Ideas: Crawlers, counting and mechanical circuit networks.

[alan2here]

Crawlers would be a robot that slowly crawls the base, moving either randomly or systematically between neighbouring buildings, making some change. Able to be set to replace a bulding/belt with another of the same size, swapping with items from a steel chest size inventory.

Counting inserters would be an inserter that counted the number of items they had moved, to use with circuit networks and the such. I'd like some way to scan, to ask "how full" or "how long since" type questions of the contents of belts.

I'm not super keen on electric curcit networks, and it would be great to have mechanical ones, perhaps connected by pipe like mechanical transferences of information. It would be much more straightforward to see what was happening and the unfortunately arbitary 1/60th of a second tick for information to propagate doesn't seem as it would seem so inelegant. At the least it would allow for an athetic choice.

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Thease items would be situational, but a lot of Factorio is like that, with interesting and often deliberately oddly shaped mechanics, balanced off each other, to explore and produce ever more elegant designs with, for your own thoughts on what constitutes elegance.

[Smarty]

moved to ideas and suggestions

[deepdriller]

I don't get the crawlers. Are they supposed to upgrade buildings? Because sometimes a yellow belt is better. Just randomly upgrading belts could prove to be a major resource sink where it doesn't need to be.
The 1/60s delay is anything but arbitrary, because that's just how many times the game updates.
It's the smallest unit of time in which anything can happen and is pretty standard in computer games.
Anyway, at best these things should become a mod.

[ssilk]

Some of my stuff really needs basic belts.
For example: I use a basic belt to side-insert into express belt to assure, that the two lines of the basic belt is completely put into the one line of the express belt.

Automatic replacement suffers, I recommend this mod instead: viewtopic.php?f=92&t=14781 Upgrade planner

[alan2here]

Same here with the belts, it's quite an advanced factory but nearly all yellow, as belt movement isn't what holds things up, and I too deliberately use red and yellow belt together.

Ssilk, that mod is a nifty idea, possibly seems a bit quick. I was thinking for the un-modded game if it's something you can just leave running, of something a bit more gradual. Although that mod does lead to interesting situations with the construction robots task que.

As described, they'd be more flexible than having just this one task, although they could upgrade belts/pylons, as well as doing so in only one part of the factory by seperating that part, or swap out placeholder buildings for whats desired, and would be an item that exist as well as other systems that can perform similar tasks, and would be situational, and not for most players, as already happens in the game.

If you don't want to upgrade all your belts/pylons, don't build, place one and set it to do so.

The 1/60th of a second is less arbitrary than 1/14th of a second would be. There could easily be a game tick that is faster than 1/60th of a second, unless updates per second is tied to frame-rate in Factorio, even then there probbably already are updates for some of the games systems that don't use the 1/60th of a second update period but use somthing else.

I don't think circuit networks match the continuous seeming or instant movement of other processes such as belts, pipes, robots and wires, or the mechanical aesthetic, although I love the other electric stuff and the ability to move items based on how many items are in a chest.

[ssilk]

Well, there are other mods, one for example that places ground plates. Use just that mod and change it a bit to replace belts instead.

But I don't see this in vanilla, cause it reduces players possibilities; we have discussions about the belts nearly every 2 weeks and so I can say, that I'm sure, that especially new players would think this is the only way to go, which is in my eyes very bad.