It’s always the same pattern: After a few hours I decide to sort everything because it runs out of control but then I never do it again so it’s getting worse than before.
When playing RuneScape like 10 years ago I sorted my bank by item color. Once I started pressing the button to deposit everything at once (because it felt soooo easy) it looked like it was sorted by color but it was significantly worse, since the items I used the most were always somewhere I didn’t expect them.
Small chest size is literally the only reason why I don’t like playing Valheim. Factorio was the worst game so far. My factory worked but it was a diabolic mess that relied on me, sometimes refilling some random chests manually.
It depends on the game, the inventory and what I am doing.
Minecraft:
mining: torch in off hand, food on far left slot followed by pickaxe and blocks to fill in holes left behind by mining ores and fixing the mining tunnel as I bore through caves etc.
chests: gems, lapis, ancient debris/netherite, gold, iron, netherite and diamond tools in chest one, food in chest two, saplings, wood, sticks and bamboo chest three. Dirt, sand, gravel in chest 4. Cobble, deepslate and stone based blocks chest 5. miscellaneous chest 6+
exploration: torches in off hand, food, axe, pickaxe in hot bar
Last day on earth dumb mobile game: weapon, back up weapon, food or healing items
Speaking of the Minecraft hotbar:
(if anything isn’t present, it’s usually replaced with a block or other item)
Does it make sense? Not really. Does it make building with more than a few blocks a pain? Yes. Will I still do it? Absolutely.
Modded items can help. Like the paxel, which combines the pickaxe/axe/shovel into one tool. That frees up some space for extra modded tools like wrenches and the like.
At least there is a decent chest size in Minecraft. But with some mods installed there are tons of additional items so I always had to install Storage Network.
Refined Storage is a fun storage mod, I’d recommend trying it if you haven’t already!