I'm not sure if WhiteThunder has been cooking up something for the backpacks plugin, but with the new officially added backpacks to Rust, the backpacks plugin is less useful.

Personally, I think you should revamp this plugin to allow adjusting the default sizes for the official backpacks per user permission/usergroup. This allows VIP's to utilize more storage in the default backpacks :)

It's not really possible to do that. This will most likely remain the same as it currently is. It's still useful, offers even more storage.

I find that BackPacks plugin is still as usefull as it was before, It always amazes me that 'Official site" players look with scorn at modded servers but every time a dev creates a usefull plugin it sooner or later "magically" appears as a FP initiative (several years later) and enters the "vanilla" game. You have a poor copy of HumanNpc and BotRespawn bots with scientists (who are not as smart), You have the game map which is not as clear or detailed as the RustIO map. Now you have BackPacks, and we will see how that turns out.

The most fundamental difference between vanilla backpacks and this plugin is that vanilla backpacks are items. This is important because it means that players need to basically earn the storage capacity itself (unless players spawn with free backpacks via plugins). This plugin allows players to retain the backpack capacity indefinitely, even after the backpack contents have dropped next to their corpse on death.

While this plugin is called "Backpacks", many servers actually use this plugin like a "Bank" plugin, essentially a safe storage space where items will be kept after death or even after server wipe. Such use cases have demanded additional capabilities that wouldn't be relevant to backpack items, such as item restrictions and keep-on-wipe rulesets, which the plugin provides.

While the overall feature set of Backpacks is fortunately pretty simple and straight-forward (store items, access those items), the underlying implementation and related plugins have actually evolved into a somewhat complex 10k+ lines-of-code beast in order to address various edge cases and maintain a high performance bar. The internal complexity is something I continually need to contend with when considering additional use cases, including enhancements to vanilla backpacks.

I'm probably never going to "rework" or "revamp" the plugin. The existing design, which provides players access to a remote storage container with a variety of features, will always be relevant to a significant number of servers. That being said, there's definitely an opportunity for a plugin to expand on the vanilla backpacks for servers that utilize it (whether or not they utilize this plugin in conjunction). My preference would be to handle vanilla backpack enhancements in a separate plugin (i.e., "Backpack Settings" or whatever name it takes), primarily because I see it as a different set of use cases. I'm open to developing or contributing to such a plugin, as the community feedback develops, but there are some fundamental limitations that can't be solved, most notably that the server cannot detect players opening and closing the backpack, so there's no way to add UI controls on the backpack for the purposes of gather/retrieve and multiple pages.

If you are looking to expand on the concept of backpacks as items, while enhancing the vanilla backpacks is a valid approach, it still needs to be designed and implemented, and is subject to significant limitations, whereas the Bag of Holding plugin already has a great implementation of that concept and has been established for over a year. It was also the pioneer of the gather mode feature which I eventually implemented in Backpacks. The only issue is that it's a paid plugin, but justifiably so as it was obviously a lot of work (as was Backpacks, I just happen to be generous enough to have donated the hundreds of hours of development and support that it took to get to this point). I have in fact contributed to Bag of Holding plugin multiple times because I really like the idea, and I like working on it as it has a very complete and performant technical implementation that is rarely seen in plugins. If you are interested in that plugin but don't find the price affordable, the developer (whose username is the opposite of mine for some reason) has repeatedly stated that they are willing to offer large discounts to those who ask.

I will continue to use this plugin as i find it usefull as a reward item, No player gets a backpack on joining the server (and i have removed both backpack items from Betterloot loottable) , They have to be on the server for one hour to gain a six slot backpack, the more time they stay on the server the more slots they get. The same is true of the other backpack funtions,
I am extremely grateful for the amount of time you have put into this plugin and the results you have achieved.

I love the new vanilla backpack items a lot because like the rest "plugins officially added to the game" we again have proper implementation (no commands, intuitive to use and proper vanilla controls, etc). Respect for all plugin developers and I know this is not their fault for this problem, the game is limited a lot unless Facepunch do it their way. Still the /backpack plugin offers a lot of features and CAN NOT be replaced. On our PVE servers players love this plugin and it's the most used one. Combined with the vanilla backpacks you can have the ultimate combo but without this plugin you have nothing.

Now I want to make one suggestion and I hope @WhiteThunder can implement it. Currently by permission you can give everyone to have Gather All/Existing to your /backpacks. Also allow ItemRetriever as well. While the retrive feature is supported on the vanilla backpacks too, players are asking if we can also have the Gather thing. Maybe that's a suggestion for a separate plugin or it can be added to this one? If added to this plugin, I'll also instantly add it to my personal x2 server as well (where I usually don't like players to use virtual made up things of any kind).

Keep the good work on this plugin!