I do think that the crates you on- and off-load from caravans should be an entity you can place and move around in the world.(similar to how arche age did it)
1. I think its a long hanging fruit since the spacial inventory system really is build for that.
-You are on your freehold and your 3 gathering bags are full? Craft a crate, leave it there and pick it up to store it later.
2. It´s far more fun and sells the trading fantasy better than the current clunky UI driven system.
-It´s far more fun the get rewarded when you offload the precious crates 1 by 1 at a trader and it goes satisfying "sound effect + vfx", instead of just drag and dropping into an UI.
-Also bystanders can observe the haul. It brings a system from instancing it into UI, into the open world and enrich it and make it feel more alive.
3. You can replace the boring caravan spawning timer, by loading crates onto the caravan with your buds for a few minutes.
-Both in the case spawning the caravan at the node and spawning a caravan in the wild (when you succesfully ambushed others). Caravan spawn timers dont make sense... use an approach that makes sense!
4. Could also be used in nodes and other usecases, like players or npcs carrying crates from building to building.
5. It conveys the scale of caravans and ship sizes and upgrades better.
-Trading ships that can haul 20 crates sure would look juiciy to ambush
Thoughts?
