One of the problems I often have when using drawers for automated processes is wanting to move drawer contents around.
Say for example that I have a bunch of processes all pulling from and pushing to drawers, like this:
All of the drawers have to be locked, because any unlocked drawers connected to the network will immediately fill up with random items from the processes that are feeding back into them.
Moving around where the items are in a setup like this is tricky, and it's something I have an idea for solving in a neat way, if it's at all feasible to do in reality.
Imagine a tool that you craft called the "Slot Exchanger". When you right click it on a drawer's slot, it would remove the slot from the drawer entirely, leaving an empty slot that does not accept anything, and the slot would be picked up by the slot exchanger. If you right click on a different slot of the same size, it would exchange the two.
This would of course not make much sense on shadow or compacting drawers.
I have no idea how complex this idea is to make, but I thought i'd share the idea in case it is something that is doable and you feel makes sense to put into your mod.
One possible downside to consider is it would mean dealing with the possibility of breaking an empty drawer, or being stuck with a slot exchanger tool with no empty drawer to put it in because you lost the empty one.
Thanks very much for the mod, it's the best implementation of the drawers concept i've seen yet, it's a really awesome factory tool.
How does it make the mod better?
It would allow easily rearranging locked slots in any drawer setup, not just factory lines like the example I most commonly use it in.
Even though in a fully single drawer storage setup it's easy enough to move entire drawers around to rearrange them, to move specific slots in a double or quad drawer you need to unlock the slot, empty it, re-lock it, and apply the filters to both swapped slots.
A slot exchanger tool would make it incredibly simple and intuitive to move slots around if it's possible to implement.
Description of the feature
One of the problems I often have when using drawers for automated processes is wanting to move drawer contents around.
Say for example that I have a bunch of processes all pulling from and pushing to drawers, like this:
All of the drawers have to be locked, because any unlocked drawers connected to the network will immediately fill up with random items from the processes that are feeding back into them.
Moving around where the items are in a setup like this is tricky, and it's something I have an idea for solving in a neat way, if it's at all feasible to do in reality.
Imagine a tool that you craft called the "Slot Exchanger". When you right click it on a drawer's slot, it would remove the slot from the drawer entirely, leaving an empty slot that does not accept anything, and the slot would be picked up by the slot exchanger. If you right click on a different slot of the same size, it would exchange the two.
This would of course not make much sense on shadow or compacting drawers.
I have no idea how complex this idea is to make, but I thought i'd share the idea in case it is something that is doable and you feel makes sense to put into your mod.
One possible downside to consider is it would mean dealing with the possibility of breaking an empty drawer, or being stuck with a slot exchanger tool with no empty drawer to put it in because you lost the empty one.
Thanks very much for the mod, it's the best implementation of the drawers concept i've seen yet, it's a really awesome factory tool.
How does it make the mod better?
It would allow easily rearranging locked slots in any drawer setup, not just factory lines like the example I most commonly use it in.
Even though in a fully single drawer storage setup it's easy enough to move entire drawers around to rearrange them, to move specific slots in a double or quad drawer you need to unlock the slot, empty it, re-lock it, and apply the filters to both swapped slots.
A slot exchanger tool would make it incredibly simple and intuitive to move slots around if it's possible to implement.