There are two things that every WoW character has: a hearthstone, and a backpack. Well, some bank alts might have destroyed their hearthstone, actually, but absolutely everybody has that 16-slot backpack occupying their first bag slot. 16 slots made some sense back when that was also the biggest size bag that wasn't crazy expensive, back in classic WoW (Traveler's Backpack/Mooncloth Bg). But now that 16-slot bags are dirt-cheap, 18-slotters are reasonable, and 20- and even 22-slotters are obtainable, and especially moving forward into Wrath with the basic tailored bag being 20 slots, the backpack's 16 is starting to look a bit puny by comparison.

This leads one to ask: when are we going to be able to upgrade the darned thing? I'd love to be able to grab a few extra slots by trading it in for an 18- or 20-slot bag. And it really doesn't make sense for our backpack to be the smallest holding container on our body. I mean, I like that everybody starts out with a free decent-sized bag, but it really should just act like any other bag slot after that. Someone asked the same question in the WoW forums recently, and Zarhym responded in a non-committal fashion, saying they were thinking about it but didn't have anything to report just yet. Personally, I don't see the downside of transforming the backpack slot into a regular bag slot, but there may be something going on behind the scenes that I'm not aware of. It is also worth noting that we will be freeing up a few bag slots already in Wrath with our non-combat pets, mounts, and tokens leaving the inventory, not to mention bigger bags being available. Still, it seems like one can never get enough space.

Welcome, my friends, to this week's late Addon Spotlight, where we'll be looking at a little tool to help manage your inventory. First of all, I would highly recommend reading through Matthew Porter's Big bag blowout series over at The Creamy GUI Center, it's not only a fantastic look at many inventory options, but builds a solid foundation for your inventory addon needs. Given all that good information, I thought I'd pipe in with a look at Mr. Plow, an inventory stacker I use in conjunction with Bagnon.

I never could get used to inventory addons that auto-sorted my bags into categories; I just wanted something to consolidate all of my bags into one window. That said, I am also somewhat obsessive about an orderly inventory, and had no problem taking time to organize my inventory so that items I got from grinding or quests were found at the top of the window, where I could easily sell and use them at my discretion.

Then came along Mr. Plow, the handy bag stacker that will organize and compress your bags for that neat and orderly look that former Army sergeants require of their inventory.

They're getting serious about easing inventory headaches in Wrath of the Lich King. Recently we heard all about the new storage system for mounts and vanity pets (you'll learn them as spells; they will not occupy space in your bags). Shortly thereafter it was hinted that tokens (such as Badges of Justice and Battleground marks) would face a similar treatment.

An enterprising and clever beta participant by the name of Xabora has discovered what form this treatment will take, by typing /tokens and hitting return. This is reminiscent of the way Achievements were first discovered to be in WoW, which was by someone in the alpha typing /achievements. Yay slash commands! Anyway, it looks like the new system will track all your tokens, as well as your honor points and arena points, with categories for each phase of the game (Classic, BC, Wrath), PvP, Holidays, Raid, Miscellaneous, and Unused.

I'm not entirely sure why there's a category for "unused" tokens, or why Raid is separate from Classic/BC/Wrath – are they planning on putting tier tokens into this system? Will raids in Wrath award different tokens than heroics? No telling just yet, I guess. But it's nice to know that even more bag spaces will be freed, and we won't have any more issues from having left our tokens in the bank.

Welcome readers to this week's The Creamy GUI Center. It looks like I stumbled upon an addon topic that, judging from your comments, a lot of people view as a cornerstone of their UI and addon experience. This week, thanks to reader feedback, I'm going to extend our look at inventory addons to three parts instead of two so that we can take a look at a couple of fan favorite bag addons that I missed. I did indeed hear your cries of wanting more in the comments, so let's get down to it with a look at ArkInventory and TBag.

Welcome folks to this week's The Creamy GUI Center. This week I tackle one of the great suggestions left by you the reader in the comment's section. We're gunna examine bag replacements and inventory managers in a special two part series. This week we'll see how to organize your inventory with bag replacement addons. And in the following week we'll look at which addons help you change gear around for different situations. But let's not put the cart ahead of the horse, first we have to organize all that equipment, so let's get to it!

As Eliah reported in the undocumented changes post yesterday, MMO Champ has done a little searching through the PTR files, and come up with some interesting changes to mount speed items. According to the code found yesterday, Blizzard was trying to change items like Carrot on a Stick and the Riding Crop to mount enchants (like the Shoulder or Head enchants available from many places for rep) so that they simply enchanted a mount with a faster speed rather than taking up a trinket slot. Sounds like a great way to cut down on trinket space, right?

