Hime Inventory System

Hime Inventory System is a plugin that will greatly change the way inventories are handled in RPG Maker, and will also make it easier to create new plugins based on inventories.

What is an Inventory

In RPG Maker, an inventory is a collection of items, weapons, armors, and currency such as gold. An inventory could hold a lot more things as well, but for starters we'll have these basics.

Who owns the inventory?

By default, RPG Maker offers you a "Party" inventory. That is, a shared inventory that all party members can access. When you gain or lose item or gold, it's added to the shared party inventory. When you're in battle, everyone uses the same set of items.

How can this be improved?

The first thing that we want to do is to separate the inventory from the party. Once we do that, we can start doing a lot of new things

1. Assign independent inventories to actors. Instead of a shared inventory, every actor keeps track of their own.

2. Implement inventory management functionality. For example, maybe you want to have inventory limits like you can only carry 100 items, or up to 50 weight.

3. Swap inventories quickly. Let's say you wanted to enter an "arena battle" and you only get to use some preset items. You can quickly "store" your inventory somewhere for the battle, and then just give it back afterwards with a single script call.

4. Create inventories for shops. A shop is more than an inventory, but the items that it has for sale can be tracked in an inventory. With a unique shop inventory, you can now implement features such as "limited shop stock", restocking, selling items to shops and buying them back later, tracking how much gold you spent at a shop for loyalty programs, and so on. Basically, anything you can think of when it comes to shop management.

5. Create chest inventories. When you open a chest, instead of just "gaining 1 potion", you literally open a chest that displays a potion, which you could then choose to take. This naturally leads to a "storage" system where, combined with the inventory limits, you can force players to store items that they won't be carrying on them.

With the Unity inventory system, you can add all sorts of new systems to your game.