Hello,

I was wondering if you could add compatibility to the mod Transport Drones found here: https://mods.factorio.com/mod/Transport_Drones

The item "Transport Drone" needs to be manually inserted into the Request Depots to function. The amount of Transport Drones in a Depot is important and needs to be manually adjusted, depending on how much research has been done. Doing this with bots/inserters/chests is possible, but annoying, since it can't be automated.

Would it be possible to add this item to the list of exception which can be held in the inventory?

Would adding circuit wires to the depots that allowed reading the number of transport drones in the depot make this less necessary?

So, you're saying that transport drones are like modules. Interesting. I've tried playing with mining drones, and it is a mild pain to get the drones into the depots.

IMHO, this should be dealt with by circuit wire that can read how many drones are in a depot, be it mining or transport. For modules, that's a big change and it's a base game item. Though, as you say, it might also be nice to change the numbers based on research done...

I agree - if the amounts of drones in the Depot could be read by the circuit network, it would be much easier to input the correct amount. It would also be nice if the requested item could be set by circuit network, or at least the amount of items that is to be held in the inventory. But that's not how the mod works.

To me it seems like a design decision that this needs to be manually adjusted. Which is well possible if you run to the Depot and and do it as a player. But wit BNW, you can't do that and the mod becomes VERY hard to use as a result.

I see two possible ways to change this issue. One would be to change how the Transport Drones mod works. Which could go against it's design principles and would add a lot of work. The other is to add the Drones to the whitelist in BNW. Which seems like the easier solution and - since the issue comes from the lack of a player character - is a problem created by BNW.

After looking at control.lua I decided to try to add my own solution.

elseif name == "transport-drone" then
return math.min(200, count)

This added to the itemCountAllowed functions allows me to do what I wanted.

Would it be possible to add a list of items that other mods can add entries to? That way, other mods could decide if they wanted to support BNW or a small compatibility mod could be written to make it easier to integrate BNW into other mods without the need of editing either mods.

Your idea of a table is interesting. I'm not sure how to make something like that that can be modified by another mod.

It's a good idea though.

I think, provisionally, I'll add transport and mining drones, 200 of each. Though if I recall, a stack of mining drones is only like 20 or 10..

I do think though, that these two mods should modify how they function. The lack of ability to wrap good automation around adding or removing drones (or set request slots) seems like a big flaw. I mean, on a normal logistics chest, you can easily use the circuit network to set request slots.

Unfortunately, while I haven't played with it myself, it seems that reading signals from or writing signals to the circuit network is expensive from Lua.

I never used Mining Drones, but yes, the Transport Drones Stack only to ten.

I joined the discord of the dev of those mods and he's constantly adding new stuff. currently working on enabling circuit networks for Transport Drones.

Looks like the workaround won't be necessary in the future :D

Perhaps Module Inserter would help?

Also, runtime cross-mod support is done using LuaRemote.

Looks like they're not modules; they're ingredient slots in a disabled assembler; you can insert mining drones and transport drones with regular inserters, sometimes, but you can't remove them with regular inserters.

Please fine a pull request to add support for the mining drones and transport drones mod.

I added the blueprint related pull request, but not the mining drones related one. I'm going to look into what to do with this. IMHO, the mining drones mod could just 'process' the mining drone when you inserted it and then make it available in an output buffer to remove.

I should sit down and take the time to understand how LuaRemote works.

I've been inserting mining drones and transport drones into the klonan drone buildings using inserter chests. However, that's really very painful. Being able to manually drop them in would be a huge qol improvement.