[Concept] Survival friendly lab

[y.petremann]

For now this is just an idea, but I think this can be made :

The concept here is to have a structure or item that serve the purpose of testing factory layouts without interfering with survival.

So what I think is that you basicaly have an item that can be used to view and test prototypes.
For that to work, when you use the item, you would be moved to a testing surface, as a ghost in a testing force, you could exit the view whenever you want, and you get information about your original character being attacked.

This make sure that resources, power or technologies are not cheated and also permit to have a separate view of production statistics.

This force would start from scratch but could place anything with cheat option, and he can choose if tech is instant or not (and so deciding of tech level for hir prototype), some structures could permit to have infinite power, item source and sink.

The terrain would be based on 9 chunks by default, but if something is build in one chunk all adjacent chunk would be buildable, if a chunk is emptied, chunks adjacents that only have empty adjacent chunks would be emptied, this enforcing a resticted working area (this is not necessary)

A specific entity would be the probe, this could be used in real surface to transfer circuit information of item passing on a transport belt to a testing surface, and thus using real data for production for your test, this one could be also used between your tests to try diferent layouts, the probe as it transferm data could also be used to send information of blocked transport belts to make the sinks stopping working to fully emulate connections of transport belts.

Finally, the better to the end, a testing area could be transformed into a blueprint, energy and item source and sink would not get copied as of all entity marked as only made for testing purpose, and a blueprint could be transformed in testing area.