Addon Spotlight: Customize without hassle with AdiBags

Each week, WoW Insider brings you a fresh look at reader-submitted UIs as well as Addon Spotlight, which focuses on the backbone of the WoW gameplay experience: the user interface. Everything from bags to bars, buttons to DPS meters and beyond -- your addons folder will never be the same. This week, AdiBags steals my heart, you little minx, you.

Welcome to Addon Spotlight, the second most amazing column on WoW Insider next to The Lawbringer. Coincidentally, both columns are written by the most handsome writer, if I do say so myself. Don't tell my raid, but I'm drafting this article during our fights. They don't really need an add tank on heroic Maloriak, do they? Naaaaaaaaaah ...

This week's addon is my new darling inventory addon called AdiBags. Many people have already heard of and are using AdiBags with good reason. Take the wonderful interface of a Baggins-like mod and combine it with the robustness of Arkinventory married to simplicity. Personally, I couldn't be happier. Well, I could be, but not about addons!

Adi should stand for ad(d)icted

What is AdiBags, you ask? AdiBags is an inventory replacement addon that takes over your bag and bank interface and automatically sorts items based on category. Instead of one "dumb" bag, you get one "smart" bag that labels categories and dumps items into a pre-considered category. The feature set that AdiBags sports is robust and clean, easily turning your bags into a powerful interface.

Out of the box

One of the problems with Arkinventory is that, out of the box, the addon is a scary premise. The amount of customization is perfect, wonderful, and my kind of robust. The problem is that many people are not my kind of robust -- out-of-the-box options and setup that is simple to understand is paramount to a complete addon package. AdiBags' default options are categories already active, moving your items into their new homes automatically. Sure, you're going to take a minute to find something that might not have been classified the way you thought it would be, but for the most part, everything is where you'd imagine it to be. In fact, if you're an auction house addict, a lot of the same categories are present in the setup.

Smart filters out of the box include junk (grey) items, item categories like trade goods and consumables, quest items, and automatic gear set sorting based on Blizzard's built-in equipment manager. With Arkinventory, I had to write out my own equipment set string of code and constantly update it. Now, with AdiBags, it does it for me; I just have to set which ones will be displayed.

New items

I hadn't used Baggins or its respective cousins in the inventory addon sphere for a long time because Ark was so comprehensive for me. The existence of the "new item" sort and graphical alert was something that I truly grew to love over the course of my time with AdiBags. New items, recent additions to your inventory, are given their own spot to live for a small amount of time, as well as a glow effect that alerts the player to these new items' location.

Finding new items in your bag, be it a quest item you just picked up or a raid consumable you snagged from the cauldron, is important. The last thing you want to do is rummage around in your inventory, looking for the one flask or potion that you need for the next encounter. I used to misplace quest items all the time back in the old days, when bag mods were not my top priority. AdiBags makes finding new items easy and painless.

Currencies made easy

While the default bag interface allows for a few currencies to be listed alongside gold, AdiBags makes it look just a little nicer. Along the bottom of the bag interface, players can select to show lots of different currencies, from honor and conquest points to Champion's Seals and valor points. You've got a simple readout of your points.

Tidying up

Bag mods have been doing this for a while, but the feature still keeps amazing me every time I use it. Bag Tidying allows you to group up items in disparate stacks automatically. There is even an option for almost-automatic tidying that will attempt to combine items each time the bag window is closed. AdiBags also includes an option that allows you to "group" similar items on top of each other without showing the stacks. For instance, if I have three stacks of elementium ore, it will show as 60 elementium ore in my bags, as opposed to three stacks of 20. It will still take up the requisite bag space, of course, but the at-a-glance quantity checking is invaluable to me.

It's not Arkinventory

AdiBags is not Arkinventory, and people see that as a good and a bad feature. While you will not get the robustness of Arkinventory's monolithic and amazing sorting criteria and customization, you will get something that resembles it and doesn't require the type of setup Ark does. The real magic of AdiBags is giving you the basic sorting needed to give you Ark's functionality without the back-end work.

If you want to change an item's category or sorting preference, just drag and drop that item onto its new category. Can you create your own categories? Absolutely. For instance, I created a category called "Archaeology" for all of my fun archaeology items, like my brand new Ancient Amber. To create a new category, go into the "manual filtering" section under filters, put whatever item you want into the item box, name the section anything you want, and click "add association." It's very easy.

AdiBags even has a built-in LDB data source for displaying how much free bag space you currently have, if you're into that sort of thing.

Bottom line

The biggest endorsement I can make for AdiBags is that so far, the addon has stayed as part of my UI for longer than a week and I haven't gone back to Arkinventory yet. While I'd like some of the sorting to be a bit more robust and have the ability to sort through my alts' bags, or at least see what items exist in quantity on other characters, AdiBags does things right.

Arkinventory has robust alt support and item tracking, while AdiBags is lacking, but hopefully over time this feature will be implemented or worked on by someone. AdiBags is too good of an addon to not get these features at some point in its life.

Download AdiBags at [Curse].

One quick mailbag question because I have literally no idea what this addon being requested is, and maybe you guys and gals can help this person out.

Thanks for the email, Kelley. Anyone? Comments? Mana is definitely not my specialty.

Addons are what we do on Addon Spotlight. If you're new to mods, Addons 101 will walk you through the basics; see what other players are doing at Reader UI of the Week. If there's a mod you think Addon Spotlight should take a look at, email mat@wowinsider.com.