I'd like to see a storage chest made specifically for this so that it can have its costs altered to fit better. Instead of using the steel chest, we could use a "Merge Chest" or perhaps "Storage Plot", that takes different materials like steel bars, steel, some iron for shelving, maybe a bit of copper wire for the lighting you'd use in such a large storage building.

Even better if you can make it so that merging works specific to different types of storages.

In this case, a wood chest can merge with a max width or length of 1, with the other dimension being maxed at 6. Iron chest being the same with other max being 8, steel 10.

Then you have your storehouse block, which defaults at 2x2 in size, and can be a max width of 6 of those (12), and the other max being 6, so 6x12 or 12x6 of those blocks.

Finally, your "storage plot" for your fenced in area being made of concrete and steel bars, defaulting at the size of 6x6 in size, combining together to make a max of 6 of those in both directions to have a total size of 1296 storage chests or 36x36 tiles.

Just some ideas about immersion and balance.

You might also consider the warehouse mod for some graphical ideas.

That sounds needlessly complicated. Might be good for immersion, but I will not implement this.

I have ideas how to enhance the graphical side of the mod, but without someone who is able to provide the sprites I'm not able to do anything.

Well, I know an artist who I could ask about such and see if she's interested at all. I'll give her a poke and see what she says.

As for the idea I had, there's two ideas here. One is just the simple version of one single chest with its own cost system and then there's my more advanced version which I figured you wouldn't want to do. What do you think of the simple version? Simply for changing the costs of the individual chests.

For the simple version, I was thinking a good cost would be 6 steel, 4 steel poles, 4 iron sheets, 2 copper wire = 4 chests. Each chest with a storage capacity of 50, and an HP of 250. (12x12 grid of these 7200 storage 36k HP) (42x42 = 88.2k storage, 441k HP)

Now obviously you have your limit system here that limits the storage and HP but I was just doing the math for max potentials just cause. Steel chest is 48 storage, 208 of these hits the max storage limit already. So with 50 storage per chest your default storage limit would be hit 8 chests sooner. Reason that recipe produces 4 chests, is so that the copper wire goes further instead of having one per chest. Iron sheets for storage shelving inside the storage area or various other storage related tools. Steel poles for supports or fencing in both cases of warehouse or fence area.

Unfortunately she said she isn't up for the art thing right now. :P Too much to do and whatnot.

Limiting the entities which can be merged to a custom entity would be bad for all people which use vanilla (and bob's) chests. It might give me better control on how the merging is done, but it would alienate all people who are already using this mod for (almost) no reason.

Thanks for checking with the artist for me.

Well, I didn't mean immediately change the entity over for everyone and limit to just that. Your settings already take care of telling the game what entity to use. If you update the mod with this new entity, and change the "default" over to the new entity, everyone who uses the mod already will still have their settings for "steel chest" while anyone who installs the mod after that update will have the new default. But, anyhow. Just thoughts and whatnot. I like to balance and make things realistic so I ponder up ideas for all sorts of things. I've got lots of mod ideas that I don't think will ever get done. :P

Bottom line for me is that I'd prefer supporting vanilla chests over custom entity created just for balancing sake.