Storage and Inventory

Overview

Outbound uses a grid-based inventory system split between the player's personal backpack and the shared storage built into the camper van. Managing space is a constant rhythm of the game: you head out on foot, gather resources, return to the van, and deposit what you brought back so it can be processed at workstations. The system is tuned to feel manageable rather than punishing, in keeping with the game's cozy survival tone. You will never be truly stranded by a full pack, but being thoughtful about what you carry makes every trip more productive.

Storage in Outbound is modular. As you progress through the technology tree and unlock new blueprints at the researcher, you can expand your van's capacity, add interior shelves and containers, and eventually raise the vehicle into camper mode for a pop-up second floor that hosts additional storage, garden beds, and crafting stations.

Storage Types at a Glance

Player Backpack

The backpack is your personal inventory while exploring on foot. It is a grid of slots, and every item you pick up out in the world goes straight into it. That includes harvestables such as fiber, lumber, and berries, but also non-resource items like download vouchers for signal towers and bottle caps used at vending machines. Because these trinkets share space with raw materials, deciding what to keep in your pockets is part of every trip.

A handy quality-of-life feature is item locking. Clicking an item in your backpack reveals a lock symbol on its tooltip. Locked items stay put when you dump everything else into the van's storage, so you never accidentally deposit a blueprint ticket or a quest item you meant to keep on hand. This is particularly useful for vouchers and other keepsakes that you want to carry with you until you reach a specific vendor or terminal.

Players also have a journal that tracks the contents of the backpack alongside notes about your journey, giving you a clean view of everything you are currently holding.

Camper Van Storage

The van is your central holding point. Its trunk and interior compartments provide the main bulk storage for everything you find out in the outdoors. You access van storage by walking up to the rear of the vehicle and interacting with it. The storage interface sits near the Crafting Table, so you can deposit, sort, and immediately feed materials into recipes without juggling windows.

Deposited items are no longer part of your backpack. They count toward the van's weight capacity instead, and any player in a co-op session can pull from them. In a single-player run, the van effectively doubles as your base stash: as long as your stuff is in the van, you can drive across the map, park anywhere, and still access it.

Storage Modules and Interior Build-Outs

Beyond the default trunk, you can expand the van with additional storage and display modules that you unlock through the building system. Each module slots into the van's interior (or onto the roof in the case of racks) and contributes to your total carrying space.

Shelves and side tables have received a steady stream of fixes across the alpha. Notable improvements include better collider placement for items set on top of shelves (v0.5.8), the ability to place multiple items on a single shelf (v0.5.10), correct handling of hanging decorations and shelf contents after a save load (v0.5.11), and the removal of a bug that could spawn endless lumber when breaking down shelves (v0.5.13). A later patch (v0.7.8) made sure that customization applied to items placed on shelves is preserved properly when loading a save. Together these changes make shelves a reliable display and storage surface in the van's interior.

Dog Companion Pouch

Your dog companion doubles as a mobile storage assistant. Dogs can carry items for you and fetch resources from nearby points of interest, effectively acting as an extra inventory pocket while you focus on harvesting, cooking, or building. Commanding the dog to return items back to the van saves a lot of round trips on foot, especially when you are exploring a rich biome far from your parking spot.

In co-op, the benefit compounds. Each player's pet can shuttle resources back to camp while the group keeps pushing forward. You can adopt and train a new friend at the Paws and Whiskers Lodge, then feed and pet them to keep their mood up so they stay productive helpers out in the field.

Encumbrance and Weight Upgrades

Both the backpack and the van have capacity limits, and the penalty for going over works differently depending on which you fill. For a deeper dive into the specific penalties and movement speed thresholds, see the dedicated encumbrance article. In short, when your backpack exceeds its capacity you become encumbered and lose the ability to sprint, but you can still walk at normal pace back to the van. Harvesting lots of fiber or lumber in one session is a common way to trip the limit, so pace yourself and dump loads regularly.

The van has its own weight capacity that determines how much total mass the vehicle can haul. Alpha patch v0.5.6 (released 14 April 2025) made a significant change here: the van's initial weight capacity was increased from 12 to 20, and the vehicle researcher gained new weight upgrade blueprints so you can push it even further as you advance through the technology tree. Those upgrades are researched at the workstation and then applied to the van like any other blueprint.

Because the van's weight pool is shared, co-op groups need to coordinate deposits. It is easy to trip the vehicle's weight cap when several players dump loot at once, so consider crafting or recycling bulky materials before loading more raw resources into storage. See the version history article for the full list of alpha changes that have touched storage and weight since the Kickstarter build.

Co-op Storage Sharing

Outbound supports groups of up to four players in multiplayer and co-op, and storage is where the social layer of the game becomes obvious. Each player has their own separate backpack while they are out exploring. Vouchers, bottle caps, harvestables, and tools that one player picks up stay in that player's personal inventory and are not accessible to the rest of the group until they are physically deposited into the van.

Van storage, by contrast, is fully shared. The moment you drop items into the trunk, shelves, or any other van module, every player in the session can pull from the same pool. Recipes and unlocked blueprints are also shared between co-op players automatically, which means the van effectively becomes the party's communal workshop. If one player does all the crafting and another does the gathering, the two simply need to keep the van topped up to stay productive.

This separation creates a clean division of labor. A player on a specific errand (running vouchers to a signal tower, carrying a key item for a quest) can keep those items locked in their backpack while the rest of the team focuses on hauling raw materials back to the van.

Organizing Your Van

A well-organized van saves real time during long runs. The Crafting Table sits near the rear hatch for a reason: depositing materials and then immediately queuing recipes is the fastest loop in the game. Building your most used workstations close to the storage interface keeps everything within a few steps. See the van building guide for layout ideas.

Some practical layout principles:

• Keep bulk crafting stations (Crafting Table, cooking stations, the recycler) on the ground floor near the trunk so deposits and production share the same footprint.

• Reserve shelves for display items, spare tools, and category-specific stacks you want to see at a glance.

• Use rooftop racks for low-priority bulk items like raw lumber, since you do not interact with them as often.

• Push garden beds and decorative props onto the camper mode upper floor so they do not compete with work surfaces downstairs.

• Leave a clear path from the rear hatch to the Crafting Table so dogs and co-op teammates can deposit without getting stuck on furniture.

Tips and Tricks

• Offload resources to the van every time you pass it, even if your backpack is only half full. Full pockets make it easy to miss a rare pickup further out.

• Prioritize van weight upgrades at the researcher early. The jump from 12 to 20 weight in v0.5.6 was significant, and further upgrades only widen the gap.

• Lock vouchers, blueprint tickets, and quest items in your backpack so the "deposit all" action at the van never accidentally hands them over.

• Send your dog to carry overflow items when you are gathering far from the van. In co-op, split dogs across different biomes for maximum throughput.

• Spend download vouchers at signal towers and bottle caps at vending machines before they pile up. Both occupy the same pocket space as real resources.

• Recycle junk at the recycler rather than letting it clutter van storage. Breaking items down into base materials is often a better use of space than hoarding finished props.

• In co-op, agree on a deposit rhythm so players do not all dump loads at the same time and push the van past its weight cap.

• Park near dense resource nodes when you plan a harvest session. Shorter trips back to the van mean less time encumbered and more time gathering.