Last week I showed a preview about the way we intend to rework loaders and I’m glad that the feedback was very positive. There were a couple questions and suggestions, and we’ll refine the things a little based on that.
Small Conveyor Lifts
Now for today I wanted to address another age old request: Small conveyor lifts. For a very long time we have been asked to add 1x1 conveyor lifts so that belts can easily go up or down without the larger footprint of slopes or freight elevators. The reason we haven’t was because they aren’t trivial to implement and that I always felt like they’re not different enough from the freight elevator (especially before we recently added the ability for automatic excavation). I do understand the size argument, but then again it’s an infinite world…
However, due to continued demand we’ll start looking into how a small conveyor lift could work in FOUNDRY and do some prototyping.
We’re currently still in the design phase, so it’ll take a bit before we can show something in-game. One of the main things we’re currently exploring is a design where you don’t have to worry about the rotation of the lift. The way we would do this is to allow connecting belts on all four sides of the bottom/top piece. Here’s a draft:
If you only connect one belt, it behaves as you would expect, and with multiple it would kinda act like a splitter/merger. Does that look interesting to you? Or would you prefer the classic approach with single input and output connection? This is just one of many questions, but certainly one of the more important ones.
In case you’re wondering: We don’t plan to remove the freight elevators, as they still serve their own purpose in having higher throughput, being bi-directional and they have the ability to excavate terrain on their own.
What else is currently happening?
We have started to actively work on blueprints, and will most likely be able to show something soon. However overall this is a very big task and surely will take a while to complete. I don’t have more details today, but here’s a small work in progress screenshot:
We do have a couple other things we’ll soon want to look into, but currently it’s summer time and there’s a bunch of vacations, so things are naturally advancing a bit slower. Stay tuned!
That’s it for today, see you next time!
-mrmcd
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