Not as OP as Protoss.

I still feel as though pullers should need an employee. This mod altogether significantly cuts down on busy work. No running around like mad men picking things up and no manually placing of crafting items.

That means the thing thats off balance is the workpower. Pullers should be limited to how much they can put on a rail before needing a workforce to help them out. Like for every puller every 10items sent through requires someone with the "flick" or maybe "haul" job to come and assist it for a few seconds.

Besides with the RNG in this game everyones doomed to get that cannon fodder unit who is worthless at everything. Give your unskilled workers something to keep busy.

I dont know if it is possible but I have a suggestion for you my friend, I too think that the pullers are too OP, but I think the problem here is that u are rellying in the stockpiling zone, that by itself can cover an infinite area for free, I have 2 suggestions for you:
1- Create a furniture (like the mod RimFridge) with variable sizes, like 2x2, 3x3, or 1x1 that can increment themselves (like your rollers), and the pawns use that furniture to store the goods, and the roller/puller/pusher and direcly interact with that furniture to transporte the item.
2- This one I dont know if is possible, but somehow limit AoE of the puller, even if the player creates an area of 50x50 it will pull just 5x5 for example.

The puller idea is great, but it kills your mod, because the pusher and the roller are no longer needed when you can transpost the goods with the zones.

Talking in realistic terms , the roller cost is probably cheap considering that the lamp is 15 steel, but it is pretty expensive if we consider that a mere path 10 tile path costs 150 steel and 250W, maybe 5~7~10 of steel and 3~5W per roller, consider that the rollers are usefull in massive quantities, so a big ammount of power for a single roller also means more steel, componet and space for power production.

IRL a puller (picker) system would need some sort of network to pull from larger areas; be it humans picking orders/parts/items or bots on wheels/rails/tracks scanning and pulling. (some very interesting stuff on how Amazon and such do their warehouses and order fills out there on the web.) In my mind pulling a 12x12 (or larger) area from a single point is highly unrealistic and very OP.

If the puller were limited to a smaller area, say the center of a 5x5 square, this would make the player make or place a puller system or force interaction by pawns to keep that area full.

A network of 5x5 areas to accomplish the "magic" of picking from a huge stockpile with a single puller/picker would negate the OP nature of the current puller. It would also actually encourage some creativity in using space and networks to fully automate proceedures that currently require a single pick/pull point. Adding the extra effort to cover a large stock pile self balances by requiring space, planning, power and materials for all the extra pieces parts if you want to go big while still allowing the simple system with a single pull area to be useful if players want to use people parts instead.

I'd not make the power requirements too high. I intensely dislike the unrealistic power consumption in the game. At the end of the day it just forces us all to be Scotty and just make more and more power. Nothing uglier than 1/4 of the map full of wind and solar and batteries just because bulbs in the future use 50 times the power of LEDs we have back here in the stone age of today...

Originally posted by Over9000:

I still feel as though pullers should need an employee. This mod altogether significantly cuts down on busy work. No running around like mad men picking things up and no manually placing of crafting items.

That means the thing thats off balance is the workpower. Pullers should be limited to how much they can put on a rail before needing a workforce to help them out. Like for every puller every 10items sent through requires someone with the "flick" or maybe "haul" job to come and assist it for a few seconds.

Besides with the RNG in this game everyones doomed to get that cannon fodder unit who is worthless at everything. Give your unskilled workers something to keep busy.

Maybe a Basic puller that requires a operator and a more advanced and expensive piece that doesn't require a operator but goes slightly slower.

If you needed to flip a switch every so often then that would mess with the AI because it would just flood their task.

based on the suggestions you guys made here are my thoughts:
for power, my initial thought was, assuming Geothermal generator providing 3600 power per unit, any amount below 36W per unit would be good because it will let you have over 100 rollers per generator.
obviously, i was wrong. both because people start working with rollers before geothermal power and because even without the rollers, the core components in the game require so much power that dedicating one or two Geothermal generators for rollers is just too much to ask.
my suggestion, since rollers are greatly influenced by momentum is to seriously cut the power requirement for each setting it to 5W per roller.

Puller, first thing, it was mentioned before that Puller renders Pushers useless, this is somewhat true because Puller, by design, can do everything the Pusher can.
However, this is also why they cost more. Puller may not always be needed for a specific job (for example, routing specific items to a different roller or sending items to stockpiles)

side note: truth is Pusher handles stacking items into stockpiles better. in the beginning of BaRKy's video you can see him use Puller instead of Pusher to move wood logs and a case where some wood got skipped by the Puller. but thats a bug that will be fixed soon.

At the current stage, i want to avoid human(and colonist) interaction if possible. I think giving the Puller a base range(5x5) for example, is a good idea and will probably get added. the only issue is how extending the range will be implemented.
My idea was maybe adding beacons similar to the trade beacons just much smaller in range. the beacon range has to be touching the Puller range in order to connect to it and adding additional beacons with ranges touching will extend the overall Puller range.
This is somewhat similar to the furniture idea above, but requires less building while requireing same amount of planning which i believe will be a better user experience.

These are obviously my ideas, not set in stone, feel free to criticize them and add more ideas!

Originally posted by historic:

At the current stage, i want to avoid human(and colonist) interaction if possible. I think giving the Puller a base range(5x5) for example, is a good idea and will probably get added. the only issue is how extending the range will be implemented.
My idea was maybe adding beacons similar to the trade beacons just much smaller in range. the beacon range has to be touching the Puller range in order to connect to it and adding additional beacons with ranges touching will extend the overall Puller range.
This is somewhat similar to the furniture idea above, but requires less building while requireing same amount of planning which i believe will be a better user experience.

