Genshin Impact player breaks their crafting function through excessive screen-making

The Serenitea Pot is a system in Genshin Impact that allows players to craft furniture and build their own custom homes and landscapes. Players have come up with plenty of lavish builds, but if you take things too far, you can completely disable your furniture crafting function altogether.

Reddit user u/Enmityaz found this out the hard way. They’ve been on a years-long grind crafting more and more Pine Folding Screens until the game itself eventually told them, “no more.”

How did this happen?

When the Serenitea Pot function first launched in Genshin Impact, this particular piece of furniture was the most resource and space-efficient way to obtain the most points. Players who wanted to maximize their teapot points quickly figured out that crafting dozens of Pine Folding Screens and packing them into neat rows was the best way to min-max this otherwise relaxing game mode. This practice is called crypto mining within the community, since a roomful of screens looks a lot like rows and rows of crypto mining rigs.

When most players reached the points threshold where they unlocked all meaningful rewards, they stopped crafting additional screens. But not Enmityaz. They had a goal, a vision. Let the other players have their fancy mansions and hot tubs. Enmityaz would have screens upon screens — nothing but a sea of glorious Pine Folding Screens as far as the game could render.

So they kept crafting. Each screen takes 16 real-life hours to craft, and you can only craft five of them at a time. There are some ways to speed up crafting, but this would still be a painfully long endeavor.

They soon ran out of space in their teapot, but continued to hoard screens in their inventory. They posted updates to Reddit when they reached 3,334 screens. Then 8,002. Finally, in October 2023, they posted the glorious final update: 9,999 Pine Folding Screens, the absolute maximum that Genshin Impact allows in their inventory.

But they needed more. Curious and determined, they filled up their five furniture crafting slots with five more Pine Folding Screens. After the 16-hour crafting time, they came back to collect the finished furniture.

Except the game wouldn’t let them. Their inventory was full on this particular item. Oops. The crafting slots couldn’t be cleared without claiming the finished screens, but furniture can’t be deleted from the inventory either. Stalemate. Enmityaz can no longer craft anything in their Serenitea Pot, folding screen or otherwise. Their furniture crafting function is as good as bricked.

Can it be fixed?

As one does when encountering an in-game issue, Enmityaz contacted customer support. Hours later, they received a response to the effect of, “Your inventory is not limitless, that’s why you’re not able to collect the next furnishings.” Well, we already knew that. That’s not helpful. There hasn’t been another follow-up since.

Hopefully, HoYoverse is able to figure out a solution to this predicament. I honestly don’t blame the developers for this design oversight. I doubt that any other player has ever reached 9,999 of the same furniture, and developers probably never even considered the possibility. Who knew someone would be willing to spend years crafting the same item over and over again?

Realistically, it seems the solution would be to give players a way to destroy crafted items without claiming them. It seems Enmityaz would prefer some other way to continue hoarding though.

Until a solution is implemented, Enmityaz is stuck with a broken teapot, unable to craft anything new.

But why though?

All this leaves me wondering…why? Why embark on this years-long journey of crafting nothing but Pine Folding Screens? When another user asked this question, Enmityaz replied:

“When teapot came out, these were unlocked by default and were worth a lot of Adeptal Energy, so people crafted loads of this so they can max out the Serenitea coins ASAP. When I was finished, I had 80 of these. 80 was enough for me to consider going for 9,999.”

-u/Enmityaz

…Which boils down to, “just because.” And honestly? I aspire to this level of dedication. We could all learn something from Enmityaz. What that lesson is, I don’t know, but there is something to be learned here.