Consider that an 8MB save file isn't necessarily a problem. If you have that much space to use, you might not want to just store the attributes of the items, b

Consider that an 8MB save file isn't necessarily a problem. If you have that much space to use, you might not want to just store the attributes of the items, but their entire history, without regard to the size of a history entry, because you can reasonably assume that people aren't going to spend a lifetime crafting items in this game. You can just start implementing it this way because you speculate that you may find a cool use for it, somewhere way down the line during development, when changing that system would become prohibitive. If you don't find a use for it, the overhead still doesn't matter.