MAngband

In angband, squelching items make it so that you can ignore things you know you will not want. Mangband hasn't had this feature for a while, because items always take up space on the ground. Me and Thorbear were talking about this and a couple other things, and we both thought the following thing:
What if you gave the user the option to set unwanted items to grey/white/black or some color after IDing them?
Example;
You just ID'd a potion of weakness. You don't want to ever care about it again, so you squelch it, and now, all weakness pots are black for your character.
This could be done in several ways:
A Squelch macro (ctrl+s or something since we can't use 'k' like angband) that would prompt you to squelch/unsquelch an item.
A Squelch menu (which would likely be used in town) that would allow you to squelch 'bad' items that you had seen.

To make this work, we would likely have to remove all the flavors of one color, and make up new flavors that would be linked to different colors.


This would be a powerful change, but I think it is a logical one to make. After all, it would basically just be making the game one step closer to ang.

... or do like I did in PWMAngband and implement the V squelch system properly (or at least a simplified version).

Currently, I have a macro set to suppr that does \ek-y... maybe that's enough for squeching ;)

PWmang squelching would work too!
In 1.2, some lucky users with giant monitors will be able to see the entire map at once, and hence be able to check any square on the map without moving.
To keep the game fair, people without huge monitors need some way to look at far away items quickly as well. Some implementation of squelch, whatever that may be, is necessary to achieve that.

I *sort of* like the suggested implementation here (different colors), but I don't like the idea of a general, automatic squelching of anything and everything.

In my world, even having a "delete" command in the first place is pretty bizarre (though clearly useful). Example: Let me know how you'd actually "delete" a dragon scale armor if you were an adventurer.

I hate sifting through crap as much as the next guy, but I still think it's just part of the game and adds some realism. What SHOULD be discussed however, is why a real high-end guy like Saruman would carry junk. I'm sure he does sometimes. Or any other not-braindead monster.

I think the existance of junk is yet another balancing feature, i.e. you need to consider whether or not it's worth it to go through the drops of a monster that may drop a lot of junk. This is important since basically any monster may at any time drop something awesome as well. So, adding auto-squelch streamlines what should be a judgment call.

And as for giant monitors in 1.2... Well, think of it as one more way to invest in your character :)