Great game so far Denki. In having a lot of fun trying to make my bots as efficient as I possibly can.
Minor bug report for v20.1 (win x64 with lighting):
When chopping trees the first few chops sound correctly but then towards the end of the chopping process the sound either stops playing or plays out of order i.e. only every second hit to the tree.
Suggestion(s):
1) I'd like to up-vote the if-statement request I saw on the bug/request spreadsheet. it is -really- needed for more efficient setups that prevent stacks and stacks of stuff on the ground and also to better control when the bots fetch new tools vs. storage full loops. At the moment there is no good way to inter-mix the repeat loops in such a way that say a tree chopper bot properly stops it's work when storage is full (which appears to be at about the 90% mark or so?) while at the same time monitoring it's own tool durability to go fetch a new tool as needed. An if-statement would allow way better control for these situations, which prevents tons and tons of stacks of things on the ground. The more entities in the world, the more laggy it could potentially get. Imho an if-statement addition should become a somewhat high priority being added to the game for this reason. It would also help eliminate some of the crazy item towers that seem to occur quite often.
2) As an expansion on the already requested if-statement, perhaps do a combination of the "find nearest X" and an if-statement allowing for a condition where wrapped code is only executed if that "find nearest X" function is true. As an example: if "find nearest stone" [ go grab stone, stuff stone in storage ] - next line: if "find nearest ore [ go grab ore, stuff ore in storage ]. With a conditional version of the "find nearest X" it would be possible to have one robot search for more than one thing, thus allowing a single bot to clean up the mining mess that the mining bot leaves behind - or even have the mining bot search the ground to figure out what it just mined and properly stuff it in storage without grinding to a halt if either stone or ore was not dug up.
3) Bot update: a memory card upgrade. Perhaps in different sizes. When setting up bot makers, I find that 32kb (or 32 command lines) is short by 4-8kb to allow a single bot to create a new bot, stuff it in worker storage and craft a name tag. It seems kind of wasteful to me to have to craft up a second bot just to do those few extra things. Of course only one memory card may be installed at any given time and having a memory card installed in a bot imho should prevent the floppy disk from being used to make a backup / copy of the "program" since logically the memory expansion would exceed the size of the floppy. (also prevents situations where people try to copy from a memory expanded bot to a non-expanded bot).
4) "Move to beacon (?)" (?) = select beacon as normal. I assume that naming beacons will become possible at some point in time. If that is already possible I have yet to figure out how it's done.
5) We have these 6 command menus in the teach panel, most of which are empty at the moment. I'm not sure whether this has been requested before (couldnt find it) but perhaps add some of the more tricky commands to those menus, like the "find nearest X" command. This would make it easier to complete recharge bots without having to wait for a random bot to run out of juice. Just a thought, nothing high priority.
Keep up the great work Denki!