[MOD request] Assembler vendor machines. Amazing idea.

[Yezpahr]

The other day I had a weird factorio dream where I saw items coming out of assembler machines without the need for inserters.

It looked like a vending machine slide system that burner mining drills have:



Could this be done in factorio or did my dream just troll me?
Needless to say it should then drop the item on the nearest side of the belt, not the far side.


How I hope it could work:
A button somewhere in an assembler machine's GUI can switch the assembler to the new type, with one of those fancy vending machine slide box thingamajigs. (o wow 'thingamajigs' is a recognized word in firefox dictionary o_0)

[darkfrei]

Loaders?

[Yezpahr]

What, loaders?
What is your point by saying just 1 word?

I should not craft with assemblers, but just place stuff on belts with loaders?

I just want assembler machines to toss their items on belt without the need of mechanical arms.
I've never used loaders before, so if they're also designed to extract stuff from assemblers then I'd still not use that cuz they're two spaces wide (if I'm not mistaken) so that would be counterproductive....

[khalismur]

Miniloader then.

[Deadlock989]

This gets asked for a lot. It is only possible in mods through heroic measures - something people call "composite entities" which is essentially hiding invisible loaders or inserters when the standard machines are placed, and then trying to look after them when other mods are hell-bent on breaking the arrangement. It is on my list of Things To Do In Life to make a standard set of functions and event handlers to run this kind of thing, but it is near the bottom of that list and the very bottom is probably hoving into view around 2025. I doubt the game engine will ever get it natively because it is unswervingly dedicated to simulating rotating robot arms in minute detail.

There was a mod that had assemblers that used this method in Factorio 0.14 or 0.15, with quite nice sprites, but it wasn't updated and I can't remember what it's called or find it on the portal now.

[Yezpahr]

It is on my list of Things To Do In Life to make a standard set of functions and event handlers to run this kind of thing, but it is near the bottom of that list and the very bottom is probably hoving into view around 2025. I doubt the game engine will ever get it natively because it is unswervingly dedicated to simulating rotating robot arms in minute detail.

Too bad it's one of those near-impossible things :<
But you mention simulating robot arms, but can't that be skipped if you modify an electric (or burner) miningdrill (with new sprite) to craft items instead of ore?


Thank you for putting some thought into solutions for this, I hope you get to the bottom of that to-do list.
(*note: Wake me up when you do ^,^)