No, it isn’t straightforward because SHARED and INSTANCED loot uses completely different coding.
Also, if you find so hard to share and trade, there is the housing system, and there you can put 10000 millions of chests, put them in shared mode and throw everything you don’t need there so people can check for themself at anytime they wish, since they wont need you to trade manually.
Taking us as an example, we have an house that is so filled with crap that we don’t know where to put it.
Everytime we go alone to get loot around the various regions we’ll then get back at the base to empty ourselfs on the chests there.
We didn’t get to the point of owning houses with overwhelming amount of chests and loot, so it might be a different experience when you’re later in the game.
Regarding effort I might be wrong, I was judging by the q&a where it seems that separate loot was their first implementation – and it was changed to shared later. Also, spawning a bespoke “loot” entity with a bound player id, which would only be instantiated/rendered for that specific player seems like pretty basic logic. Considering the world has a real-time shared state, which is normally not at all simple to do – this should barely even register in terms of developer work (game design implications might be a different story).
It is not “late in the game”. We just farmed a couple of zones, gathered all together the required silver and we filled in an house to organize ourselfs. And that happend right after we got inside sacrament.
I think that the best fix would be to increase the drop tables until Sacrament is unlocked. Typically the game seems to update loot tables around key events. It would make sense to increase the loot table until that point in the game and then it can be reverted to a normal loot table.
I do agree there should be a slight bump in natural resources produced by the random spawns around the world (not nodes) and chests.
Played almost all weekend. Never had a issue with loot.
We communicated with each other when we found new stuff on the beach. In case anyone wanted to try a weapon. The trade function took a bit to get used to but it made us constantly talk with each other about wha we were finding.
Once we got a bit further in and figured out our builds we knew to look out for specific loot for each other.
We usually have way more loot then we know what to do with.
Having a played another 10 hours after, I confidently say that this issue does indeed go away like others have mentioned.
It seems this issue is the only problematic within the first 2-3 hours before reaching the city, and the problem is amplified if you are a new comer to the game when a lot of the mechanics are unfamiliar.
edit:
During the twitch stream on 2026/01/26, it seems enemy drops are scaled in multiplier but not chest. ( Twitch )
Adding to other people’s opinion, I agree with that loot sharing is at the moment a bit cumbersome to use.
To trade anything you would have to go through:
Interact with your friend
select trade
find the item you want to share
on your end set accept trade
your friend does the same
maybe add an option to hold Y (on controller) when interacting to jump straight into the trade menu
not true imo. the more people in the session, the more enemies spawn, the more loot you get. you then cooperate and share with eachother cuz it’s a coop mode hehe. the game is not responsible for your personal failings at interpersonal dynamics…
you can argue for streamlining the sharing process, i think if they added chat and allowed item linking & comparison through that it’d be fine and remove the friction of opening a trade but your friend not really needing the item
Loot primarily based on world, buildings and host-player, not guest-players, stop trying to complete game in two hours of one evening. If the game has as much loot as you ask for, you’ll get tired of playing after a couple of minutes due to the overabundance of gear.
It seems that most players agree that in the first two hours of the game, loot is a bit scarce and needs to be reviewed. That only happens during the first few hours; as you progress through the game, the loot becomes more balanced and you end up with plenty of it. As for whether loot should be shared or not, I think it should continue to be shared. My friend and I are almost level 30, and loot has been abundant for a long time now. We sell almost everything we find that we don’t need. From the early-mid game onwards, loot is no longer a problem.
The loot system for coop is objectively flawed. While I don’t mind sharing and cooperation, there are some resources that are just to scarce to make looting enjoyable and I really only think that applies to embers, stuff like research paper, and rarer mats (bear hearts, skulls, etc).
Shops offer 1-2 to share between 4 people per 24 hours, which is rough.
Can’t farm for them because 4 people running around trying to farm embers for their builds have cleaned up the world just to get like 2 (if they’re lucky).
Like I said, I don’t mind sharing loot but I’m not gonna micromanage my friends who also need them for their builds. And the best option is almost entirely to start up a single player world to farm and at that point, why am I playing multiplayer? The current loot system combined with the size of the current world, methods of farming, and cooldowns for loot reset just don’t make looting feel too great for multiplayer play when you’re pretty much locked out of getting any outside of crucible (which offers abysmal rates, not to mention if someone dies they’re just stuck sitting there watch us stream for 15 minutes and get no loot) since the world has been sucked dry, at least when you’re playing with all 4 players. I can definitely see this being better at 1-2 players.
I also think that the daily/weekly/challenge/bounty system should be a target for a multiplayer change at the bare minimum for exp.
Edit: After beating the game, I still think this is true. Paper becomes abundant but for the early game it needs a supplemental boost as it becomes really competitive initially for people to unlock different research. Eventually embers do get more available through plague outbreaks but these aren’t fun to run over and over again but thank god they scale loot for players that contribute. If anything, I’d rather run crucible as this seems to be the mode designed specifically for replay-ability. Once you get far enough, loot from the crucible just becomes uninteresting fodder.
