Allow passive providers to store items they already contain
Posted: Sun Jul 12, 2015 6:32 pm
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.
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.