User blog comment:Christian Wilson/Inv. Stacking glitch/@comment-4583259-20111125171200

There is one part of the game that tries to break stacks up into smaller stacks to make sure none is bigger than 255. There is another part that adds stacks together, when you move things around in the inventory or when you pick up new blocks that you've just mined.

But when a stack gets to be 255, these two parts of the game seem to fight each other, and the "add together" one wins the fight... then it adds more just to say "I told you so!".

If you have a stack of 1 (a single block) and a stack of 255 and you put the 1 onto the 255, you'll get a stack of 256 and a stack of 1 (256+1).

Then put the 1 on top of the 256 and you'll have a stack of 2 and a stack of 257 (2+257).

Then put the 2 on top of the 257, and you get 259+4.

Then put the 4 on top of the 259 and you get 8+263.

It continues: 271+16, then 32+287, then 319+64, then 128+383, then 511+256, and on and on. The numbers go up into the billions, then suddenly you get what looks like a stack of 1 (a single block with no number). This block is "cursed", you can't move it, use it or throw it away. It uses up a space in the inventory forever.

The worst thing about it though is, if you have one of these bigger-than-255 stacks and you start drilling out new blocks of the same material, every time you pick up a new block the game tries to split the stack into smaller stacks of 255, and you get another stack of 255 in the inventory. Pretty soon your inventory becomes full of lots of stacks of the same material.

So if you're going to take advantage of this "glitch", you need to look in your inventory often and throw away extra stacks of 255 that you find there. And never grow a stack into the thousands or more, because you'll never use that much anyway.

(I first learned about this glitch from a posting by "Abstractwarrior" on Oct 3rd, here on toucharcade.com.)