I hear ya. When I was building an inventory setup for my low kb rpg, I had to be careful in ensuring that each byte spent counted for something. I ended up on settling on 16 bytes per item: 8 for the name, 8 for details, like cost, damage, etc. For most equipment I ended up settling on a progression setup where each piece was more beneficial than the last, but the cost went up considerably. Since I allocated one byte for cost, the number was multiplied by 25 to give me a max. price of 6375 for an item, so my chest and enemy gold drops reflect that max. If anything costs 0, it's a special item and it gets special treatment like, "It can't be sold or dropped".
