Logging into Star Wars the Old Republic for some Imperial trio levelling on Tuesday evening, I was very pleasantly surprised to notice a new convenience feature: the materials inventory.
This separate storage now allows my characters to ‘bank’ crafting materials and save on a ton of bag and bank space! I’d not heard anything about this in the run up to the expansion but it’s a major gameplay plus for me. On my Bounty Hunter alone it’s saved 38 different slots worth of inventory space between mats gathered from his two gathering professions, vendor-sold components and augmentation components (and my old main just saved 79!).
The convenient one-click button shown above on the main inventory tab also acts similar to “Deposit Collectable” option on the inventory in Guild Wars 2. Just as convenient and with some item quality filters to give customisability. Moving items from the cargo hold to this new storage does require more old-fashioned clicking as there’s no corresponding button on the cargo hold UI, but that’s a chance to do a proper spring-clean of bank space.
The user interface in general seems to have received a new lick of paint as the item hover-detail shows above – bold coloured backgrounds to show item quality for instance. Lots to take in, though I’m very glad this new feature is included for Preferred players (no idea if it’s also on a purely free-to-play account?). It seems on par with the Guild Wars 2 equivalent, and definitely superior to the Elder Scrolls Online crafting bag that’s only available to subscribers. I’ll not be subscribing to unlock the new story content for a while but the expansion has brought some nice improvements to our lower level group sessions!
GamingSF 
I’d heard some mutterings about the material storage being limited to subscribers even though Bioware had stated nothing of the sort. Nice to hear that it’s actually available to non-subscribers as well, especially in this expansion where they’ve generally lifted some more of the limitations for free and preferred players.