Be it glitch or game design I, and I'm sure many others noticed that corpses disappear in this game. And I'm also sure there is a cap on how big your save file can get before you start running into constant crashes glitches ect... Well my thought is, what if we pick up everything and I mean EVERYTHING that we have absolutely no use for and dump it all into a corpse we killed in that area. So when the game inevitably deletes the corpse in question it also gets rid of a large amount of garbage that keeps our file size growing and growing. Sure it will lead to a LOT of constant annoying over encumbered messages, but all we will have to do is find a corpse and dump the trash. Heh heh Fallout: New Vegas...The Trash Collectors. I need to start a new game anyway so I'm going to do that and see what happens. I probably wont steal the garbage, but just all the stuff I find while exploring and whatnot.

I'd assume that whenever you interact with an object this data needs to be saved so rather than picking up all of the loose items (which the game much now remember have been moved) you should probably not touch anything unless it's important.

True, but then why does the file size get larger by leaps whenever you simply get to a town? I just figured that the game then marked that area as explored and automatically marked every item in that area as discovered and you can freely do whatever you want with it. You can see it immediately if you save before even picking up a food item, then pick the item up and eat it and save again, the file size actually goes down albeit 1kb, but it goes down without you ever interacting with it beforehand. This was just a thought on getting rid of all the misc items in a different, but seemingly similar way to eating. Guess there would never really any way of knowing for sure until someone came with the know-how to get into the nuts and bolts of the game mechanics to see what really effects the file size constantly getting larger and ways of lowering it. :shrug:

Keeping stuff will not affect the size of the save file particularly much I think, especially not if you only keep more of something you already have.

I've seen it suggested, for example, that you shouldn't keep more ammo than you need. Well, the 'info' on ammo of a certain sort is most likely just kept in a variable, and having the number in that variable 2000 instead of 75 isn't making it bigger (i.e. it doesn't occupy more space on the hard drive). The idea of keeping less ammo I guess is based on some sort of crazy anology to real life. Yeah in real life more ammo would mean more space and more to carry around and to keep track of, but in the game the space in RAM and in the save file is exactly the same whether you have 5 bullets or 50000. Literally exactly the same, it's just a different number in a (same-sized) variable.

I don't know exactly how it's programmed of course or how they keep track of items you carry around (or store somewhere), but I don't see how it can take up much space. Even just 1 kB (which is 1/1000 of an MB) is enough space to keep track of a lot of items.