Amazon Warehouse Infinite Storage

[crypticorb]

Are you tired of building hundreds of storage compactors? Wish there was a better way? Well there is now.

I present... the Amazon warehouse infinite storage module! Here's a video of it in action. Skip to the end of the post if you want to see how it's made.

This setup can automatically sort and store an infinite amount of material, and requires only a small amount of power to run. It runs off the basis of an infinite food storage system from (insert source here).

Spoiler

How it works:

1. Items are shipped in or swept into the containers in the middle.
2. The shipping loaders are preset with different material categories, and only the sweeper directly below each can access it, due to the airflow tiles.
3. The sweeper arms are run by the automation on the right, which enables it for 3 seconds, disabled for 0.1s. This allows the arm to grab an item from the shipping or compactors, and drops it immediately, 
4. The item drops out of reach of the arms, lying in a pile.

It works amazingly well for all shipped items, as it can pile up an infinite amount of materials which can then be immersed in chlorine, cold water, refrigerated as food, and easily accessed by dupes.

Some pros:

1. Scalable. This build can be built repeatedly, one for each individual material if you want. The only limiting factor is the range of the sweeper arms.
2. The whole build takes very little power to run.
3. It's very compact. Once you have 50+ storage compactors, it adds dupe travel time just to retrieve materials from the far end of a storage room. This brings all the storage to one spot.

A few cons:

1. @Saturnus noted that this can cause significant lag in very late games, when materials pile up in hundreds of objects. Use at your own discretion.
2. There can only be 5 sweeper arms, and only 5 separate sorted piles if you want only a single offloading point for shipping. All 5 arms have to be able to reach the one shipping offloader. If you don't care about sorting at all, you could build 1/5 of this setup, and have it all in one pile. You could also build a separate compactor for each material type under a single dropper setup, though you would have to manually sort and sweep them, no shipping with sorting.
3. The sweeper arms sometimes glitch and continuously grab 20-30kg at a time instead of 1000kg. You can see this in the video at 1:15.
4. The storage compactors must be set to sweep only, or dupes will continuously move the stuff from the piles into the compactors.

Finally, overlays!

Spoiler

How to build!

Spoiler

Start with this. The shipping loader connects to the bridge, and into the offloader. The bridge is important to trick the sweeper arm into thinking it's a continuous rail, even though it will never successfully load anything into it.

Add the sweeper arm and blocking tiles. Can be any tile you like, their purpose is to keep the adjoining sweepers from messing with the neighboring shipping loaders of different categories.

Duplicate and add the automation, and wire everything up. The outputs of the shipping loaders can all be routed into the one bridge. Set the shipping offloader lower priority than the loaders above, and add the compacters for manual dupe sweeping if you want to. Any shipping from places outside like plastic factories or metal refineries are routed into the shipping offloader.

 

[InternetGuy]

Do items on the floor cause lag?

[PhailRaptor]

Isn't there a mass limit to each resource pile per tile?  Once you get a particular pile above that number, any more you add of that resource will get deleted.  Won't it?

[Saturnus]

20 minutes ago, PhailRaptor said:

Isn't there a mass limit to each resource pile per tile?  Once you get a particular pile above that number, any more you add of that resource will get deleted.  Won't it?

Not anymore. It'll divide into separate piles of 25 tons each. I've been using the endless storage trick for quite a while and although great in theory let me just warn everybody that the lag it caused especially later in the game is horrendous. You are actually better off doing a traditional mega-storage with rows and rows of storage compactors, each storing separate items.

The idea is great though, and if Klei can sort out the lag issue this should be the go-to option for mid- to late game storage.

43 minutes ago, InternetGuy said:

Do items on the floor cause lag?

Very much so unfortunately.

[DMFan79]

37 minutes ago, Saturnus said:

and if Klei can sort out the lag issue this should be the go-to option for mid- to late game storage.

 

Wouldn't it be better if they just increased storage capacity of compactors?

