Thanks Garry - this is a clever solution. I'll file it away for future reference. I have a boolean tagged to each object, which works well enough but could get unwieldy if I have a box full of stuff. In my version, I could put the objects back in the containers if I wanted to code that in as well. But as it is, it's not necessary for the game play, so I've got a 'there's no point in doing that!' type message instead, which is familiar adventure game shorthand for 'you could have done that, if the author had bothered to code it...'