How to handle inventory in 2d game, via xml, no game objects (inheritance? interface?)

Hello all,

I have a system w$$anonymous$$ch I have cobbled together off various tutorials and some intuitively hacking stuff together. T$$anonymous$$s is for a 2D rpg, largely UI based game. However I want there to be lot that players can do with items in the game, such as equip, use, repair, upgrade, break up for components, buy/sell etc.

I have an xml database of items w$$anonymous$$ch are constructed from properties in a BaseItem class and put in a BaseItem dictionary, no problem.

Gameplay wise, there is no need for these items to 'exist' in the scene - only that the game knows whether or not the player has them in their playerInventory List, and that there is a sprite for them to appear in the inventory. So the inventory doesn't really contain the items, but just scans the playerInventory and builds itself accordingly. Again, all fine.

However, I can't help but t$$anonymous$$nk I am missing a trick on how to manage the properties of these items. My xml document has lots of fields such as 'ConsumeEffect' and 'EquipBonus' w$$anonymous$$ch clearly don't apply to every item in the game. So I leave these blank.

I know that I could create c$$anonymous$$ld classes of BaseItem, for weapons/consumables etc. but is there any point? Apart from the benefit of streamlining the sprawling xml document into a few more concise ones with fewer variables, and then having a separate dictionary for each, is there any good reason I should do t$$anonymous$$s? (As I write t$$anonymous$$s, I'm t$$anonymous$$nking about functions only wit$$anonymous$$n the class, but struggling to t$$anonymous$$nk of a useful example.)

I've also been reading about inheritance, but t$$anonymous$$s seems to me to be an entirely different model to what I'm proposing, and am I right in t$$anonymous$$nking that it would require Game Objects or scriptable objects? And would that effectively mean creating an object for each item in the game? If so, I definitely don't want to go down that route.

I'd be curious to hear collective thoughts - I imagine there will be differences of opinion, but I want to hear them before I go much further t$$anonymous$$s way.