Various pawns for various reasons over the game seem to carry items in their "Inventory". Your colonists do it when training animals, and other pawns carry meals and silver, quite a neat little thing to actually be able to carry something without it being equipped or hauled.
My Suggestion is that the player can command colonists to add certain items into their inventory for future use, obviously limits would apply otherwise colonists would turn into walking storage zones. However one use I can already see for this is field medics. Give a guy a personal shield, and some medicine is his inventory, and he could go into a firefight and fix some boys up on the field. This is just an example, but I imagine their are lots of good reasons, both for RP and gameplay.
i would honestly think this would be cool to see in game
Livingston,
I've suggested a RPG-like inventory/equipment system (mine included encumbrance) before. So I support your suggestion. A proper GUI with a preference system for each slot. Ect.
Cheers,
Michael
Until it's implemented into the game, there is The Tool for the Haul, it adds backpacks and carts to the game, especially backpacks are pretty nice, if you're using it together with Mai+Robots hauling robots, you might find them robots doing hauling parties in your storage rooms if there's not a lot to do, meaning they will constantly use the carts to stack up stuff in your main stockpile, but that problem and it's pathfinding issues are removable by forbidding the carts until there's a big haul again, do not under any circumstance try to wear a backpack with a bot, it will just crash the game.
This would actually be really nice.
I've had a situation once or twice before where I had to micromanage someone from my kitchen/dining hall area to my prison complex because a prisoner was starving and a manhunter pack I couldn't fight was roaming around. It's also a little annoying to have to send out a sniper without a meal in their pocket. I mean, you can set up a stockpile and tell them to haul (assuming they haul) but that's really fiddly. Opening up that one slot inventory space (even keeping it restricted it to meals) for the player to manipulate would be sweet.
Yeah Exactly Veneke, it's a very simple thing to do I would think, but would impact the game a lot. It's small things like this that Rimworld still needs work on