Inventory Debate

[BuszmoPL]

I wanna hear your opinion on which inventory revamp mod is is the best.

Vote on de poll, feel free to discuss in the comment section

[Sheriff_U3]

The top one for me is I3, it's interface is simple and easy to use, it's gui is modern, and has some nice features built-in.
I don't care for unified inventory for a few reasons, one is all the clutter it has, it's gui also seems a bit out of date.
sfinv is just that, simple and fast, it's gui is very basic, but I pefer it over unified any day because it doesn't have the clutter.
Smart inventory, a bit wierd in many aspects, but at least brings some new idea's with switching inventory rows, but it's gui is cluttered and not as modern as I3, plus it lacks small screen support.

[Linuxdirk]

I mostly play modded Minetest Game games so sfinv it is for me, sometimes Unified Inventory or some variant of those two. For my own mods I usually create formspecs as needed. Some are inventories, some are not.

For developing and testing mods in Void I use Void Inventory. For everything else I’m fine with the engine inventory (because the mods do not need inventory interaction).

[Skamiz Kazzarch]

I don't really care for the "modern" look of `unified_inventory` and `i3` and think both are bundled with too many 'features'. Also `i3`'s craft grid being in a scroll_container is supper annoying since it interferes with some quick item manipulation methods.
Never played with `smart_inventory`.
That leaves `sfinv`, which I consider basically ok. With the one caveat that it's stuck in formspec version 1, which is especially aggravating when I write a mod that extends it in some form and must choose between having pixel perfect control over element alignment or having consistency with the rest of the inventory.

[TenPlus1]

@Skamiz Kazzarch - I prefer sfinv as well but wish it had additional functionality like unified_inventory for custom recipes and the addition of page buttons along with it's default tabs.

[MXB]

UI+ all the way. From a player's POV it actually _helps_ you play. The others slow you down. i3 was my first fave but after I found UI+ I switched and never looked back. Sadly i3 has some nasty bugs (autocrafting destroys buckets, etc.) and the extra wide and sorting "features" turn out to be pretty useless. sfinv is so crude and primitive that I actually thought it was the built in default, surprised to see it listed as a "upgrade" mod over what I can only imagine is a horror default seeing as how simple and lacking in features sfinv is. Trust me a server actually using sfinv has to be damn great to keep me playing (and several are... dreaming of them upgrading to UI+... sigh).

[bgstack15]

I tend to play Mineclonia, and their default inventory screen is already pretty fully-featured.

When I did play Minetest Game, I tried i3 and thought it was fine. I haven' tried any of the others, and I don't even recognize some of these names. Perhaps you could write a long post describing each one, with links to ContentDB/forum posts for each one.

[Astrobe]

Sfinv for minimalism-oriented games with some leeway for unexpected extensions. The mod-programmable tabs proved themselves useful for more things than 3D Armor integration.

[ShallowDweller]

Short answer: none.
All of them have their pros and cons when it comes to looks and function.

Long answer:

Spoiler

When playing Minetest-based games, I end up falling back to Unified Inventory + Unified Inventory Plus (UI+) all the time, despite prefering the other revamp mods' interface for multiple reasons. My latest experience with Minetest-based games was on Luanti 5.11.0 (I'm using 5.15.1 now, but been mostly playing MineClonia or doing non-Luanti things in recent times), so I apologize in advance if the complaints I'm voicing have been fixed since.

Back in the day (5.0.0 and many later versions), you couldn't shift-click to bulk-craft. The only way to quickly input multiple of a recipe in the crafting grid was with Unified Inventory and the only way to retrieve all the items in a single click (instead of having to set up a 90-click macro for that) was with UI+. Spam-clicking could get old fast when crafting torches for spelunking (specially after they increased ore depth without bothering with adding anything interesting for the player to see or any forms of vertical mobility in the 2 km way to the ores) or setting up a base or automated system without using creative mode. I think the bulk-crafting issue was solved by now (I could be remembering wrong, but i think I could bulk-craft with shift+click on 5.11.0), but then...

... The other inventories' crafting guides make it a pain to view which items belong to a given group when the recipe calls for a group instead of a specific item. There is a guide mod I tried to use to remedy that once, but I had to toggle the mod all the time because of other recipe viewing issues (if I recall correctly, I couldn't view reverse recipes or something with that mod enabled, nor which items belonged to a given group with it disabled in the Asuna game). This problem didn't exist with Unified Inventory. I could view what recipes an item was used for, what other recipes could be used for obtaining a given item (as well as non-crafting ways to obtain the item (mining), something I can't remember seeing in other inventory mods) AND if a recipe called for a group instead of a specific item, I could view which items belonged in the group in case I wanted to bulk-farm OR get rid of that one bunch of useless items I had only 1~4 of each to clean up chest space.

And at last, but not least, Unified Inventory came with fairly cheap upgradeable bags and 4 (or 5?) dedicated slots to equip them before any other inventory mods started doing that, which was great if you wanted to go nomad instead of setting a base up or if you had multiple bases and didn't want to go back an forth for crafting materials all the time.

I wanted to move to other inventory interfaces BADLY, but UI+'s functionality spoke way louder than any good looks the other revamp mods and I was stuck with the most functional, least-favorite looking one. And you know what is the worst part? Unified Inventory's super cluttered interface was the best for creative mode, so I couldn't even switch to a better looking interface when I didn't need the survival mode functionality.

TL;DR: I wish UI+ could be used with Smart Inventory or any of the other inventory revamp mods and that they had the same ease of access to information as Unified Inventory.