Heightened Carrying Rail... thing.

[Doomie]

Hi, I had an idea for a feature that I'd initially thought was in the game when I saw the menu art, but I realized I'd been mistaken. I'm not sure what they're called in real life but one might see them in a foundry, where containers of molten metal would be carried above the factory floor to pour into vats or molds. I thought this could work similar to a miniature rail-courier system, but it'd only be able to move one or two (or more, on upgrade?) resources at a time with a little vat (for liquids) or a clamp (for items). They'd need two or more supporting beams placed on the ground and a rail running between the locations, and couldn't cross with other rails (a higher, more expensive beam-wise rail could cross over), working with the logistic or robotics programming system maybe. As opposed to robots, these would also be a cheaper, more analog way of things working. Thanks for your consideration! ^-^

[Gali]

Another level (underground + ground + new over ground) of logistics would be awesome

[Doomie]

And after a few iterations of new layers it would become the big, complicated web we all love! Oh, also, if a second layer of logistics was added we could start having vertical inserters to change layers and one day even a roof on our factories, because there's no way that the rain on this planet isn't bad for our skin or worse, our machinery.

[ske]

While the idea as such is good the problem I see is the user interface. Right now you can address all items by pointing at them with the mouse. If you add more layers that will become more complicated.

The subsurface mod has an interesting approach to this: viewtopic.php?f=97&t=19178

[orzelek]

While the idea as such is good the problem I see is the user interface. Right now you can address all items by pointing at them with the mouse. If you add more layers that will become more complicated.

The subsurface mod has an interesting approach to this: viewtopic.php?f=97&t=19178

Tbh it would be enough for me that there would be an official entity to transfer items between surfaces without need to do it through control.lua. It might be a moot point if we get luajit but it's a performance consuming task to transfer lots of items between surfaces.

[Doomie]

My idea for how to deal with the user interface issue is to have a little indicator on the bar showing which layer you're affecting and focused on, like is used in Dwarf Fortress. Using '+' and '-' or scroll wheel, or some other button set the player could scroll between layers they wanted to use. I suppose if this was in effect catwalks could be used to handle accessing these things easier; if you took the stairs up to the second floor it would automatically switch to the second layer and make other layers transparent.