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Choo! Choo! Sweet update - thank you Kenney <3

That's excellent news, thank you! I would rather wait and know I get the full Kenney quality, than get something rushed. Take your time :)

Thank you for the update and new blocks to play around with, Kenney. As always greatly appreciated. I was hoping to see some train related blocks and parts though. I sent you an e-mail about it and you mentioned it may be coming in a future release. Keep up the great work - best $40 I've spent :)

Makes sense. Brilliant Denki, thank you! :)

Denki, in continuation of gmrose9's questions about the savegame json stuff I was wondering what the boolean property "TD" does for Rock and TreeSeed? It seems to be false when placed in-world and true when in an inventory (either player or a worker). There is a despawn timer linked to these two object types but since the "TD" property is a boolean it can't be the time left before the object despawns. I can't quite figure out what the "TD" acronym is or what that property is used for.

So far I've been doing exactly that to try to arrange the huge list of bots in some meaningful way, though with a list of bots as long as yours and mine the list can still be a bit difficult navigating when searching for that one specific bot. Organizing the bots this way works but imho it is not optimal. I still beleive that having the added option of bots also being arranged by the beacon they are linked to, would make it easier for us as players and managers of this army of bots :)

I have been thinking about ways to better organize the list of in-world bots. I primarily use the bot list panel to find and access bots but as the list grows bigger and bigger it becomes more troublesome finding the right bot.

Here's my suggestion for a better way of organizing the bot list:

Once at least one named beacon is placed in-world, add a third tab to the list panel using the beacon icon for the tab.

When that tab is active, list all named beacons as expand/collapse headers (similar to how the Visual Studio toolbox groups WinForms controls for example) (ordered by name ascending/descending - the current arrow button can work there too).

Under each of these beacon name headers, list all bots that have at least one link to this beacon. 

At the bottom of the list add another header for all remaining bots that are not linked to any beacon.

This way the list of bots is grouped the same way we have grouped them to their beacons, thus making it easier to find and access the bots that belong to a certain area - for example all the tree farming bots would be linked to a single beacon that covers the tree farm (beacon: "Treefarm").

I think adding this organizational feature would greatly improve the overall management of our bots while still staying in-sync with the spirit of simplicity :)

To put it all into one word: Excellent! :D

Regarding the "Move to beacon" command: I frequently set my bots to move to a specific location when their actual work process is completed - i.e. when the storage they are monitoring runs full and they stop their work. A "Move to beacon" command would allow three scenarios to play out:

1) When a bot completes its work it moves out of the way indicating visually to me that this particular process is in idle mode and it thus also makes it easier to locate the bot in the world since they are all gathered around the beacon.

2) When moving my build beacon all my builder bots that are currently idling because no build projects are active, would move to the new beacon location so they are already at location when I start throwing down blueprints. I usually grab the beacon and set my player character to move to the new location, then through the build menu I start moving their source storage boxes to the new location. With a "Move to beacon" instruction, I would simply stop/start my bots and have them move there instead of having to wait for them to catch up once the first blueprint has been put down.

3) Migrating bots that move over great distances could be made to travel specific routes by applying multiple "Move to beacon" instructions which would make laying out stone paths as roads easier to handle. A recharge bot could then also be placed at each of these route beacons to make sure the traveling bots don't run out of juice mid-route.

This suggestion also sprung to mind just now:

Allow those "buildings" that don't require flooring to be placed on flooring, like the storage boxes can. I'm currently reorganizing all my stuff and creating buildings to put things into, but I have to leave the "floor" of the building empty for things like the porridge pot etc. because they wont go on flooring.

Thank you for hint about the Z key. I completely forgot about that one!

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!