House Keeping

Part of going on vacation is setting up the house. The windows need to be opened and the house aired out. Dust covers need to be taken off of the furniture and then the cabinets and fridge stocked with food and drinks. It's a miniature move in. You unpack all of your bags into the closets and dressers, buy cleaning supplies and laundry detergent and set up a second home.

At our vacation station, I was staring at my items hanger in horror. Ender had jumped all of my stuff down for me. My ships were safely tucked into my hangers and various assets dropped in as well.

It was a complete mess.

I have used containers for so long that I had forgotten how messy a hanger is without them. Station containers, for those who have never used them, are containers that are to large to put into any ship. They are made for station organization. Due to their logs and ability to be locked down they are more for shared corporation hangers. This does not mean that one does not take them into the services they are suited for.

I discovered containers very early in the game. I was mining and I needed giant secure containers to hold my heaping mounds of ore that were making me rich. I was so excited to dive into my first .07 system so that I could anchor a can in a belt. Mmm. How I love those sweet early memories.

I also wound up using them to neaten my hanger. Later I found station containers and later after that things like station warehouses. Some of the access issues seem to have been cleaned up. The three week delay to deleting them is a bit irritating but I'm a home body who enjoys a neat place to live. I have a low sec home and a high sec home. I normally have a can at the major trade hubs that I buy and sell out of to hold the tons and tons of salvage.

Dear CCP, May we have some personal hanger tabs to keep our things organized?

So far CCP has said, “No.”

So many of us make do with containers for personal organization. This is also one reason why the inventory changes with Inferno broke so many souls. The concept of individual ‘boxes’ is deeply ingrained and it is how we organized. For a while CCP took away our ability to easily have and sort these boxes. Then they gave it back. It was a rough summer.

I also like to combine my ship and items tabs into my station service menu. With my containers it creates a nice neat screen. It's an option on the escape menu under general settings. I found it my first day and used it. I have met many people who did not even know such a thing was real. Because I use it, I didn't lose track of my main hanger window when the inventory changes happened during the spring.

Of course, now and then, when doing mass repackaging of items I repackage a container and it spews everything out all over the hanger.

The weirdest thing is that while writing this post and looking at my assets window (which is very neat and compact) I noticed that Sugar had an item in Dodixie (the Gallente trade hub). Sugar has never been to Dodixie. She is Minmatar, went to Derelik and then to Molden Heath. Then she got locked out of high sec and that was that. Yet, when I selected the station and looked I found out that I have a Retriever in Dodixie. Sugar can't fly mining barges. I have no idea where this ship came from or why I have it.