TL;DR
A method to making items of different quality stack together for easier management and lower mental tension: use sub-menu to select stacked item quality.Problem
Quality mod is my most anticipated 2.0 feature, I was worried they won't stack since first FFF. Making them not stack together is a reasonable design because you don't want stacking them break their quality, but this arises a few problems:- Items of different quality take more slots;
- which gives the player more *unfun* management issues and mental tension.
- And many similar item icons just with different quality color will be an eye-sore.
Solution
1. Just let them stack together in one slot;2. then we have to deal with quality problems:
To keep different quality, just remember count of each quality in one stack, and show them separately when players click (or hover) on this slot: bring up one sub-menu to select specific quality.
This design has a comforting working example: Stardew Valley has items of four qualities, that don't stack and works similar of Factorio. A mod just named "Stack Quality" implements the above design and it works like a charm： https://www.curseforge.com/stardewvalle ... perimental
Note that this mod is for Stardew Valley 1.5, while now the default branch is 1.6.8.
As for using different quality: we already have one design to manage quality, by letting the player set quality requests.
This design can be used on more places like:
- set a hotbar slot level quality preference;
- let player use preference even when using inventory items, so that they don't need click on sub-menu every time.