Inventory

Updated: 09/12/2023 by Computer Hope
Example inventory of fruit

Inventory may refer to any of the following:

1. In business, an inventory or stock describes purchased goods held by a business to be sold or used.

2. With computer gaming, an inventory is where items you obtain in a game are stored. In many computer games, an inventory is opened by pressing the "i" key on your keyboard. Once in the inventory, items can be clicked or dragged to your character to be equipped or dragged elsewhere to be dropped. The inventory screen can also often be organized and show additional details, such as the weight of all items carried for games with inventory weight limits.

Note

P2W (pay-to-win) games may offer convenience features that allow for bigger bags (inventory) or the ability to carry more weight.

What is inventory Tetris?

Example of inventory Tetris in the game Diablo 2.

Inventory Tetris is slang describing an inventory system with items of different sizes. For example, most inventory systems are a grid style, with only so many boxes available. Big items like a sword or a shield may take up more than one of the available boxes, as shown in the picture of inventory in Diablo 2. Because of all the different-sized items managing your inventory becomes like a game of Tetris, where you must move box-shaped items to fill up empty boxes. In our picture, if we had a new shield we wanted to store in our inventory we'd need to move items around until we had enough space to place the item. Some developers have solved this problem by moving away from having different sized inventory items and making everything only occupy one square.

Tip

Some games have a button or keyboard shortcut that auto arranges your inventory.

3. When used as a verb, taking an inventory describes making a list and counting any available items. For example, a spreadsheet can keep an inventory of how many goods you have for sale and their quantities. A business can know when more goods need to be ordered by keeping an inventory.

Tip

Companies with a large inventory may use an ERP (enterprise resource planning) to help manage and control their inventory.

4. When describing Internet advertising, inventory is how many available page views a company can offer to an advertiser that's not part of their booked space.

Barcode, Business terms, Computer slang, FIFO, Game terms, Internet terms, Item, LIFO, List, SMS, Stock