Guide:Inventory management

Keeping a clean and organized inventory is a key part of success in Terraria. Running back and forth between your home-base and current mining extension is unavoidable to new characters. Figuring out what to keep, what to store in chests and what to throw out along the way will reduce the number of trips, allowing for more digging time. As a general rule, when you leave your house you should always have 10 or more slots in your inventory free, which will allow you to pick up new items as you continue your adventure.

While you're in the middle of the earth, digging a new ore vein you just found, you realize you have no room to pick it up. What do you do? There are several options:
 * Discard low-value, easily acquired blocks you dont need. Dirt Blocks and stone blocks are usually not needed in the quantity that you get them. (You can shift-click an item to discard it.)
 * Return to your home base and unload current goods into chests and containers.
 * Create temporary containers to put things in, so that you can pick them up at a later time.



Make a plan when you go exploring. If you're going out to mine or farm a certain item take that item with you and save slots for that item. More than one adventurer has left his home to dig for adamantite only to find his inventory clutter with stuff that's fairly useful but not what he was looking for. The trouble is to know what to throw away and what to keep. Set a priority for items like this:
 * The item you were setting out to farm (This should never be a throw away option; it's what you came to get.)
 * Rare drops (basically anything that drops from a mob that isn't the norm).
 * Ores and Gems based on how much you've collected of the specific type. Throw away smallest stacks first if you find something rarer or find more of what you were looking for replace your low level ores with higher ones.

Those are just a few examples but it's really up to what you need. The important thing is to make sure you always have space to pick something up in case that rare item drops or you find something you absolutely need to pick up like a bomb statue! The important thing regardless of how you prioritize is to make sure your inventory is neat and manageable.

Generally it's a good idea to keep a few things in your inventory that you'll collect all the time while wandering through the world of Terraria. A couple of those would include Fallen Star, Mushrooms, and Lens. That way those things will stack up over time and they aren't something that you have to think about having a lot of as you'll always collect them every time you wander around. They're also a fairly common item to come across and while common they're hard to amass in large amounts so collecting them over the course of your play time is a good way to get large quantities rather than setting out to farm them specifically which can be a bit boring. When your stack gets full deposit the stack and leave one of that item in your inventory to represent that slot being for that item. If you have over a stack of Lens, Maximum Mana, and health potions such as Great, Greater or Lesser health potion you won't need to keep slots for these in your inventory. In Hardmode you should have met these requirements, so in Hardmode you also won't need to keep inventory slots for these.

Once you return home, you should have several containers waiting for you. A good idea is to separate items into categories, and to keep each category in separate chests. For example, keep weapons/accessories in one chest and ore/bars in another. Doing this will allow you to easily store newly acquired items of the same type by using the 'Quick Stack' command in the Storage Items. Having a chest to quickly put things into is a good idea as well, because sometimes you need to get to a friend quickly. In your main inventory you have a 'Quick Stack to All' option, which is very useful in dense storage rooms.

Tips

 * Chests are important in sorting items. If you find a treasure chest, after looting it you can break it with a pickaxe and take it with you.
 * Rename your chests to match the types of items they store, for example "Ores and Bars", "Potions", "Weapons", etc. This can make finding your items much easier.
 * If you don't wish to clutter your world with many chests, you can create another world and place all of your chests in that world. Whenever you need a specific item, you can join that world and retrieve your items quickly.
 * Many common items are also used as Ammo, and can be stored in your Ammo slots. These include Gel, Fallen Stars, Sand, and as of 1.3, Bones.
 * Once the Merchant spawns, buy a piggy bank and carry it with a stack of Platforms. Carry them to increase your available inventory, just place the bank on two platforms to access the extra slots - then pick them up and continue. You can increase your space further by getting a Safe.
 * It can be convenient to keep your piggy bank and wooden table inside your safe. That frees two main inventory slots, and the safe can be quickly placed nearly anywhere for fast access to specialty items like diving gear. The piggy bank can be pulled out for cargo space when necessary.
 * Its a good idea to keep stacks of certain essential, or valuable but common, items in your piggy bank. For example, your Coins, Gems, Torches, and summoning statues.
 * When a Blood moon occurs, blood zombies and dripplers will spawn. These have a chance to drop a money trough. This item, when used, will summon a flying piggy bank allowing you to access your piggy bank anywhere without needing to place one down. This not only frees another slot since you don't have to carry platforms, but you don't have to remember to pick it back up when you are done.