Disney Dreamlight Valley's Lead Producer, Manea Castet, recently sat down with Polygon to give further details on the game's recently revealed content roadmap for 2023, and one of the most relevant pieces of info they relayed was that the first major update, coming this February, would bring significant quality-of-life improvements to item sorting.
Disney Dreamlight Valley has been out in early access since September, and it's had a pretty healthy fanbase so far that's enjoyed engaging in life sim mechanics with Disney characters in a Disney setting. The game hasn't been perfect, of course, with many bugs and glitches, some even preventing players from completing quests, but they've been patched over time, and Castet marks the importance of player feedback during this indefinite early access period.
"For each update," Castet stated, "around 50% of [it] is community-driven... There are a ton of quality-of-life changes coming, like an improved storage system." Disney Dreamlight Valley players have long complained that dealing with the storage system was an exercise in tedium. Items are stored in chests in your house, but as the game goes along, you need numerous chests to have enough space for all your things. Furthermore, the chests are totally identical, and you can't see what's in them without opening them.
So, unless players have a particularly sharp memory, if they're looking for one specific item, they often have to open and sift through each individual chest to find it. Not to mention, items don't stack automatically, which makes putting things in chests exhausting in the first place. The upcoming February update will add several types of chests, so you can differentiate between them from the outside, and it will also add "a panel, so you can see what's in the chest before opening it, too."
The roadmap listed three major updates to come in the first half of 2023, and Castet spoke a bit about each one. The second one, scheduled for April, will add Simba from The Lion King, as well as a Lion King realm, which wasn't included with the previous addition of Scar. The third is simply slated for Early Summer, but Castet states it will bring a "huge step forward with the main story," as everyone comes together to uncover what's behind 'the Forgetting'. Finally, Castet revealed that, in a future update in the second half of 2023, Beauty and the Beast protagonist Belle will be moving into the valley.