Some items cannot be taken

Does that include the small statue of Sequanna in the bandits lair

We also need to be able to harvest mushrooooms....

 

Quest items it was possible to lose permanently, if you dropped them in lava or something as they were unique items and didn't refresh. It was also important not to give quest items to companions because when their health got low they'd panic and run away and would start throwing items out of their backpack to lighten the load so they could get away faster. This meant if you weren't paying attention that enchanted hourglass you needed might have got dropped at some random point in the forest where you had a fight with bandits and you might not realise it to two hours later. This was a fail state if you couldn't find it again (it was there somewhere but it's a needle in haystack thing).

That said in the later games general items did respawn in a sense meaning there was an infinite supply of food and health potions you could steal (there was an infinite supply of enemies that dropped gold so you could also buy them) and most NPC's homes wouldn't become completely empty because as part of their scheduling they would go to their kitchens, work stations, store fronts etc. and walk around to different surfaces in the room (tables/benches etc.) and place down and subsequently pick up random objects related to their task/profession. So Healers would place down things like bandages, reagents, flasks and completed potions, tailors would put down bolts of cloth, scissors etc. anyone cooking would put down pots/pans, flagons, plates, and assorted food stuffs. Just putting down things, wandering around, picking up things they'd put down... So it looked like they were actively sorting their inventory to use the items they working with. In reality they weren't doing crap. They are just animating next to surfaces while spawning and deleting items.

I'm hoping this is a feature that eventually makes it into SotA in addition to NPC's wandering around and picking up the stuff avatars drop (good job for quards and beggers) such that the NPC's redecorate their environment as part of their schedule. It goes a huge way to make the world feel interactive and alive. They also need to comment when stuff goes missing of course.