My exact suggestion: Just make the chest appear on the ground like any coin/level item, still keep the little "new chest!" sign over the inventory, as that is none-intrusive and actually useful.

During the tutorial, getting a chest is a big deal and it's cool how it sort of forces the player to acknowledge it and plays a little animation before the player can claim the chest.

After about 40 resets it gets pretty damn old, though. Every time I get a chest I kinda cringe a bit cos it throws off the game so much, making me click the chest, wait for it to do it's animation, click claim chest, and finally back into the game. Really throws a wrench into the flow of the game. Even worse if you're afk, the chest will sit there for 10 seconds before being automatically claimed. Why on earth?

Just as a rule of thumb I think we should avoid anything pausing or slowing the game just to grab the player's attention. It's an idle game.

Hey NoName, you can go into the options and turn off 'auto pause' and this means the chest will take 10 seconds to be picked up instead of the default 8 minutes or whatever it is.

I honestly have no idea why that's even an option to begin with lol. Who would want that?

thanks for the info powerfrog