[Saturnus]

1 minute ago, DMFan79 said:

Wouldn't it be better if they just increased storage capacity of compactors?

Personally I think 20 tones is fine.

[DMFan79]

10 minutes ago, Saturnus said:

Personally I think 20 tones is fine.

Then why the need to resort to using piles of items on the ground?

[Saturnus]

Just now, DMFan79 said:

Then why the need to resort to use piles of items on the ground?

Because it's much more complex to set up and get working. You have to remember that storage compacters require no tech to be researched and is very cheap to build, so the 20 ton limit of those is perfectly fine.

[Lancar]

I really dislike the endless rows upon rows of storage compactor solution the game currently has, and really wish Klei would just give us scaled up versions to reduce the clutter. The OP's method is effective and neat, but feels a bit exploity even though it really isn't.
I'll probably just continue doing what I already do and leave 90% of ore on the ground where it was mined.

[SharraShimada]

Took a look at the setup, and spotted the HUGE downside at once. Took a look at the video, and booom, there it is.

The logicgate-shutoff-sweepers cause really heavy lag. 1 of them works in small bases. Lategame not so well. 2 are a pain, and more are real hell.

And yes, this may crash your game in time.

While it can work, its no fun to use, because you cant play smooth anymore (unless you have a monster CPU with lots of single-core power at your disposal). I do not recommend this setup at all. Its a nice proof of concept but not worthwhile.

[SakuraKoi]

44 minutes ago, Saturnus said:

Because it's much more complex to set up and get working. You have to remember that storage compacters require no tech to be researched and is very cheap to build, so the 20 ton limit of those is perfectly fine.

Well, there is also Smart Storage Compactors and ain't no one ever said that other materials could not offer even more ridiculous capacities.

Personally I'd welcome "space storage" but alas cargo bays can only hold 1t.. and I guess the price is a little high but that can be excused by merely shooting stuff into orbit.

 

Also, ya better call it Amaz●n~

[Saturnus]

7 minutes ago, SakuraKoi said:

Well, there is also Smart Storage Compactors and ain't no one ever said that other materials could not offer even more ridiculous capacities.

The smart storage compactor have even less storage (10 tons) and is in its current form more or less useless. Smart storage compactors should have been smart in the same way smart batteries are with a hysteresis control so you could set a range within which the output should be positive, and not just at full.

[PhailRaptor]

2 hours ago, Saturnus said:

Not anymore. It'll divide into separate piles of 25 tons each.

Good to know.

[Saturnus]

Just now, PhailRaptor said:

Good to know.

Note however that the output of some machines like oxylite distillery and fertilizer synths output (or used to output, not sure if it's been patched yet) small piles of material that would not fuse, so if you let it run for a while you'd end up with a tile with 1000s of small 10kg piles, each requiring processing power causing lag, and if you by accident moused over it, the game would freeze for several seconds trying to display the content list.

[crypticorb]

6 hours ago, Saturnus said:

Not anymore. It'll divide into separate piles of 25 tons each. I've been using the endless storage trick for quite a while and although great in theory let me just warn everybody that the lag it caused especially later in the game is horrendous. You are actually better off doing a traditional mega-storage with rows and rows of storage compactors, each storing separate items.

The idea is great though, and if Klei can sort out the lag issue this should be the go-to option for mid- to late game storage.

I didn't know this, and I'm glad you pointed it out. I did notice some lag, but not any significant difference from the 50 storage compactors, so I attributed it to the beta branch logging software doing its thing. I updated the OP to include a warning about potential lag.

I think it still might be better than mass compactors in some ways, as I'm comparing it to leaving the trash materials lying around outside the base, which amounts to about the same number of objects lying around.

Even if the entire system has to be scrapped, it's still an effective material shipping sorter, and the basic concepts of the setup can be used in other builds someday.

