Your Diablo 4 stash is tiny because a bigger one would fry your PC: 'This isn't a storage concern, it's a performance concern'

Diablo 4 Sorceress surrounded by undead monsters

(Image credit: Activision Blizzard)

As we all know, Diablo 4 is in desperate need of the KonMari Method. There's just too much stuff clogging up your inventory and littering the floors, and it's had players crying out for a solution since the game released.

Blizzard has pledged to make things better in Diablo 4's upcoming 1.1.1 patch with the addition of a single extra tab in the game's stash screen—the big chest where you can store all your unneeded knick-knacks—but that's got players asking why the devs don't just add infinite stash tabs with room for infinite items. Problem solved, right?

Wrong. According to Diablo 4 associate game director Joseph Piepiora (via Gamespot), the reason Blizzard hasn't just given everyone a veritable bounty of stash slots is because doing so would slow the game to a crawl and potentially turn your PC into an RGB-festooned air fryer.

Speaking on Twitter, Piepiora told one curious player that "When we say they are expensive what we mean is that they create a lot of memory overhead," because whenever you "see another player in game you load them and their entire stash filled with all their items".

"This isn’t a storage concern," said Piepiora, "it’s a performance concern".

When we say they are expensive what we mean is that they create a lot of memory overhead. When you see another player in game you load them and their entire stash filled with all their items. This is what teams are working diligently to improve so that we can have more asap.July 22, 2023

So if you run into a player who has filled their infinite (or even just abundant) stash slots with thousands upon thousands of items, your poor PC has to do the work of loading that lucre in. The good news is that Piepiora says Diablo's teams "are working diligently to improve so that we can have more ASAP," the bad news is that you're stuck with your woefully inadequate number of stash tabs until they figure it out.

Diablo 4's 1.1.1 patch should be here in the next couple of weeks, per Blizzard's emergency Campfire Chat last Friday. That stream was put together to address fan fury about Diablo 4's pre-season 1 patch, which caused wall-to-wall discontent in the community after it came out last week. Blizzard vowed never to release a patch like it "ever again," but I think the studio has a hard row to hoe before it gets back in fans' good graces, if indeed it ever does.

One of Josh's first memories is of playing Quake 2 on the family computer when he was much too young to be doing that, and he's been irreparably game-brained ever since. His writing has been featured in Vice, Fanbyte, and the Financial Times. He'll play pretty much anything, and has written far too much on everything from visual novels to Assassin's Creed. His most profound loves are for CRPGs, immersive sims, and any game whose ambition outstrips its budget. He thinks you're all far too mean about Deus Ex: Invisible War.