Oolite Bulletins

I am sure that I read somewhere on this site ages ago, that it may be possible to expand the commodites list (F8).

You would be able to click on, say, the Food item and it would then expand down (or come up with a new list) of different types of food that you could buy. Each food item would either have the same price per tonne or there would be maybe a Cr or 2 difference between each type of food.
Then, in your cargo manifest, instead of just seeing 5 tonnes of Food, you would see something like 2T of Peaches, 2T of Old Earth Onions, 1T of Leestian Banana Grubs.

Is this being looked into, or even possible?

Other than that, what would happen if I added more items to a commodites plist file? Would the extra items be shown on the F8 screen or is there a limit to what can be listed?

Thanks.

Expanding the commodities is not currently possible. You could probably add another commodity or two, however I am not sure whether the additional lines would fit on the screen.

What you can do relatively easily is to rename the commodities. One simple way is to change their display names only, like for instance the various localization OXPs do. Internally the commodity identifiers would remain the same, but you could for instance change "Liquor/Wines" into "Champagne" at the front end. By not touching the identifiers you make sure that the same commodities remain illegal to take out of a main station.