One of the things that annoys me about crafting is inventory management. If I want to build something, I need to have the required materials in my inventory or I can't craft with them. That means I have to make a trip to my chests/cabinets/crates/barrels/whatever and pull the materials out, hoping I have enough inventory space while remembering the recipe(s) that I want to use. With dozens of recipes using more ingredients than I can keep in my inventory, it's also difficult to tell, at a glance, what I can make or what resources I still need to gather. These issues would be solved if I could just take a crafting station and wire it to a storage item, and have that storage item act like it's part of my inventory whenever I use the station it's linked to. For example, I could have a cook top linked to a refrigerator where I store raw, farmed food. By accessing the cook top, I can use the items stored in the refrigerator to craft a recipe without ever having to move anything from the refrigerator to my inventory. So once I have a stockpile of crafting ingredients, I never have to move them from their storage location in order to use them.
I'm going to necro this year-and-a-half old post because this is exactly what is needed in the Starbound mod world. With massive overhaul mods like FrackinUniverse that adds thousands more items, being able to link chests and other storage with the player's inventory while crafting is a HUGE need! But it can't just be chests on the ship. With planets now able to be colonized, many people are moving planet-side. And what if the crafting station is on the planet but the storage is on the ship? Food for thought.
I just made a comment in another post about more automation that I would like to see some sort of food crafting station that you store your ingredients in cause I don't like filling up my inventory with foodstuffs. I think it would be neat to store the top tier materials in their respective crafting stations rather than cart them around as well.
There's only one problem with this: poorly implemented, it would allow the player access to the contents of every chest everywhere (or at least every chest on the planet). Proposed solutions: 1. Have the ship locker and possibly the craftable Storage Lockers be tied to the player, and allow that player to use its contents at any crafting station. 2. Allow the player to link storage containers to crafting stations, similar to how inputs are wired to outputs.
@Nate McCloud I think we're not very far from a well implemented concept, take a look at this : http://community.playstarbound.com/resources/item-broadcaster-hyper-storage.1745/ I believe the evolution of that mod, would give us something really good.
