Dismantler/Recycler Bots

[Avarant]

Or whatever you'd want to call it.

Basically, bots that that will 'mine' all the structures you built in an area. Whenever you want to re-purpose an entire section of your base or remove a big chunk of walls/turrets to expand, you highlight an area and they will come and perform 'mining' or reclaiming on all of those items, taking them back to a storage chest.

[slpwnd]

I suppose this will be a subset of the blueprints functionality.

[Hazard]

At minimum we need a way to automate clear cutting. I don't want to have to spend a lot of time on deforesting to get some space.

[Avarant]

Totally agree Hazard. I actually was coming back to say as much heh

[BurnHard]

I don't want to have to spend a lot of time on deforesting to get some space.

Have you tried using your (combat) shotgun? Clearing large areas of trees is just a matter of seconds with it. Walk around, press space and point at the desired direction with the mouse cursor.

[ssilk]

Or Flamethrower? Much more effective. Meanwhile I use it mainly for that, not for fighting.

[BurnHard]

I have tried both, flamethrower and combat shotgun. For me it works much better with the combat shotgun, more reach and faster while walking forward the same time.

[Hazard]

I have actually, I just find that it both takes too long and that it's a waste of resources; you could use all that wood to fuel the boilers for one.

[ssilk]

Eventually I do that in the beginning. But believe me, cutting more than 1000 is no fun, no matter, if you feed you burners with it or make the complete apartment out of wood.

[Ardagan]

Am I the only one using scripts to clear the forest?

Regarding Recycling/Building bots. One thing that may be added as part of blueprints:
Currently, there is one thing that gets annoying sometimes. If I make a mistake in space for 1 square while building factory, I often have to rebuild like 20+buildings. Would be awesome to add a functionality to move all buildings in some area to some other position. Would be twice as good to do that automatically (construction bots for example), but adding manual option will also work (something like auto-path in this case).

Benefits are:
1) If you need to move production to some other place, you can just mark factory and move it to new place.
2) Quite often I surround my base from all sides with LTs. If I want to expand, I have to move all those 1k+ turrets to new positions. Trust me, that's a looong story. I wish to have that automated.

[ssilk]

As in reality: moving can be quite different from copying. But I never made 20 buildings and then saw, oh, one too less and do it all again.

Off topic:

I generally don't plan much when I play, I like improvising. My factories looks most times like a hill of garbage and I adore those, which make those straight layouts. I like for example to built a spiral of belts with items moving on it. Totally useless (besides it is some storage).

BTW, being more off topic I was just in the second part of "the Hobbit" and I was so disappointed. The first part was really good and now the whole story is so lengthily. About half an hour with this dragon alone. If the third part is the same then good bye.

[TGS]

I think what would probably be better is having say... a laser pointer or even sonic screwdriver kind of device with infinite range that you can click to hold which would create a laser pointer and you could sweep the pointer over any building and your construction bots would go and dismantle/pickup the 'flagged' objects then return them to the nearest logistics chest (Be it storage or requester) or if you wanted them to go straight to you... simply have yourself set as the requester for said buildings/items. Either way it should be part of the logistics network. You should be able to quickly sweep over things you want picked up. Then you can replace them as necessary.

This could even be a initial 'idea' boilerplate for some of the RTS stuff. Or an entry pathway to the RTS stuff. IE you slowly unlock more and more command functionality via pointers or items for your bots to perform. Then eventually when you reach 'mid' tier of whatever the RTS stuff is you gain more of an overview ability. Then eventually you can command offensive stuff as well. But this would be a great precursor for that. As it would let you quickly mass remove things. That being said it should be a higher 'tech' (As of right now anyway). Or the pointer item could rely on battery power from a power suit which could serve as kind of a tech check.