These are obviously my ideas, not set in stone, feel free to criticize them and add more ideas!

Wow historic. Using what you decided on and based on other peoples suggestions I just remembered something extremely important that may help you if you can figure out how to implement it. Minecraft had a similar issue with a mod that was made. Basically they solved it by requiring you to designate the zone the machine could interact with using a laser grid. The bigger the grid the more relays you needed and the power consumption increased massively with it. And with you lowering the costs greatly in power consumption. You could tack on a lot of extra power to pullers specifically with huge excess stockpiles.

To describe how it would work. Basically you put down uh lets call it. Constructor Rod. In its menu you select Grid 1. Than you place 3 other ones all selecting grid 1. This makes them shoot a laser beam to all other grid 1 rods in the area that they can reach. And the puller is able to pull things between that area. For every space greater than 3 you just have to put a relay pole down inbetween a constructor rod. And you can just use the drop down menu to keep making more grids for different stockpile zones so that they don't interfer with each other.

I personally dont like the beacons/pole idea, because thinking in a industrial way it just doesnt feel natural, but it is just my opnion though, somehow I still think that this solution can be pretty simple.

Historic, what about a special metal floor, and the area of that metal floor is the area the puller will act, this area will cost some metal and consume some power like over900 said.

If you cant code a stockpile on the floors (I think that would be harder and unpracticle), would it be possible maybe to code zones? so the floor is a special (invisible?) zone, and the player creaters the stockpile over that floor, just like we already do with the rollers.

Originally posted by demetrio:

I personally dont like the beacons/pole idea, because thinking in a industrial way it just doesnt feel natural, but it is just my opnion though, somehow I still think that this solution can be pretty simple.

Historic, what about a special metal floor, and the area of that metal floor is the area the puller will act, this area will cost some metal and consume some power like over900 said.

If you cant code a stockpile on the floors (I think that would be harder and unpracticle), would it be possible maybe to code zones? so the floor is a special (invisible?) zone, and the player creaters the stockpile over that floor, just like we already do with the rollers.

Actually the original idea came from modern day construction techniques. It's how they built things like airplanes and such. But your probably right I didn't think about how it would look on the interior of a home. I was more thinking about it outside your home where people could put large stockpiles over their entire farm and the puller can basically auto pick up every plant you harvest.

I really like the new suggested ideas, putting aside the visual aspect for a moment(just to make sure we are all on the same page). whats offered is basically making Puller(or Puller and its possible additions) consume dynamic power based on the area it is handing.

For example, if we give Puller a small starting point nerf(because its really OP atm) say - energy consumption up from 60 to 75, and based on suggestions above to have its range limited, say we go with 5x5. this means each zone cell is weighted at 3W.

This then means Puller's power consumption will be (zone cells * 3). does this seem like a good starting point? 300W for a 10x10 stockpile sounds a bit much to me. do note that normal rollers are getting "buffed" by having their power consumption reduced to 5W per unit (from 25).

And again, im not ruling out the addition of machines or floors that was suggested above. it just seems that the main purpose of them is balancing by adding additional power cost. so i thought we first find the fine balance point for the power consumption

5W is just fine for the rollers, but just 3W for the stockpile is probaly too low, maybe 10W? that feature fits better in the Power Hungry tech like hydroponics in large quantities and Sun Lamp

While it does seem like not much, if we take a look at an end-game colony fridge, this could easily go to up to lets say 7x16? assuming you want two Pullers at least to get meat and veggies these two Pullers alone will consume 7*16*10 each(1120W) and 2,240W for the two. assuming the player dosen't use custom power mods you will need almost a full Geothermal power generator just to hold these two fridge Pullers.

Ic, I forgot to count multiple pullers for the same stockpile, and in an automated base scenario it is pretty common.

With low power usage for belt sections, it might be feasible to have a quasi-'stockpile' that's actually just a giant loop of conveyor belts, with a single-tile basic puller.

It would go something like:
- Colonist drops off item at puller tile
- Puller takes in item and puts it on belts
- Belts cycle around infinitely
- Pushers split items off onto different belts as needed

Think like airport baggage carousels - lots of stuff gets loaded on and goes around and around and around until somebody needs it - except a little more automated.

I think this kind of setup could allow for early, limited pullers that feel more realistic, without requiring significantly more actual work (since it's basically the same as putting into a stockpile), but needing some thought put into layout and logistics to get the most benefit from it.

Originally posted by Roadie:

With low power usage for belt sections, it might be feasible to have a quasi-'stockpile' that's actually just a giant loop of conveyor belts, with a single-tile basic puller.

It would go something like:
- Colonist drops off item at puller tile
- Puller takes in item and puts it on belts
- Belts cycle around infinitely
- Pushers split items off onto different belts as needed

Think like airport baggage carousels - lots of stuff gets loaded on and goes around and around and around until somebody needs it - except a little more automated.

I think this kind of setup could allow for early, limited pullers that feel more realistic, without requiring significantly more actual work (since it's basically the same as putting into a stockpile), but needing some thought put into layout and logistics to get the most benefit from it.

You can already do it pal, you just have to create a close circuit rollers, pullers to get the items u need out and create a stockpile over the circuit, with the items u want to keep rolling