I’m pretty sure citing an example is 
ok. The thread is about machine automation and interactive, functional things…that’s what games like Satisfactory & Factorio do best, right?
Next time, try to find a larger photo 
jk
And that could lead to an aerobic septic system that sprays fertilizer on your crops 
(I remember learning about those as a kid and was horrified that ppl actually did that lol)
Boost, bump, bounce, and zoom blocks…yes, please!!
Well, you don’t need a sorting machine any more than you need a massive warehouse, fully stocked workshop, or even a house at all. My main character was a drifter for almost a year before I bothered building a home. Advanced builds are just optional abstract projects to pursue, same as anything else in Boundless.
is better than satisfactory, especially with regards to automation and progression and nobody can convince me otherwise!
One thing for sure is automatic crafting and hopper type items. I’ve even seen new people trying to connect their spark conduits to their storage, trying to make it feed their spark generator. I would like some kind of conduit that connects from storage to a machine and pulls items that machine can take, like a spark generator pulling fuel and a machine set to produce refined gleam pulling raw gleam.
Minecarts
As I suggested before, it could be just the track, and it’d summon a minecart and put you in the cart in one step. That way the devs don’t have to add spawning of carts and dealing with empty carts
I’d like to be able to craft a little robot that I can tell to craft a number of items. I give it worker access to a couple of beacons, then it will find the materials it needs (providing they are stored somewhere in the beacons it has access to) and take them to machines, and craft away.
You could also ask it to sort items in a particular “drop” chest. Providing you already have that item stored somewhere in the beacons the robot has worker permissions to, it will empty the chest and place all the items into the appropriate storage. Of course, if you don’t already have the item stored somewhere it leaves it in its “drop” chest.
Would be nice to have it keep an eye on shop stand and if they get low it will top them up - again providing it can find the items in storage in it’s beacons.
Really, I’d just like to see a cool, and maybe a little clumsy, robot walking around making stuff. It doesn’t move as fast as we can so it would take longer that we would to get stuff done.
It would be powered by spark, and maybe as time goes by, we can craft upgrades for it to allow it to do new things.
Just thinking out loud…
Oh and can’t forget we need an automatic block transformer!!
It would be great if this robot could tell us where we left things. I have a stack of forged chisels lost somewhere…
The rapid expansion of our conquest in boundless universe has forced us to expand the size of our storage facility.
Due to this phenomenon, I propose creating a console which can be used to search everything in our storage (within the same beacon). When an item is selected from the console, it’d set the coordinate of the storage box containing the selected item.
The automation aspect here is that I don’t have to manually open storage boxes one by one to search for a particular item (which I could have mistakenly placed somewhere)
Additionally (maybe asking too much 
), next to it, we could have a tube (transparent to display delivered item) which can be connected to the console to “magically” deliver the selected item into the tube
You know what would be even cooler than tubes?
NPC Oortians that wander round your workshop moving stuff for you, between machines, to storage boxes etc etc.
Ooooo, or maybe not Oortians. Maybe trainable wildstock.
Have you played modded Minecraft? This is similar to how the Applied Energistics mod functions. By default it is a standard sortable, centralized storage system. You can upgrade the volume to near infinite and add a basic crafting terminal where you get the standard 3x3 crafting table as part of the same GUI. Then later into the progression you can hook up autocrafting. You can add recipes to it’s knowledge base and when you need something that requires multiple base steps it calculates if you have all of the raw components.
each planet or planet type could have its own native population (snow giants (strong slow) on a chill planet, insectoids (live underground, active at night) on a toxic planet…)
player can build a house with a bed and a native NPC might show up ( total amount limited somehow, later in progression NPCs from other worlds will follow the player to a different one) if the NPC is treated nicely ( access to food, entertainment, other NPCs) it can be persuaded to work for the player : harvesting and replanting crops, guarding against mobs, making a machine more efficient…
there could be some control blocks for NPC system, for example ‘town hall block’, if such block is placed in a beacon , all NPCs gather around it at a certain time during a day. player could write a custom greeting for them to say when someone is near…
Imagine placing down your little wall-e like robot, it looks up at you inquisitively. You can give it one of a few tasks then it bounces up and down happily then runs off to show you where your tools are.
… and then for even more progression if they liked you enough, the’d even follow you around and cut down trees, gather plants, help you hunt or just carry rounds your stuff. And they can have skill trees, and you’d be able to equip them with tools…
I imagine them as those adorable little robots with the forklift that can lift a cube. Anki?
I hate comparing boundless to other games of any genre; but after recently taking a quite long break from the game I’ve found myself drawn to 2 types of games - builders like from the depths where the function of my build is dictated by its form(server heavy, unlikely) and damn darn factorio.
I would give someone’s front teeth (don’t ask) to have the factorio circuit network in boundless. If i could build your 100plot monster and give inputs to
My life would be complete.
better still, have it detect when shop stand is below 20% capacity and automatically que up production from raw materials in storage to refill the shop stand back to max capacity.
puzzle and quest / dungeon(trapdoors keycards) that stuff i want
collect item get reward
follow story
solve puzzles
I feel like this would be horrible for the game, but I was actually thinking about this yesterday too! lol
I was wishing for something like a shop cabinet that could be filled with items that you normally sell - once your stock starts running low or is sold out, it automatically pulls stock from your cabinet & fills the stand. Maybe even have a magical repository cabinet at your workshop that sends the items you’ve made to the shop cabinet. Boundless-o-matic 
(maybe it could be used for machines/manufacturing as well)
Well, the key factor is still the time spent gathering the raw resources. Building a machine that processes anything is essentially trading additional raw resources (you have to gather the raw materials to craft a more complex manufacturing system) for time invested crafting. So long as the gathering of resources isn’t automated, then automation of production and stock shouldn’t have a negative impact. I theorize that it would instead have a stabilizing effect on the economy when new finished goods are automatically qued up to restock empty shelves.
This in turn allows players to invest their play time doing more things they enjoy, or farming additional raw materials. I see this as an absolute win!
I like this, you would basically link up your crafting ‘station’ to the shop stand with a ‘pipe’ and once its done crafting it will output into the shop stand.
So combining these different aspects of automation will make for some interesting creative metas
Edit: To make a limitation, (possible to prevent huge laggy builds) maybe making the pipes have some sort of distance limit like spark does