Support for Hoppers

[JU12000]

I was planning to try and implement support for Vanilla hoppers as they're covered by Automate, and it would increase compatability with certain mods e.g. Walk of Life.

There's a number of ways I think this could be implemented but to me it seems like a hopper should contain some elements of both GameStorage and ObjectMachine.

The hopper is a type of chest, so we wouldn't necessarily care about the MachineState of the ObjectMachine it's attached to, instead preferring to load it with materials to feed the attached machines recipies until we're out of materials or the chest is full. Unlike a chest - since the hopper would be feeding the attached machine instead of the Junimo - we would need to keep track of the following useful data encompassed by ObjectMachine:

• The IsStillPresent status of the attached machine, to decide if we should keep loading the hopper.
• The recipe returned by GetRecipeFromChest. We'd have to proxy the call to this function through the hopper to the attached machine and return the result.
• The category of the attached machine, to decide which Junimos could add items to the hopper
• The result of IsCompatibleWithJunimo

There are some other quirks, but I'm not sure if it actually matters to solve for them:

1. If a hopper and its attached machine are on the same network, do we care to stop Junimos from interacting with the machine?
2. Should Junimos be allowed to remove items from a Hopper in order to feed other machines on the network which take the same items for their recipies?

I'm interested to hear your feedback.

[NermNermNerm]

I never implemented hoppers because, well, they're just dumb. In a world with Junimos and/or Automate they really don't do anything useful. I'm unaware of any real use for them in Vanilla even.

...if you want something to do, see if you can figure out why Junimo Huts are being reported as broken. I have a vague memory that I made them work a few months ago, but we've got reports that they're busted.

[JU12000]

I agree that they're essentially useless, the main reason I wanted to add them was to increase compatability with other mods that specifically rely on interactions between hoppers/machines in an attempt to make them useful.

I'll take a look at the broken Junimo Huts first, but I'd still like to open a PR for Hoppers if you're willing to merge.

[NermNermNerm]

If you can't make a case for how it actually improves the player experience, I doubt I'll move it. Are there other mods that people use that would benefit from this? Given that players need to do a little bit of adjustment (e.g. running pathways) to cope with Junimatic, wouldn't it be more sensible for the player to remove the hopper? If you can make a case for it, I'll be interested, but it has to solve a real player problem to get consideration.

[JU12000]

The biggest problem it would solve for me, is that Walk of Life has a perk which only works for machines which are being fed by a hopper. If I were using Automate this perk would work fine, but I can't use Junimatic as a drop in replacement if I wanted to keep using this perk from this mod. If this were a much smaller mod I'd just edit it locally and ignore the problem but with 62k users I'm guessing the potential overlap between users of Walk of Life, and people who would be interested in this mod extends beyond just myself.

Another option if you're still opposed, is that I make a separate mod with Junimatic as a requirement which only implements Hopper support for those interested, that way you wouldn't have to worry about potentially supporting it.