I'm trying to figure out where to put my workbench and how to arrange the chests it will use. Has anyone spent anytime with it yet? From reading the wiki it seems it will only access chests that are directly touching it? Is that a single chest? Or any number as long as they are touching the workbench? Or any number as long as they touch each other? It probably isn't any chest in the room if it was placed in a shed right? Can anyone verify this new item's properties? I'm trying to decide how soon I want one, and where I'll put it. At the moment it might be over near the pond, but it probably starts near the furnaces. Thanks
It will pull from chests in any of the 8 adjacent tiles; this is practically limited to 7 since you need one space open in order to actually reach the workbench itself. There are also mods which affect this; notably Better Workbenches which extends it to the "any number as long as they touch another connected chest" and Automate which can use it as a connector.
I played a coop game with my sons this weekend and we built the workshop day 1 of summer next to our 6 chest. It took a bit to break the habit of trying to open the chests and pull the ingredients/components into the backpack to craft. But even doing that, Wow! That was pretty darn useful. it was nice to know that "with your current inventory of things all in these chests" that I could build a beehive, or a sprinkler or tappers, or fertilizer or speed gro, or what ever. It was really really nice. Especially in multiplayer when the game doesn't stop for you sitting there looking at the inventory and crafting.
I tried yesterday, you need only 2 chests to put all the ingrédients needed for crafting. So 3 tiles are enough.
Quite right. Some efficient farmers very well could get away with one or two or few chests. I have not determined my minimum number yet. But I was asking for the game "maximum" because I have a spreadsheet system for tracking inventory and color coded chests to help me quickly find what I need normally. And i want to impact that as little as possible. For example I would prefer to leave all of my coral and snails in the "blue, fish" chest and the sap in my "brown natural resources" bin and my oak resin in the "green artisan product" chest but still have them all accessed by the workshop to make the various fertilizers I need. Instead of having one "crafting chest" where I place those items away from the other things they store with. I normally run about 6 to 8 chests next to my stairs leading into my house. Adding the workbench and having it reach 8 means I can just move that row into a cluster around the workbench and done.
