Allow passive providers to store items they already contain

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Tallinu
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Allow passive providers to store items they already contain

Post by Tallinu »

If I have a dozen passive provider chests on the outputs of various assemblers, each making sure that they contain a certain number of various crafted items at all times, the rest of the chest's large inventory is often going to waste. At the same time, when I deconstruct a section of my factory, everything gets dumped into whichever storage chest apparently has the highest priority (which there doesn't seem to be any way to control), unnecessarily taking up a lot of storage space with low-count stacks of a large number of different items and potentially sending the bots a long distance to reach that storage.

Instead, allow bots to "store" items back into the passive providers they (presumably) came from, at a higher priority than storage chests which do not also contain the same item. Only items already present in a passive provider should be stored there, and if the item is also present in storage chest(s), the bots should simply drop it off at whichever is closer.

Alternatively, have a checkbox on the passive provider which enables (or disables) this functionality so that in cases where you don't want anything being dropped off there, you can prevent it - perhaps some parts of your factory are very distant from where you typically work and you have a lot of storage close to that site, so you'd prefer deconstructed stuff to go to the nearby storage rather than the distant provider for faster re-use.

Another option which would solve this as well as add a feature useful in other ways: Give storage chests a filtering option (similar to the request interface on a requester chest) so you can limit them to storing only certain types of items, and prioritize filtered storage over unfiltered when looking for a place to store something. Then use storage chests for factory outputs instead of passive providers.

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ssilk
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Re: Allow passive providers to store items they already contain

Post by ssilk »

The devs seem to plan chest priorities. Let's see, if that is useful, maybe it works better than this. If not you can create a new.
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