Not so fast -- (ha! get it? "fast"?) as Dariusmdev points out, this would actually mean that you'd have to buy even more Riding Crops, probably even throwing up the price on the servers. Because instead of getting one mount trinket and using it for all your mounts, you'd have to get one enchant per mount that you have. Good news for Leatherworkers if the change goes through, not so good for people who like to use a lot of mounts.

Which may be why Blizzard may have decided against the change at all -- according to Eliah, this change isn't actually implemented on the PTRs yet. So mount enchants are only in the code for now, and not actually available in the game. But it does show that the folks at Blizzard are actively trying to come with ways to help us handle trinket management, and that's definitely appreciated.

Nearly every hybrid has felt the sorrows of lacking itemization at one time or another. Every hybrid has seen its ups and its down, has watched class balance fall into and out of order, and embraced their spec through the good and the bad. Throughout all of this, though, there has always been one ever-present issue. Completely unchanging. Viability and acceptance? Oh, no no no.

Bag space. The Blue Crew of Blizzard has made it very clear over the last few years that limited bag space is fully intended. It's viewed as an important aspect of game play. A mini-game, if you will. I must say, being forced into choosing whether you want to keep an item you enjoy or vendor it in favor of that new piece of resist gear that is mandatory for your raid's upcoming boss fight is the worst game ever. Sometimes little vanity items mean quite a bit, like your first epic. A lot of them are just plain neat, like the furbolg outfit maker.

Fear not, my friends, Bagnon is here to solve your dilemma. It has been mentioned by WoW Insider before, and many believed it had fallen through the cracks into obscurity. Given your newfound hope for something simple yet elegant, I'll move right into its features and options.

You wouldn't go to Cancun, Rome or New Zealand without packing items appropriate for the trip -- so why should you go to the Black Temple or Karazhan any less prepared? Levenah of the World of Warcraft Livejournal community asked players, "What do you carry for a raid?" She personally slings an impressive number of potions, a good amount of weapon oil and holy candles, and what appears to be one banana.

Most of the respondents seem to carry multiple stacks of every potion and food available, which makes me feel slack -- back when I was raiding, I came with about 10 healing pots, a stack of plus agi food, and then five to ten or so of my choice offensive and defensive elixirs. Oh, and 20 of each poison and Flash Powder, and usually a small amount of the Blinding Powder that no one ever asks me to use.

I know that tanking and healing classes tend to have to bring more items than DPS -- and this isn't even counting all the various sets a druid has to carry! What's on your packing list for a raid?

Gaslaw asks on the forums whether backpacks will be bigger in Wrath of the Lich King, and (kind of surprisingly) Drysc says it's not beyond the realm of possibility.

I guess it's not that surprising-- it does seem like we are carrying more stuff around lately, in terms of quest and rep items, if not just plain old extra gear sets. We've already had lots of ideas on how to fix things, from creating more keychain setups, to just plain coming up with more bag space. But fortunately, Drysc doesn't seem to have just bigger bags in mind-- he seems to have "better stuff in the works."

What that could be, we have no idea. Pack mules? Dimensional suitcases (made, naturally, of sapient pearwood)? Finally, player housing? Drysc says we'll find out soon.

I should warn you in advance before we get too far into this review that Possessions has been known to be very addictive, meaning that once you use it, you may not be able to play the game without it. One particular hunter who is very near and dear to me started acting like a drug addict who had just gotten her fix when I showed her this add-on. For people who have multiple characters on the same server and especially characters devoted exclusively to storage, this add-on may send tingles of pleasure through your body that you have not previously experienced in an online game.

Once you install Possessions the first time, you should immediately login to each of your characters and open all your bags in your inventory and in your bank. Once Possessions has scanned all the information into it's database initially, all updating is then done on-the-fly. This is where the sheer beauty of Possessions begins to shine.

Let's suppose you're playing on your warlock who is an engineer, and someone in your guild is looking for silk cloth which would be stored in the bank of your tailor. You can either type "/poss" by itself to bring up a dialog box (and type "silk cloth" in the search field) or type "/poss silk cloth" right in the chat window. Possessions will give you a search engine style report of all the items you have that have "silk cloth" in the name. You can even "link" these results back into chat by shift-clicking the item icons in the search results. Mousing over these icons will give you the usual in-game description of the item, but at the bottom of the tooltip it will also tell you how many you have, and where the items are located on what character.

