Repurposed sorting machines

[FantasticFwoosh]

The little and underused sort machines are all over the lesser used halves of the station. There's one for separating metal in the disposals room and numerous ones over mining for processing conveyor belts of minerals. Id like to see more use and a abilty to actually construct said machines should they A - break or B - have a functional use elsewhere on the station.

Personally my vision would be to have R&D own a sorting machine that feeds materials from a crate or a locker straight into the machines meaning you can keep busy doing SCIENCE!!

A little diagram of what i mean, C stands for conveyor, L for locker and S for sorting machine (-) are to signify the joints in the process, (=) stands for complicated processing in which ill probably explain the connection.

>Place shit on the starting conveyorbelt to begin processing or alternatively use a open/closed crate for convenience that the machine will take materials out of, you can just stand over it and dump all your RCD junk you collected from upgrading stuff.

C-C(L)-S = *Transfers materials into* Autolathe = *Raw materials like metal from Autolathe that are created can then be sent though a adjacent sorting machine that will seperate it from other materials until turned off or specified not to* - S - C = *the metal/glass can be then processed into the Protolathe or Circuit imprinter using a priority setting on the sorting machine that splits the glass evenly unless the one machine is full.

Alternatively you could just have the sorting machine help process stuff into a crusher and process the metal and materials coming out

C(L) - S = *sorting machine spits materials out onto the crusher tile that gets refined and sucked up by crusher number two on the other side which places it into another locker* - S - C(L)

Im sure this would be a nightmare to code but what do you think?

Conceptually with more addition to this we could have sorting systems that strip prisoners of items autonomously (anything in the back belt or pockets slot)

Feedback greatly appreciated.

[Remie Richards]

So Factorio?

[FantasticFwoosh]

So Factorio?

Of sorts, right on the money my friend.

It only makes sense that it is extremely monotanous to do anything yourself when we live in the future, heck we could even have a automatic slime core processor that puts things into the fridge automatically with a little R&D machine magic. It'd also increase ingenuity of custom designs by crewmembers.

EDIT - On hindsight, this would be abusable as all heck with the former crusher functionality of making random resources as you could make a loophole with the protolathe to feed into a crusher materials printed off ten at a time for only metal and glass by using manipulators or something. Then by that logic you could make your own space station by scratch using RCD's and power it entirely off fully configured MRSPACMAN diamond power and endless backup bluespace batteries. But as it stands you can just feed metal and glass back into the system to be crushed again so its still kind of a exploit in theory.

[Not-Dorsidarf]

There's loads of cool sprites for sorting machines in the crusher files which would be great for a factorio-style sorter

[Incomptinence]

Hell factorio style set up autominers on deposit and shunt it all back to base would probably be more fun than what we have at present. If we could get mules or something to work like trains to haul ore for us too HNNNG.