Crane Quarry: A tool to greatly help in making "Sandbox"-esque constructions in a vanilla game

[Alfons100]

People love experimenting with the sandbox mode to create different machines to see how effectively you can do things, you can vacuum instantly, spawn in set amounts of matter and build things efficiently.

The issue here is that, these build setups- are an absolute nightmare to do in vanilla, without any cheats. All because of one reason: The Duplicants themselves. They are simply incapable of building large scale things without messing atleast something up.

Vacuum sealing things is frustrating since the chances of them enclosing themselves is high, they will probably entomb themselves once or twice. If you prioritize something wrong, there is going to be tiles that become unreachable, and of course, Dupes needing ladders to reach anywhere. Jetsuits do not help since they leave out annoying CO2 exhaust. And if anything breaks inside the construction, you have to break it open in order for them to reach it, which probably leads to a plethora of problems, such as gas leakage

We need a solution to this so any sane mind could do these cool build setups without cheating, which would fit perfectly with the latest updates being "Quality of Life"

 

Thats why I suggest a sort of "Crane" setup(It is not exaclty a crane, I dont know what to call it to be exact), built from 2 corner blocks which then forms beams in a square, depending on how you built them. I got a very low quality Paint image to demonstrate:

Excuse the horrible quality, really.

Let me explain, to make a "Crane" area, you need to build two Crane corner blocks, in any way as long as it forms an invisible rectangle. The two will then connect and form a passable rectangle which indicates where the Crane will operate (The rooms overlay should highlight it). The Crane setup will need electricity, which varies depending on how large the surface area of the Crane area is, maximum is 2kW.

Once the Crane area is made, Duplicants will go to either Crane block to operate it, which will send out a Dupe controlled "Arm" which will build, haul/sweep and dig anything within the Crane area, depending on the Duplicants own skill. If there is a storage Compactor/Conveyor Input inside the range, the arm will hover over it and pick/load it off

Mind that these Crane Arms cannot operate, they can only build/sweep/repair/pickup/dig/toggle. All such errands inside the Crane Area will become forbidden for normal Duplicants. Only crane arms work there until the Crane block is disabled/destroyed

Multiple duplicants can work on a single Corner block, sending out multiple crane arms, but operating it could need a new Job which needs mastery of both Seasoned Architect and Miner, it has an expectation tier of 25 Morale.

This means that dupes wont have to place their feet inside finnicky builds and mess things up, and makes finetuning things inside much less of a headache. Hydrogen Liquefaction or Sour-gas condensing are two notable lategame challenges that needs creative solutions, and building them is much harder than they need to be thanks to Duplicants often putting themselves into danger. This would add a duplicant-stupidity-less way to do great builds