While there is a lot of power behind a system like this, it’s important to understand some basic fundamentals about how your items (and the quantities you set) affect the long-term value of your game’s internal economy. An inventory system like this one sits right in the middle of your game’s item flow. It doesn’t just store items; it controls how they’re created, moved, and removed over time. Getting that balance right is a long-term tuning process, not something that can be “solved” in a few paragraphs, but there are a few key ideas worth keeping in mind as you set up your items and recipes.

Production vs. Removal of Items

At the most basic level, you’re trying to find a balance between the amount of items created and the amount of items removed from the game. Items are added in many ways:

— Loot on NPCs

— Loot in containers

— Crafted items

— Quest rewards

Everyone loves getting loot, but that initial excitement wears off quickly if the player has no meaningful way to use or convert what they’re getting, especially once their inventory fills up. If items only ever go into the game and rarely leave, the value of each individual item drops over time. For every major way you add items to the world, there should be a roughly corresponding way for those items (or their value) to be removed, transformed, or consumed.

Vendors and Currency

Included with this asset is a Vendor System. It is one of the primary ways to remove items from the game.

— The player sells items to the vendor.

— Those items leave circulation.

— In return, the player receives currency.

This creates a basic item to currency conversion, which is good, but it also introduces a new problem: if the player can endlessly convert items into currency, their wealth can inflate very quickly unless there are sinks for that currency as well. The vendor helps balance this by also selling items back to the player, and the sale prices are higher than the buy prices. This spread is important; it prevents simple buy / sell exploits and ensures that trading with the vendor has a cost. Because of that, it’s important that vendors sell things the player actually wants to buy:

— Consumables are ideal, because once used, they are removed from the game.

— Other useful but limited items (like repair kits, ammo, temporary boosts, etc.) also work well as ongoing sinks.

Crafting as Value Conversion

This asset also includes a crafting system. When used correctly, crafting can help pull more items out of your game than it produces, or at least compress many small items into fewer, more valuable ones. When a player crafts:

— Multiple input items are removed.

— A single output item is created.

— The total value may be slightly higher, equal, or lower depending on your design.

In practice, this means crafting is often combining the value of multiple items into the value of one item. If you want crafting to act as an item sink, design recipes that consume a meaningful number of materials, especially for higher-tier items, so that crafting feels powerful but still drains resources over time.

Wealth Growth and Player Progression

A simple way to think about the health of your economy is to look at player wealth as a combination of:

— All items they own

— All currency they hold

Your goal should generally be for the player’s overall wealth to grow steadily as they progress:

— It shouldn’t grow so fast that everything becomes trivial.

— It shouldn’t stagnate or shrink to the point where progression feels impossible.

A game where wealth never really grows will feel punishing and unrewarding. A game where wealth explodes too quickly will feel shallow and quickly lose its sense of challenge or achievement. The systems in this asset are all levers you can use to tune that curve.

Maintaining the Value of Rare Items

One of the main goals of all this is to maintain the perceived value of your items over time. If a player finds a rare crafting ingredient 3 hours into the game, and then finds the same ingredient 100 hours in, it should still feel meaningful:

— Early on, it’s exciting and mysterious.

— Later, it’s familiar, but now the player understands how it ties into more advanced recipes or progression paths.

The key is that the item still does something important in your economy: it leads to upgrades, unlocks, or progress that matter at that stage of the game. If rare items become trivial or useless due to overproduction, their emotional impact disappears.

A Starting Point, Not a Complete Guide

This is just the tip of the iceberg. Economy design can get very deep, especially in multiplayer games where player-to-player trading and long-term progression amplify every imbalance. You don’t need to master all of this from the start. Instead, keep these ideas in the back of your mind while you:

— Create items and set their quantities

— Define loot tables and rewards

— Design crafting recipes and vendor inventories

As you iterate on your game, revisit these systems and adjust how many items you introduce, how quickly they can be converted to currency, and how effectively your sinks (vendors, crafting, consumables, storage limits, etc.) keep things in check.