There are other options in the search dialog you can explore that accomplish a variety of other filtering tasks and that allow you to search a specific character or a specific location, but that's for you to play with later. Packrats of Azeroth, download Possessions today! I should note that I've hot-linked a much larger screenshot of the Professions search window to the tooltip thumbnail above. Click it to behold the true beauty of Possessions!

Hot on the heels of that trinket chain suggestion from the other day, I've got another easily-implementable suggestion for inventory management: I want to name my bags.

Not necessarily "Jonah" or "Sally" or "Tricia," although those are all very acceptable names for bags. No, I want to be able to label the bag that I keep all of my healing gear in my "Healing Gear Bag." And I want to label the bag that I keep all my quest items in "Quest Item Bag." Clear labels that help me organize exactly how things get laid out in my inventory.

Now, there's already a little bit of that going on-- "special" bags like Enchanting or Soul bags are already labeled, not to mention that you can't put anything in them that doesn't belong there. And obviously the same thing applies to quivers (Related: where on your bag bar do your hunters put your quivers? I always put mine just to the left of my backpack, but I just realized it didn't have to go there all the time).

But I want to put custom labels on all of my bags, so that if I happen to take a vacation (either out of town or to an alt), I can come back and know exactly what's where. There are lots of bag-related addons out there, and for all I know, one of them lets me do exactly this. But I'd like to see a nice and easy implementation in the normal interface.

I can conquer dragons, I can crush Centaur, and I can even take candle (I've been waiting for days to get a chance to post that hilarious thread), but if one monster in the World of Warcraft has cost me more than anything, it's a full inventory. On my hunter, I've got a bag full of food, and on my shaman, I have to carry around four totems all the time. Crafting items take up another bag or two (my disenchanting rogue has a bag full of enchanting mats and a bag full of poisons). Quest items, potions, food, reputation tokens, noncombat pets and mounts, and that hearthstone-- there's just not enough room for everything!

So here's one idea, shared with me by Braila of Thunderhorn (our guild's tree-mendous healing druid) during last weekend's Karazhan run: How about a trinket chain?

It makes a lot of sense. Blizzard implemented a keychain to get keys out of our inventories, and considering that we're all hauling around tons of trinkets lately (I had seven on me, and one of our warriors had eight with him), this seems like the first place Blizzard should go to thin out the inventory. It's not like trinkets are huge items-- why should they take up 1/16 of Netherweave Bags when you can fit 200 arrows in the same place? Spare trinkets should have their own tab to sit in, something that grows the more you get, just like the keychain.

Of course the obvious solution would be to just not carry so many trinkets around. But there's so many of them for every situation-- healing, solo grinding, raid healing, DPS, PvP-- that it's no wonder everyone at 70 has such a collection. Blizz should give us a chain to put them on.

When I compared EngBags and Advanced Bags Plus a while back, a commenter named Purity commended TBag to me in the comments. Well, Purity, I'm glad you did, because ever since I installed TBag, I haven't looked back. It's now one of my all-time favorite WoW mods, right next to ClearFont and TheoryCraft. Its features include:

• Customizable sorted inventory frame
• Customizable sorted bank frame
• Text-based searching of all your characters' banks and inventories
• Includes the bag bar in the inventory window, so you can easily swap bags without having to figure out how to restore the default bag bar that you nuked weeks ago because it takes up way too much space and you hardly ever use it

Really, what more could you want in an inventory mod? It's compact, it sorts very well, it seems stable. Go get it!

Download TBag at Curse
Previously on the Spotlight
Don't know how to use AddOns? Fear not!

When I first looked at this thread in the forums, my reaction was "QQ." But the more I think about it, the more reasonable it seems. The poster asks for an upgradable backpack, since bags larger than 14 slots are becoming the norm. I've definitely had trouble selling Netherweave Bags, since almost everybody seems to already have 16-slotters. In a world like that, the backpack becomes your smallest bag, and that doesn't make a lot of sense. Furthermore, anything that increases the amount I can carry, without me having to spend 90g each on Imbued Netherweave Bags, would certainly be welcome. Between a full set of extra gear (for healing), various consumables, quest items, rep pickups, herbs, etc., I don't usually have very much free space -- and that's even with having an AH alt that I mail everything off to once it's ready to be sold. Vendors have been pretty easy to come by, but still, I'd really appreciate an extra 4 slots, like the poster proposes.