different size and configuration; all carrying equipment uses bold lines to divide inventory slots and represent smaller spaces, so a particular backpack may eschew a large central space for more small pockets suitable for holding a single rifle magazine or grenade. Only the character's main pockets, tactical vest, and belt can have their items accessed without going into the inventory screen; an important part of preparing for combat is loading your ready pockets with magazines, first aid kits, spare ammo boxes, grenades, and other important items so you don't have to go scrounging through your backpack. It also subverts the usual caveat that weight doesn't matter, and even includes gradual slowdown over a certain load.
** The one downside to the method in terms of realism is that items cannot be rotated; a pouch with two horizontal slots will fit a first aid kit or cleaning kit perfectly (as it's a horizontal item that takes up two slots), but a vertical two-slot pouch can't fit it at all. The very popular Blue Sun mod was unable to code rotation into the inventory, so they tried to compensate by making copies of a handful of items (like first aid kits and cleaning kits) that were vertical rather than horizontal. It ends up creating an even odder situation where you may have a choice of only horizontal cleaning kits and no horizontal slots to fit them!

[[quoteright:256:[[VideoGame/KingdomHearts358DaysOver2 http://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/DS_KingdomHearts358_01_4424.jpg]]]]

* The ''{{X-COM}}'' games made heavy use of this, even giving the characters separate grids for each body location (and separate Time Unit costs to move things from place to place).

*** The 2012 remake does away with inventory entirely, letting you choose a main weapon, backup weapon, armor and supplementary equipment. However, they do give a shout-out to the original game, as changing your weapon from bullet to laser to plasma will change the soldier's shoulder pads and knee pads to accommodate the ammunition of the weapon.

** Although the strategy game ''MechCommander'' only had weight restrictions for adding weapons and components, the sequel played this completely straight- each 'Mech had a grid inventory the represented both size and weight of the weapons added, as well as extra armour and heatsinks (the other limit on components) This system was used somewhat creatively, however, since smaller 'Mechs could have a lot of space but the grid would be made tall and narrow, preventing the addition of heavy weapons.

* The CarWars like boardgame ''Battlecars'' used this. Each car had several weapon bays, usually 2x4 squares. You could carry 8 volleys of machinegun ammo (1x1), four 1x2 artillery shells, or two 1x4 missiles, of increasing power, mixing and matching as you wish.

** ''[=MechWarrior=] 4: Vengeance'', ''Black Knight'' and ''Mercenaries'' featured a more reasonable system in which each 'mech had specific hardpoints for weapons to be mounted and a limited number of slots on those points along with weight restrictions, some 'mechs had gray omni-points denoting any weapon could be mounted. The [=MekTek=] pack introduced 'mechs with ammo consuming (ballistic and/or energy), heat generating (energy and/or missiles) and direct fire (energy and/or ballistic) points.