Items play an integral part in your characters progression in WoW. Not only do you have to collect better weapons, clothing, equipment and raw materials such as the various herbs for your tradeskills, you also need to collect special items such as quest items which need to be carried to complete quests. Having so many items causes a storage problem so in this section we take a look at how you can maximise on storage with the use of bags.

What's the maximum storage slots I can get?

All characters have 5 available bag slots in which to place bags and these slots are located on the bottom right hand corner of your toolbar. One of them is filled with a 16-slot Backpack that everybody starts out with and this bag is not removable from the fifth bag slot. When you purchase a bag from a vendor, buy a bag at auction or find a bag after looting, you simply slot the bag into one of these four slots. These bags don't take up any additional space in your standard 16 slot Backpack since they are equipped rather than "just being another item in your inventory".

18-slot bags can be made by tailors with the approriate uber rare recipe and Onyxia also drops Onyxia Hide bags (18 slots) so you can potentially have 88 storage slots on your person. Inventory-tastic!

How are items sorted in my bags?

Bags come in various sizes and colours and how you utilise these is up to each individual player. For example you may want a particular bag colour to only hold food items or a bag to only hold quest items which can make it easier to find specific items quickly. WoW does not feature an auto-arrange inventory feature for this reason so where you place the items is where it will stay in the bag.

One of the most useful methods for organizing your items that many players use:

• Leftmost bag contain essential items that you must carry. These items include your skinning knife, mining pick, hearthstone, your pet and your mount.
• Second back contains quest related items.
• Third bag contains raw materials such as herbs and ore and cloth go into the third.
• Fourth for general loot to sell to vendors.
• Fifth (backpack) for general loot to sell to vendors.

Make it a habit to regularly sort out your fifth bag (Backpack) and move items you do not want to sell into your other bags so that you do not sell them at the vendor with an accidental right click. When you loot items, if the item in question is stackable, it will stack it with an existing stack. If a new inventory slot is required, the game will always put the item in the Backpack first , and if that has no space, it will put it in the fourth bag and then the third and so on. This is why players tend to put items they never want to sell in the first bag.

Not every item takes a complete slot in your bag. For example, a quest item may stack so 10 of the same quest item will only take a single slot. With many quests requiring multiple items this is just as well. While quest items stack there are limits on stackable items, some stacks may be a maximum of 5 or 20 depending on the item.