i guess it was bugging the crap out of me, no pun intended, so i ended up fixing the inventory issue i was having in build turns out, for whatever reason the old saveData was invalid. starting the game from scratch and playing through, i was able to interact with the inventory, no problem. however, i was having issues saving the game now! went ahead and did a development build and was getting all kinds of errors… kinda worried me at first, but then i started to see where they were all pointing and noticed a null argument exception. i narrowed this down to the new data i added to the game save for equipment purchased and with a simple null check when saving/loading, everything seems gravy now onward! to a weekend without wonder