Automated Slave Factories

[Edymnion]

This might be part of what Schine is already thinking about for updating the factory controls, maybe not. Either way, worth putting out there.

I know they're talking about putting on production limits (like "Make X of Y and then shut off"), but something I'd find very handy to go along with that is letting a master factory control a slave factory directly.

Like say I wanted to make White Light cube blocks. Normally thats have a basic factory make some glass, and some white light rods, then move those over to a standard factory to make the cubes. If the basic factories are slaved to the standard, then the standard can pull the parts from the basic to start producing cubes automatically as the slaved factories finish the components.

What I'd really like to see is basically the same setup, except that you just tell the standard factory "Make me some white light cubes" and it then instructs the slaved basic factory(s) to start producing the intermediary blocks without the player having to interact with the lower factories at all.

Even better if we could then slave factories to shipyards, and have the "Build Ship" button in the shipyard start sending build orders to the factories directly.

 

[NTIMESc]

I've been wishing for this for a long time. Even better, only have one type of factory, that produces whatever you want. If the recipe requires other crafted blocks that aren't in a linked storage, then production time increases to include the extra time it takes to produce the missing ingredients.

Speeding up production would be as simple as adding more factories to produce each ingredient. And linking the factories to a master could still be as you said, with the slaves automatically being set for production.

The only problem I see is, what if I manually set a slaved factory to produce something. Does the master factory override my setting?