[Drajor]

Originally Posted by Tabasco

You're Telling CreateBaseItem to create an item instance with 0 charges.

As an aside, using the starting_items table is good design. You may not need the flexibility, but what about the convenience?
Once you have your build environment it's pretty easy to recompile but using the table in the database is going to be faster to do in any case, fewer keystrokes, and less opportunity for errors that spawn support threads. In terms of time alone you're at a significant net loss.

ItemInst* SharedDatabase::CreateBaseItem(const Item_Struct* item, sint16 charges) {
	ItemInst* inst = NULL;
	if (item) {
		if (charges == 0)
			charges = item->MaxCharges;

		if(item->CharmFileID != 0 || (item->LoreGroup >= 1000 && item->LoreGroup != -1)) {
			inst = new EvoItemInst(item, charges);
			((EvoItemInst*)inst)->Initialize(this);
		}
		else 
			inst = new ItemInst(item, charges);		
	}
	return inst;
}

Where parameter charges is 0, it presumably uses the value maxcharges from the DB.