I personally enjoy complex industrial setups and the power does add a nice twist. I do however wish there were definitely better ways of handling inventory. I think having resource vats would help mitigate the issue somewhat. A machine that holds and automatically sorts 1 type of smart stack at a time. It would hold up to 9 smart stacks.
For example:
Insert 1 Rock Smart Stack, the machine can now only hold Rock Smart Stacks as long as there is any rock in the machine, once removed you can then insert another type. The same goes for specific rock smart stacks like Sedimentary Rock Smart Stacks or Igneous Rock Smart Stacks. However it would not only work with rocks.
Along with this add item access piping, this piping would be attached to any number of machines the player wishes and the in-game UI for crafting at an attached machine would depict the attached machines inventory with a sample image of the smart stack in use, the name and a number with the total amount available.
This would allow us to put bulk common materials into the vat for easy access while making micro managing smaller rarer resources faster and easier. It’s not an easy mode by any means since it only handles one type of smart stack at a time but it would make micromanaging a little less tedious.
I would love any kind of system like this (I absolutely loved logistic pipes; ender I/0; AE etc in Minecraft) However I wouldn’t be surprised if something like this is never added sice it would add an extra substantial strain on the servers
To put this another way… right now the server verifies all item movements… and only one movement per player can happen at any given time (with the exception of crafting and looting)… easy and scales more or less linearly.
But with a system like this… each player could generate hundreds of item movements… and this number keeps rising as they progress and build more elaborate setups. Theoretically this shouldn’t be an issue with 1-20 players… but 100+?
I would hate to have a bad connection or choppy frame rate because Joe came back from a massive mining trip ><
I suppose it could dragged out over a long period of time so that the server could “chew on it when it was convenient” kinda like queuing up a craft… but how useful would that be?
The idea here isnt to create item movements via moving items between pipes but allow the machines to access a separate storage. Basically the piping would do the same thing that spark cords do. All machines connected to a spark cord have access to however much spark the system has as a whole, it doesn’t feed individual machines. In this case its the same with the items in the vats. In reality it wouldn’t affect the servers or clients much if at all because of how it works.
Dupes are caused by bugs which can be fixed by the devs. I don’t see it causing a huge strain as long as it’s optimized. As it stands spark wires arent causing any significant strain so I don’t see any reason that this wouldnt be able to operate the same way. But alas I can’t speak for the devs on this and there are always implications to new features. Like any game, the implementation of any new update can break other things. All they can do is try new things and apply hotfixes as issues arise.
Perhaps. It’s all mostly speculation. I don’t know anything about how the game handles items and crafting in the underlying code. On 1 hand there’d be no performance impact at all and as long as the code deducted on a 1/1 ratio thered be no duping. On the other hand the game could explode because the code was dirty and the variables caused a stack overflow. The latter is unlikely though considering we are dealing with experienced developers and not the opposite. I figured I would throw a coding joke in there.
After giving it some thought, Queuing crafts wouldn’t necessarily be a bad thing. Think of it this way, nearly everything has a wait time on crafting. Only the most basic things have an instant craft. So with this knowledge the only thing that would eventually bog the server down would be these instantly craftable items. I can think of 2 things that would help alleviate some of that strain. Add a 0.25sec timer on instant crafts and/or implement a global craft queue that only kicks into place once the server detects x number of simultaneous craft operations. The easiest way to find x is to stress test the servers in their current form and every new update that tweaks item crafting or inventory management.
Credits to @Jiivita for bringing in very good points. I just needed a little time to think about what you had to say before replying.