I keep thinking it would be very useful to be able to send anything out through a port and be able to import it into a different building.
I like to play Free Build to try to make 100% throughput cures with the best cures on, but the buildings are all far too small to be able to do anything meaningful, this would make it possible to utilise every building for a single cure.
I would be happy if it cost a fair amount to export and import it again, I just feel it’s needed.
Seems like this has been suggested multiple times already:
viewtopic.php?f=49&t=11309
viewtopic.php?f=49&t=11538
viewtopic.php?f=49&t=12744
But yeah, basically I would like the same feature too.
I wouldn’t mind if there are fixed ports for doing exactly that, that only connect neighbouring buildings, to reduce the amount of UI clutter that would be needed. Earlier on when I started playing the game I thought the white dotted lines between two buildings are actually exactly doing that. If there’d be a socket exactly at the position of the white dotted line it would transfer the item to the other socket in the neighbouring building automatically without having to select anything.
But I also would favor the alternative of being able to chose yourself. With an additional tab called “Intermediates” on the selection screen of the input port… where all the intermediate ingredients you are outputting somewhere are listed. At least it shouldn’t clutter the basic ingredients page.
Somehow there needs to be a restriction though that you can’t input the intermediates you output somewhere in the very same building. That would definetely be a cheat in my opinion. The transport of intermediates should only work between two distinctive buildings… hence building-to-building ports.
It would also be nice to have some sort of “Unpacker” to go with that, which does the exact opposite of the packer.
That way you could pack multiple intermediate ingredients, run them through an output-port and then input the same package on the input-port of another room. There you could basically unpack the intermediate ingredients again for further processing. That way one could further enhance the usability of input ports as well.
I’m even inclined to suggest that the Unpacker could also be used to process starting ingredients that come in a box instead of one-by-one, which would have to be unpacked before processing, to cut back on the number of ports needed to request ingredients.