What is this mod about?

this mod adds a new spidertron which is named constructron. whenever you build ghosts or destroy or upgrade some entities, these constructrons will request whatever is necessary to take from a service station and go around your ghosts to build them. or destroy the entities marked for deconstruction.

this mod isn't a cheat. it doesn't magically build entities around constructrons, it doesn't make spidertrons faster, it doesn't give them extra equipments. it is just a vanilla spidertron that is automatically moved to locations. you need to put personal roboports and construction drones in them.

things it can do:

it can build your ghost entities. including modules. if an inventory of a single constructron is enough, it will send a single constructron to do the job. if not, it will send two constructron to do the same job, dividing their requests by two. if two isn't enough 3, if not 4. maximum amount of constructron on the same job is configurable through mod settings. you can have as many constructrons as you want regardless of what you put in that setting.

it can deconstruct trees pretty okay. it calculates the necessary constructrons needed to fit the trees in their inventory and sends them accordingly. same goes with entities without inventories. however it doesn't count items on belts, inside steel chests, robots in roboports etc. so it will not send enough constructrons if you mark a lot of such entities with full inventories. caution: this will stuck the constructron because its robots won't be able to enter back to its trunk.

it can do upgrade jobs as well. however it will try to do the upgrade job even if you did it already by other robots etc. which is annoying. might be changed in the future.

things it can't do

it can't build landfill. or any tile whatsoever. in order to give functionality to build landfills, it would require changing the pathing. right now it would try to find path inside the water, which it can not. therefore it will not. it could build concrete etc without doing much changes actually. but it does not at the moment.

right now it can't work on any other surface than nauvis. so space exploration etc wouldn't work.

how do I set it up?

well you first need to create a service station. which is just a roboport without any construction zone and 10 tile logistic radius. it is meant this way so that it's somewhat easier to seperate them from other networks if that is what you want. you need to supply their logistic network with everything that is needed to build. if you're building solar panels, you need to have solar panels available in the logistic network of these service stations. if you're building rails, you need to have rails. so you probably want them inside your mall. that logistic network needs logistics bots too. again, no cheating. constructrons will get the items using the logistic request. you need to transport these items with logistic robots.

now you can create constructrons. they require same ingredients as spidertrons. they have exactly the same properties other than their name. this allows the mod to not interfere with your usual spidertrons. it just assigns these constructrons. you need to put personal roboports in their grid and you need to power them. also, you need to put construction robots in their trunk. otherwise they are not going to build anything.

that's about it. you can just stamp down blueprints that are anywhere around the map. the constructrons will use pathfinding api to find a way to go there and build it. caution: don't put blueprints on islands seperate from your service station. don't put blueprints too close to water. it will most likely stuck the constructrons.

there may be a lot of bugs.