Inventory Control Guide

Hello everyone!

I have recently gone through a rather substantial amount of FFXI-infrastructure building on my account, and thought it might be worth sharing it. It primarily focuses on two recent plugins made by Aureus, GearCollector and Itemizer, and how I've come to use them in a way that I feel is efficient. I will explain how to use each of them individually, and then how to set them up to control your inventory.

== Section 1, Gear Collector ==
Gearcollector is designed to read your Spellcast file (or a specific group within your Spellcast) and generate a list of equipment that will be used by your job. It will make space for this by putting away anything in your inventory into your safe/locker/satchel/sack, in that order. The specific syntax is:
//gc Job Group
Ex. "//gc DNC GC" would look for a "GC" group in my Byrth_DNC.xml Spellcast file and attempt to gather all of the equipment in it while putting away all other equipment.
Ex2. "//gc BLM" would gather all of the gear between the <sets> </sets> tags in my Byrth_BLM.xml and put away everything that is not included

At this point, there are two common problems that people have:
1) They don't use Spellcast and feel the startup time will ultimately outweigh any benefit from this plugin.
2) They do use Spellcast, but don't want their current gear stuff getting quasi-randomly dumped into the sack/storage/etc. and messing up their storage system.

The first complaint is totally invalid (in my opinion) if you are going to play for more than a week after switching to Gearcollector. The amount of time and effort this plugin saves is absolutely enormous. Furthermore, you don't have to switch to spellcast in any substantial way. You need to load it and make an .xml with the gear that you want for your job, and that's it. You can continue using your scripts and such as you always did and the plugin won't interfere with it. After that, if you want to make a taco and you want to change to Red Mage, you don't have to choose. //gc RDM and go make your taco. Bliss.

The second complaint is addressed by Itemizer scripts, which are the subject of the next section.

Common problems people have:
1) Gearcollector crashes their game. -- For me, this was caused by my settings (blockkeyboard/mouse). Try these instead, and put them into the /Windower/plugins/settings folder in the gearcollector xml file (open it in a text editor and paste them in): http://pastebin.com/463NfUtL
2) Gearcollector just puts your stuff away and doesn't get anything back out. -- This is what Gearcollector does when it can't find any armor (or sometimes just when it wants to). Spellcast is more forgiving with its syntax than gearcollector, so you will need to use lowercase versions of the <sets>, <group>, <sub>, and so on if you want Gearcollector to work with your xml. If it does this sometimes but not all the time, unload and reload the plugin.
3) Gearcollector doesn't get some specific items out of your inventory. -- Gearcollector works off of the exact name of an item as it appears in inventory, while Spellcast works with the long name too. If you are failing to find a particular item, make sure its name is exactly as it appears in your inventory.

== Section 2, Itemizer ==
Itemizer is designed to (without opening any windows) move equipment from one location to your active inventory (/get), or from your active inventory to a location (/put). The syntax is /put "Item Name" Location -or- /get "Item Name" Location, where Location can be Sack, Satchel, Safe, Storage, or Locker. Furthermore, you can combine these into windower scripts with one very substantial limitation.

The Itemizer plugin cannot execute two movement commands at the same time and takes approximately .9 to 1 second to execute each command, so the more items you are chaining in your script, the longer the script will take. Considering you are unlikely to have more than ~5 such items in your inventory to be put away at any given time, I would recommend only using this for the most essential items.

The script syntax should look like this:
input /echo STARTING TO PUT THINGS AWAY!
input /put "Dark Ring" Sack;wait .9; (this will only move one Dark Ring, regardless how many you have)
input /put "Echo Drops" Satchel;wait .9; (be aware this will also only move one of your echo drops)
input /puts "Echo Drops" Satchel;wait .9; (this will move all of your echo drops)
input /put "Tavnazian Ring" Sack;wait .9; (etc.)
input /echo DONE PUTTING THINGS AWAY!

You would write that into a text document (with Editor) and save it in /Windower/scripts as plain text.

I recommend these settings for the plugin, which also goes in /Windower/plugins/settings/Itemizer.xml: http://pastebin.com/4U32RJQb

Anyway, I would recommend keeping this script short, maybe to your 20 essential transportation items. I would also recommend naming it "putALL.txt", and the following section will assume you did.

One last thing to note about Itemizer:
* Itemizer starts with AutoTool and AutoItem set to True in the settings file. This means that if you attempt to cast Utsusemi without any Shihei in your inventory, Itemizer will scan your Satchel/Sack for Shihei and move one to your inventory so that the spell will work. It is the same thing for trying to use /item "Echo Drops" <me>. -- I find this to not be very useful for items (unless they are macroed for some reason) but to be very useful for Ninjutsu. You no longer need to have Ninja Tools in your active inventory as long as you keep at least one space.

== Section 3, Setup ==
First, you will need to download Spellcast, Itemizer, and Gearcollector, and make sure that your resources (https://github.com/radectheblm/Radsources) and windower hook (http://forums.windower.net/topic/18936-windower-hook/) are up to date.

Next, you will want to open up your /Windower/scripts/init.txt file and add these to the load section:
load Spellcast
load Itemizer
load GearCollector

...and this to the alias section:
alias putALL exec putALL.txt

Next step is either going to be the most or least time consuming, depending whether you already used Spellcast or not. Setting up Spellcast for your jobs should be easy enough, but all the typing and back-and-forth to look at macros and decide what you need does take time.

This is an example for those of you that do not currently use Spellcast or wish to make a Spellcast: http://pastebin.com/6ArdgyjG
You could collect all the gear just by saving that file as "Your Name Here"_WAR.xml typing //gc WAR - or - //gc WAR default (which is the group name). Spellcast (and Gearcollector) search for NAME_JOB.xml and I don't believe it is case sensitive.

Because I do not generally want to grab all of the equipment that I use at any given time (for instance, I have no use for PDT or MDT gear in 90% of the things I do), on my more complicated xmls I make a specific group of just the items that I want and use the more specific command. For some of my less refined jobs/xmls, I simply collect everything. Keep in mind that things like weapons and equipment that only show up in the <rules> sections will not be collected unless they are specifically included in a dummy set above in the <sets> section.

Anyway, once you are done this you should be able to put away all your essential items with //putAll and grab everything for a particular job with GearCollector. It simplifies the often arduous task of inventory management and job changing to two simple command lines. Highly recommended.