Unless you've been keeping up with all of the discourse around Inflexion Games' Nightingale, you might have missed the glaring hole in the Fae Wild-bound Victorian era survival crafter's design. It's a feature that over 1,500 players have requested, with hundreds of comments to boot, and, no, I'm not talking about an offline mode.
While offline mode is certainly at the top of the devs' priority list for the moment, there's something else irking players enough that they've felt compelled to make their opinions known about it. So what's this absolutely necessary, hill-to-die-on feature request for Nightingale? The ability to craft from nearby chests.
It might sound inconsequential to anyone who isn't a survival game enthusiast like myself, but this is a quality-of-life feature that really makes all the difference when you've just spent two hours lugging resources around the map. It's important enough to Nightingale players that it has them up in arms on the game's feedback log.
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Why should we care so much about crafting from nearby chests?
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Picture this: You've battled with Nightingale's Recruit AI and somehow managed to bring heaps of building material back between the two of you. It took some time, but now you have the materials to expand your base, or finally get up that Enchanter's table you've been working towards. When you note the meagre size of the initial angling basket storage you're lumped with, the likelihood is you're going to have to scatter all that wood, fibre, stone and whatnot to the four corners of your settlement. When it comes to actually utilising those resources, however, it's going to take you forever to: A) Remember where you put the darn stuff, and B) Go around each separate container, dragging it all over to the blueprint you placed. That's not even counting the time spent sorting out the inevitable over-encumbrance issues you're bound to encounter.
While simply crafting larger storage chests and placing lots of different materials together would make for one solution to the problem, there's already a better option. One that any survival game worth its weight in sodium chloride should include in 2024, or at least have a mod for. Besides, for larger storage boxes you'd have to wait while you build up your gear score, unlock the first Antiquarian Site of Power, and then enter another realm so you can finally buy the blueprint. But who has time to actually play the main quest? I'm busy building an empire here.
Of course, implementing a craft from containers feature isn't going to be a simple task. There are a few hurdles the devs at Inflexion Games will have to overcome in order to get a feature like that just right. And at the end of the day, not everyone's going to be happy with the solution. There are so many options when it comes to implementing it. Will all chests in a certain proximity of your Estate Cairn be automatically be crafted from? Or is it worth having a toggle on each chest to allow or disallow the option?
"It's something survival games – even farming sims like (the appropriately thematic) Fae Farm – have been catching onto, and the reception has been great."
One player, known as scef, puts it well in the game feedback comments. They suggest that the ability to "set specific containers as being able to use remote crafting, or having remote crafting blocked, would satisfy all players. I wouldn't mind having to set a property every time I crafted a container that would 'lock' it, as long as I had the option to block crafting from containers somehow."
It's something survival games – even farming sims like (the appropriately thematic) Fae Farm – have been catching onto, and the reception has been great. And while Fae Farm doesn't give players the option to switch crafting from nearby containers off, there also aren't higher level resources that you could accidentally craft the same stuff with. So it's not as necessary as it is in a game like Nightingale.
Enshrouded goes a step further with an entirely different recipe for Magic Chests that allow the player to craft from only those containers, while keeping items stored in standard boxes safe. Similarly, there are container crafting mods for Valheim such as Craft Build Smelt Cook Fuel Pull From Containers (does what it says on the tin, I suppose), which "contains toggles for each type of chest as well as ship and wagon container". All very useful, but it's not a feature that comes with the base game.
So can we expect to be able to craft from nearby containers in Nightingale without mods some day? Yep. How the devs choose to implement it, we'll find out in due course. For now we can say that, as per the launch week highlights, Inflexion Games is working on it. And considering the number of upvotes the requests have, it does seem like a no-brainer.
It's something future survival game devs should keep in mind, lest their patrons be yoked with the sisyphean task of perpetually jaunting hither and thither – sorry. This is all Puck's doing.
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