Factorio Forums

TL;DR

When a storage-like structure (chests, furnaces, turrets) is destroyed, the contents should be spilled on the ground rather than get miraculously destroyed without any consequences.

What and why?

This adds a hilariously annoying mechanic into the game that ensures that the player must be mindful of all waste rather than simply opting out for a wooden chest and a couple bullets or something.
Items on the ground also prevent players from building on this tile will further drives home the point as you must clear this space first from rubble. Or have bots clear it up before replacing this destroyed turret.

This also makes biters significantly more dangerous because spilled items may land on the belt which will almost inevitably clog the system which may stop the defenses which lead to more waste.

Of course, there should be an option to combat this issue when one gets bots eventually that will mark all those items for collecting automatically.

Now, there is a small issue with this: the current spill pattern is ugly to say the least and should be randomized into a bunch of "stains" originating from a common point (or a similar pattern) to simulate actual destruction.


Other than that, it adds a small, but extremely pernicious concern into the game that one should better account for before it's too late.
Also this makes losing certain buildings less painful for some cases - the items are not destroyed after all, BUT, as mentioned before, there is a potential for a chain reaction that will stop the whole factory from working correctly.


A small note: nothing stops the players from driving somewhere remote and dropping the waste there. However, it's not automatic and requires human interaction and we all know time is the most precious resource in this game.

Wishlist: No idea what to do about fluid containers

Container spilling was explicitly removed in what, 0.12? 0.13? It's not coming back. Factorio is not about being annoying, but very much the opposite.

There is also a nasty lag spike when a million items try to spill out on the floor at the same time. Nuke a base's logistic storage and bad things happen.

The spill back then was an undesired effect when you tried to mine a chest without accounting for the contents.
This is bad.

This idea suggests returning this, uh, feature as an additional and highly undesired effect of destroying a container. Mining is always done by a player and should have no surprises like the previous spill was. Destruction may be done deliberately by a player to remove some undesired items from the inventory (I consider this a cheat), as a consequence of negligence (driving through a factory in a tank) or by the AI.

Destruction is almost never preferred over mining and the spill will make destruction even more costly.


Of course, there is an issue with the amount of items to be spilt. We don't want a full Bob warehouse to plunge host's PC into despair so I guess items to be dropped on the ground should be chosen deterministically and in such a way so as to ensure maximum potential damage (maybe something like 1 chunk worth of items at once, starting from items of which there is the least amount?).

EditorRUS wrote:Destruction may be done deliberately by a player to remove some undesired items from the inventory (I consider this a cheat)[...]

Doesn't matter what you "consider" this. This is the only officially supported way to permanently get rid of items on purpose in vanilla.

eradicator wrote:

EditorRUS wrote:Destruction may be done deliberately by a player to remove some undesired items from the inventory (I consider this a cheat)[...]

Doesn't matter what you "consider" this. This is the only officially supported way to permanently get rid of items on purpose in vanilla.

You can send them into space. I believe that's officially supported.

I disagree. Item explosions and avoiding them are just annoying. Because there are no any mechanics why stored waste is actually bad thing, that would be easy to handle by making landfill area somewhere. Even couple of hundreds of waste chests would not take significant area. Only problems would be annoyance when I have to run to landfill area or occasional mistakes or biter attacks. I do not like the mechanics that one misclick or forgotten thing would need large tedious labor to fix.

I use almost always void chests and would like to have permanent void slot in crafting menu. It would be better if there were proper landfill which would product pollution depending on waste and higher tech tiers would produce less side products, at least in mods, but I think it may not be possible or practical with current game mechanics.