Materials Hopper

I’d love to have a machine attachment that had bulk storage, similar to shop stands, that functioned as material hoppers to the machine they’re connected to. So it’d function as a contents expansion that you have to access the actual hopper to manipulate, but recipes would be able to pull directly from them.

My main interest in this comes from making bricks. You need so much mud, ash and compacted clay, not to mention stone, that it can be tough to manage your inventories while you work on gathering. Then once you have it all you’re doing a lot of running around to make sure you have the correct ingredients.

Another good example would be compacting peaty soil. If you had a hopper you could just load it in and be good to do all your mass crafts. Seems like a small QOL improvement to people who do a lot of mass level crafting!

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Yep! I like it!

The idea that I had takes this to another level.
It works a bit like spark links, but instead of carrying spark it carries items. but it’s not just an item transferring link, it is a sorting system.
there would be at least 2 different components, one would be the input box/hopper/machine and the other would be the sorting tubes. The tubes will adapt to whatever is adjacent to it, like if there is a storage block adjacent to the tube, it will attach and connect to the storage block. If another tube is placed next to another, they will connect and will throughput down the line. If there is nothing but a wall or air, the transfer tube just becomes a throughput unless it is at the end of the line, which would send any unsorted items back to the input hopper and stay there until you go to fill or start the machine (so you can see which items were not sorted thus you need to make more storage or adjust the storage layout (more on that later))

The system would work a lot like when you shift-click items into a storage array, but it sends items one solo stack (max 100) at a time since smart stacks can contain different types of items and the idea is to more accurately organize storage.

But without any setup this system will be just like puking items into storage via shift-click.
The items in the storage blocks need to (or should) be arranged with at least one of any type of item in any given slot.
If a storage slot contains more than one type of item for example some raw prime meat and raw earthyams, the sorter will keep putting raw prime and raw yams, but NOT edible lamella or raw waxy earthyams. if there is an open storage slot, then the edible lamella OR raw waxy earthyams will go there, depending on which item gets sorted first.
open storage slots will always take the next item to be sorted that doesn’t already have a dedicated slot.
This is why it is important to pre-sort at least one of each item into all of the slots available otherwise open slots will just get filled with whatever comes next.
If there are items not getting sorted that do have a slot, you could make room by rearranging slots, for example: raw meat comes back to the input hopper because the last raw meat stack filled to 900 but there are 2 stacks of raw lean meat with maybe a few hundred total so just combine them into one stack because you don’t get as much, then spread some or even one raw meat to the open slot and reactivate the sorter.

I’m thinking the input hopper should have enough input slots that you can shift click your entire inventory into it (or even a button in the UI to take all blocks and drops)
also the items won’t leave the input hopper until you close the UI or click a sort button (up to the devs on that)

I hope this makes sense and is enough information to fully understand it, please feel free to ask about it or elaborate!

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Tubes sound fun! I have a conveyor belt automation idea brewing, but I would just LOVE to have a big mass place to drop a bunch of peaty soil or stone and call it a day! Nothing too complicated, just let me dump stuff in to one place for all my mass crafts that I don’t care about colors.

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