I've just noticed this too and I would find it useful to have a total ammount of items dispayed in the cursor while I am building something. While a player is building stuff he cares about the total ammount of things he has in his inventory When a player wants to place those items into machines it i...

A tiny mod that makes certain items biter-friendly. This means that biters will not attack those entities.
All the items are configurable in config.lua