"Duping" cargo space... bug or intended?

[noremac13]

While restructuring the cargo area in our station I accidentally linked several of our storage chests to the same cluster of cargo expanders. I didn't realize until later when I noticed almost every chest now had tons of capacity out of nowhere. Basically what happened was I accidentally linked our biggest cargo cluster, which was roughly 5 million volume, to a few other chests which had significantly less volume. A chest with 100k volume became 5,100,000, and a chest with 50k became 5,050,000 etc. It just added that 5 million capacity to every chest and rather than sharing it they all had like their own version. So I essentially turned our 5 million total capacity into 25 million with the same number of blocks since every cargo block was now being used 5 times.

I tested it on small scale as well. I made 5 chests linked to a group of 5 cargo expanders. Each chest showed 600 capacity (100 base chest + 5 expanders) and I filled all 5 chests with 599999 capsules to prove that each chest could in fact hold 600 volume and it wasn't just shared between the 5 chests. 5 chests and 5 expanders should be 1000 volume of storage, but with this method I was able to store 3000 volume of items using the same number of blocks.

So is this how it is intended to work? Or is this some kind of a bug? I don't want to log in one day and find all my items get overwritten due to trying to share a cargo cube.

 

[Calhoun]

Very likely a bug.

 

[Edymnion]

Definitely looks like a bug to me. At least I would have expected cargo space to act like factory enhancers, only assignable to one storage block at a time.

If its not a bug in sharing cargo blocks, its definitely a bug that each chest is getting phantom space instead of sharing the single block in a communal space.

 

[Control]

Cargo expanders previously were able to only be linked to one chest at a time..
I had attempted a setup where multiple chests shared a storage (main storage pickup facility) and this was not possible at the time. I was forced to use a "funnel" of several small chests linked to the master system, which had the large storage...

Long story short, was unable to do what the OP tried to do, he succeeded and found a bug, I was blocked by inability to link expanders to more than one chest. (Test was run about a month ago?)

 

[noremac13]

Yeah I currently have it setup like a funnel as well. One chest to dump everything in for sorting which branches out into 5-6 other chests of various capacities. The biggest one is 5 million volume followed by the others which are significantly smaller with the next one being only 200,000. After I accidentally linked the 5 million volume block to the other chests they all reported their original volume + 5 mil so like 5.2 mil for example.

Also interestingly enough doing this also made the visual indicators shrink drastically. Instead of 1000 visual containers on the screen there was maybe like 200. Every subsequent chest I linked to the expander array further reduced the visual size as if I was doubling the space each time.

I hope the only bug is the duped cargo part and not the multiple linking part. Being able to link multiple storage units to the same expander array doesn't really give any advantage other than it allows the organization of separate stashes without worrying about the placement of the actual modules.

 

[AndyP]

for sure a bug we have to fix.

Thank you for reporting it here.

Registered as bug here:
T1980 - Cargo spaces can be reused by multiple storages