Constructor block

[Andir]

Would be nice to see a constructor type block. Admittedly, my ideas for its use only extend to making long rails, but I imagine other uses as well. My concept so far is a block that you link to a chest and place a block next to it and 'V' connect it. If you have a block in the chest that matches the block that is connected, the constructor will send out a beam and build that block on the surface it is connected to. It should place the block in the same orientation as the linked block.

Now, this can be extended to shipyards in that the beam could fire out and build the furthest block on a virtual ship so you could make ship building more interesting, but in this case the shipyard computer would be the linked block and it would only build blocks from the plan if there was not a virtual block behind it and there was an available block in the linked storage.

You could also link it to logic to have it build only when a high signal is sent to it.

 

[jayman38]

I think to keep this from breaking the game, some powerful limits need to be implemented:
1. Indeed make it so that it only works with a high signal. Not much of a limit if the rotator sensor trick still works.
2. Make it build slooooooooow. Maybe start the created block at 1 HP and have it build it up to full health before creating the next block. (In this case, maybe use the tech beam for this purpose. That would make sense and would eliminate the need for a whole new block type.)
3. Have a cooldown timer on the block to keep it from firing for a minute after the linked storage block is updated in any way, to keep griefers from creating a Server-Killer Beam of Doom (tm), endlessly adding items to the linked storage.
4. Implement stack limits/cargo storage update prior to this, so that the beam won't create 2.1 billion x 7 x 5 blocks from a single linked chest.

 

[Andir]

I would assume the ray length would be capped so that you could not build that far out.