This version adds a spider link tool, and if you want to test it it's on the GitHub
https://github.com/npc-strider/spidertron-squad-control/releases/tag/0.4.0
download the Spider_Control_0.4.0.zip and copy it to your mods folder.
If you have any bugs (because this is a beta version) please report them in this thread
thanks :)

Nice work!

The things I would point out testing wise

--> The map icon is enormous, any way of making it smaller?

--> When linking one spidertron to an entity or center spidertron is it possible to get it to stop a little bit off center or behind, maybe even a setting you can change? Something like “allow spidertron to stop within X distance”? When doing mutiple single links all spidertrons end up at the same point and it’s hard to enter the followed entity or center spidertron.

--> UI wise, what about changing the follow player button to work like the link to entity button and then combine the buttons to a common link button?

--> I would check and disallow adding two links from one spidertron (aka disallow one-to-many links/relationship and keep allowing many-to-one links/relationships). It will primarily fix the issues I had with my next two points.

--> I’m was having difficulty un-linking the spiders but it was just me not understanding implementation. Instead of only clicking the link to entity button then selecting the spidertron, I was selecting the spidertrons with the squad remote then clicking the entity. It was giving me a lot of weird results, including what looked to be an inability to unlink the spidertron but was actually just creating and deleting multiple different links. The multiple links from one spidertron created a bit of havoc.

--> When I had two links from one spidertron to follow a single entity or spidertron, deleting that entity made the mod throw an error. …

The mod Spidertron squad control (0.4.0) caused a non-recoverable error.
Please report this error to the mod author.

Error while running event Spider_Control::on_nth_tick(20)
LuaEntity API call when LuaEntity was invalid.
stack traceback:
Spider_Control/control.lua:451: in function <Spider_Control/control.lua:422>
stack traceback:
[C]: in function 'index'
__Spider_Control/control.lua:451: in function <Spider_Control/control.lua:422>

thank you for your feedback, I'll work on the mod later this week/weekend because i'm busy again
1. map icon - is this referring to the GPS tag when a squad is destroyed/removed/etc? If so, I don't know of any way to reduce the size of the huge cross; maybe i'll implement it through a chart tag thing but it's less elegant than the gps tags
2. If I implement this, should it be on a per-squad basis? Or maybe we should make the link tool save the position relative to the target and then continue with this offset?
3. I'm not sure how that would work practically? If you could describe how we can combine it i'll see if I can do it (for example, I don't really want to give players the link tool when toggling the follow because they may be using capsules or something in their hands while in combat)
4. Yep, will implement (noticed a lot of buggy behaviour stemming from that)
5. Okay if I fix 4
6. Thanks for the report, will fix

1) yeah I'm talking about the GPS / map in the top right or when you hit the map button.
2) when the spidertrons are in a squad of more than one it's not an issue as you can position them a distance away. it's only when there's one in the squad. I can see pro's to being able to have the squad at a relative position.
3) I'm going to take back #3, for some reason I was going about thinking after clicking the follow player button, you had to click the player, which isn't the case. The use case you stated, makes sense to have a specific button for.

2 months late, so I have no idea if I did fix some of these bugs (ended up completely refactoring the whole script for 0.5.0), but the distance thing is sort-of implemented when you use the regular remote on a spidertron - i'm now not updating the mean of the squad when that occurs so it just goes off-center. And I've made the link feature a lot more robust so it should not allow weird linking situations :)

Hi!
Thank you for this mod, it can be really useful in the late game!
I think I've found a bug that occurs when opening the train tutorial. Here is the error message: https://i.imgur.com/yijfpyX.png
The error seems to occur with other tutorials too