[SakuraKoi]

2 hours ago, Saturnus said:

Note however that the output of some machines like oxylite distillery and fertilizer synths output (or used to output, not sure if it's been patched yet) small piles of material that would not fuse

Well, at least eggshells won't:

• Objects such as Egg Shells will stack correctly if they are created on a tile already containing that object

and welp, even more so a reason to upgrade smart storage compactors when they are that terrible (I never used them tbh and with that info, 10t and merely full/not full output) I sure will not. I sure think that 20t is too little considering how much one has to store even if there won't be problems with regolith anymore. Not to mention smart storage compactors could be much further upgraded but I suppose that's what the next upgrades will be for and one has to suggest it for a better chance to be prioritized.

[hpongledd]

I had something like that installed into my base for several cycles. Out of experience i tell you its better removing the automation and having some container floating around, which you periodically empty

[crypticorb]

5 hours ago, DMFan79 said:

Then why the need to resort to using piles of items on the ground?

I use this setup because after about 300 cycles, I have 50-100 storage compactors of material and it gets really annoying to maintain them, and I'd like to use that space in my main base for other things.

[Rebrait]

Klei should create a 4x4 or 6x6 storage to store large amounts of items, 100t... 500t...

[Lifegrow]

8 hours ago, Saturnus said:

I've been using the endless storage trick for quite a while and although great in theory let me just warn everybody that the lag it caused especially later in the game is horrendous. 

I remember warning of said lag, and people called me crazy...

Well who's laughing now eh? Me? Yeah, yeah i'm laughing. Like a crazy person!

 

[Saturnus]

Just now, Lifegrow said:

I remember warning of said lag, and people called me crazy...

Well who's laughing now eh? Me? Yeah, yeah i'm laughing. Like a crazy person!

 

Given that it's you, it's really the only way we'd expect you to laugh, I'm right?

[Zarquan]

I thought items disappeared when you did this.  I had a colony that had something like this but simpler and manual, but I had to stop when I realized the game deleted all my copper.  This was a long time ago, so I wouldn't be surprised if it was fixed (I believe it was before sweepers).

[Saturnus]

10 minutes ago, Zarquan said:

I thought items disappeared when you did this.  I had a colony that had something like this but simpler and manual, but I had to stop when I realized the game deleted all my copper.  This was a long time ago, so I wouldn't be surprised if it was fixed (I believe it was before sweepers).

If that was still the case then no one, absolutely no one, would be complaining about regolith at all. Just stack it up in a tile and it'd be gone.

It was naturally fixed by Klei because it meant that you could delete mass, and thereby infinite amounts of heat, by just having a single storage compactor (or two rather).

[Zarquan]

19 minutes ago, Saturnus said:

If that was still the case then no one, absolutely no one, would be complaining about regolith at all. Just stack it up in a tile and it'd be gone.

Not true.  If you hadn't conquered space completely yet, meaning much of it is inaccessible, then you couldn't move all the regolith.  That stuff would pile up and cause lag.  Not to mention it would layer, so you could have 20 kg buried in each tile or something like that.  The lag would be fixable in the long run, but it would be a long run with lag.

[Nitroturtle]

4 hours ago, Saturnus said:

If that was still the case then no one, absolutely no one, would be complaining about regolith at all. Just stack it up in a tile and it'd be gone.

It was naturally fixed by Klei because it meant that you could delete mass, and thereby infinite amounts of heat, by just having a single storage compactor (or two rather).

As someone who actually did stack it all up, I can tell you this is easier said than done.  It took me nearly 200 cycles.  I built tiles using mafic rock and completely filled in the area above the upper layer of abyssalite to push the regolith up, then built a door conveyor to push it all to one side.  I actually had to reload and try again after the first attempt, because the pile was so large that about halfway across the map my game started crashing when the door would close and try to push it over one tile.  I ended up splitting it into 7 piles and dumped it in an enclosed area under my rocket silo.  The game lags significantly if I mouse over any of those piles now.  The whole process was pretty insane, but now I have absolutely no regolith with no debug/sandbox.

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