Devlog: Server-Authoritative Inventory and Anti-Dupe Systems

For most of pre-alpha the client held a copy of your inventory and told the server what changed. That is the fastest way to build an inventory and the fastest way to lose an economy. This overhaul inverts it completely: the client holds a render-only mirror, every action is a request, and the authoritative state lives in a single server-side container service that owns every slot in the world, including bags, banks, chests, trade windows and loot bags.

Practically, that means picking up an item is now a request that can be denied. The client shows an optimistic preview for about a frame and then either confirms or rolls back from the server snapshot. Because every container is owned by one service, transfers are atomic: an item cannot exist in two places even for a single tick, which removes the entire class of dupes that lives in that gap. We also log every transfer with a stable item instance ID, so if something does go wrong we can trace exactly where a specific object travelled.

This was invasive work and it will keep paying off. Crafting, the player market, housing storage, and full-loot death drops all sit on top of this service, and each one of those is a place where a naive implementation would have leaked value into the economy. Next up on the networking side is the aggro and threat table, which needs the same treatment.