While prospector is not a hardcore logistics game, resource management is a critical component to its design. The game’s experience necessitates players crafting hundreds if not thousands of items and storing them in logical containers. Prospector had a single item storage building called a Silo which had 36 item slots.
Open the filters menu for a specific silo.
Set filters and limits organized by category.
Modify from favorites tab for quick updates.
In the original design, collector bots were snapped onto silos and would collect any item in the same workspace as their parent silo. This worked OK if players only had a single silo inside a Transformer work area but was a bit of a nightmare when there where 2-3 different silos all with their own bots collecting and storing items using a first-come-first-serve basis.
You can also see that item filters themselves are added to larger categories that map to specific uses cases players might have for a particular work area. This allows them to quickly decide that a silo is only for storing say animal products and toggle all those items at once which saves them having to activate 20+ toggles.
For example, let’s say the player has a furnace and a sheet press inside the same work zone. If the furnace is set to make infinite plastic bricks while the sheet press is set to make infinite plastic sheets, every single plastic brick will be turned into a sheet when players actually want a good amount of both.
With this update, players could control how many of a resource could be used in automated crafting by setting a min limit. In addition, setting a max would prevent a single silo filling up a single item being overproduced.
Going further
Adding filters and min/max values for filtered items was a great quality of life improvement for players, but an even better solution would be to set smart filters and item limits based on what items are being crafted via automation in the same work areas as a silo. I had concepts for how to achieve this that were unfortunately too expensive to include prior to release.
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