TL;DR
At least add a way to prevent the cargo landing pad from acting like a provider chest.What?
I want control over how the container that receives items from space participates in logistics networks.There is already a mod that does the TL;DR, but my suggestion is really that there should be more robust in-game control over how the cargo landing pad participates in logistics networks.
Either of these features would satisfy:
- A button that toggles whether the cargo landing pad provides content to the logistics network.
- A filter that controls which items arriving into the cargo landing pad are provided to the logistics network.
Alternative to the above: Remove the ability for cargo landing pads to participate in logistics networks altogether. Instead, allow players to designate specific _cargo bays_ as the various types of logistics storage.
Why?
Today, at least in 2.0.*, the cargo landing pad is treated like a provider chest. It provides its contents to a nearby logistics network.The problem is that the cargo landing pad is forced to receive items arriving to the planet. Items _must_ go into this container; it is a necessary middle-man between space and the planet. This distinguishes it from provider chests in a way that makes treating it as a provider chest a problem. Typical provider chests get items because the player goes out of their way to push items into them (e.g. either inserter or explicit item request). In other words, the player can design systems in which _they choose_ for items to become available, or not, in the logistics network. This is not the case for the cargo landing pad; it is, again, a mandatory pass-through point for items coming from space.
The game has natural challenges which are fun to design around (e.g. amount of available space to build). There's a kind of challenge which is unnatural and not very fun; imagine if rails were severely length limited because of some game-engine limit rather than intention of the developers. That'd provide a kind of unfun friction for players. This is a small kind of friction that I think should be fixed. The fact that items must pass through the landing pad and that the landing pad is forced to act as a provider chest creates friction when designing logistics networks; it's a quirk of the building caused by a feature that seems like it's great ("hurray, bots can pull items from the landing pad!") but not as robust as it needs to be to get out of the way.
In my specific case, I have requester chests for iron ore. Because the landing pad acts as a provider chest, I get sudden bursts of iron ore in the network from space causing many hundreds of bots to swarm the landing pad. I have inserters pulling the ore out of the landing pad much faster than the bots can get to the pad and take the ore, so the swarm eventually turns around until its woken up again by the drop off of new material. This is silly; thankfully there's a mod that disables it as a provider chest altogether.
