Project Lore

A Tribute to Addons is a column featuring new, cool, or useful addons. Send a tweet to @Heartbourne or @Projectlore with your suggestions, or leave a comment. One of the most common questions I receive for Protip is "what inventory addon do you use?" The answer is ArkInventory. ArkInventory, conveniently abbreviated AI, is an invaluable tool for managing your inventory. It has a highly customizable "single bag" interface that displays all of your items in one frame instead of 5+ individual ones. Players can define rules to sort items by different conditions. For example, I sort all of my items by quality first, so all of my gray vendor trash is listed first and my epics listed last. I then sort by item level, and continue drilling down until I can usually scan my inventory to find items quickly.

Many settings. Handle it!

Perhaps more useful than this is the ability to add items to different columns. By default, all items are classified by Blizzard into different categories. ArkInventory can use this data to help you sort your items, as well as other conditions. Like the sorting rules, categories can be a powerful tool for organizing, especially when combined with rules. I have columns for my soulbound equipable gear, another for poisons and rogue glyphs, another for food and bandages, etc. On my characters that I do a lot of crafting on, I have settings to sort ore into a column, gems into another, etc. One nice feature is the ability to hide columns. Putting empty bag spaces into a hidden column has worked well for me. The lack of empty slots to click makes it impossible to split stacks of items (I believe), but it was rare enough that I would do that without the help of addon like auctioneer anyway. ArkInventory is loaded with features. You've probably seen me using the search bar in Protip, which greys out items that do not contain text matching the string entered. Along with the ability to scale the size of the frame, automatic resizing of columns to take up the least amount of area, independent rules for banks, guild banks, and keyrings, and the ability to browse the inventories of your other characters, AI is an addon I simply cannot play without. Grab it from Curse or WoWInterface and simplify your inventory!