Smart Moves

A key feature of DIM is that it will make sure that item moves succeed, unless it cannot (because you're completely out of space). If you move an item to a character that is full, DIM will move one of that character's items to the Vault, or even another character, to make space. This is essential for making things like Loadouts work - when many items need moving, DIM usually needs to shuffle others around. The core idea is that if you ask DIM to move an item somewhere, it will do that, and will do anything else necessary to make that happen.

As part of this, it's important to understand that DIM, and other Destiny apps, cannot move an item directly from one character to another - they must always move an item from one character to the Vault, and then from the Vault to another character. This means DIM always makes space in the Vault for items that are moved.

Likewise, apps cannot "overfill" a bucket - if you already have 9 helmets on a character and try to add a 10th, DIM must make room. Sometimes this can mean multiple other items have to move - for example, say your Vault is full and your character is full on helmets, and you ask to move a helmet from the Vault to that target character. DIM will:

1. Move an item out of the Vault to make 1 space. It may move an item onto your target character, but prefers other characters if they have space, ideally the least recently played character.
2. Move one of the helmets off the target character into the Vault (this is why we made the Vault space in step 1).
3. Move the requested helmet from the Vault to the target character.

In this example, you asked to move one item but three moves had to happen. For complex operations like loadout application, which moves multiple items, this gets even more complicated: DIM will reserve space for other loadout items, to avoid having to move too many items. This is why it's best to keep plenty of space in your Vault, and to add Tags and Notes to your items so that if they're moved, you can easily find them again.

Keep in mind that DIM does not randomly decide which items to move aside to make room. It has a bunch of rules to make smart decisions about what gets moved:

1. Equipped items are only moved if they must be to satisfy the rule that you cannot have two Exotic items equipped.
2. Items that have been manually moved recently won't get moved automatically unless there's no other choice.
3. An item tries to stay on a character, or move to that character, if it's in the character's in-game Loadouts.
4. Tags matter! Keep/Favorite items tend to stay on a character, while Infuse fuel and Archived items migrate towards the Vault.
5. Items tend to leave characters with an incompatible class, and move to character classes which can use them.
6. Lower-power or lower-rarity items are more likely to go to the Vault.