A simple addition to make sorters much more useful/powerful

Hey everyone!

As of right now, inventory management, especially with conveyor sorters can be a bit of a pain. If you really want to automate a lot, you quickly run into issues with cycles and deal with the frustration of products being pushed into docked ships once station containers are full or simply are unable to implement the functionality you want to. Sometimes workarounds are possible with event controllers, but overall the basic problem remains - you can't really chose where items are pulled from and where they are pushed to if you don't want that part of the conveyor-network to be isolated from the rest of the system.

My idea is the following - for sorters to push/pull, the path from the source to the conveyor and the path from the conveyor to the destination needs to be known. Why not add some filtering logic here? A simple whitelist/blacklist, which excludes sources to pull from and another list which excludes destinations to push to could be added to conveyor sorters (only active when in automatic push/pull mode). As the respective paths are already something the game has to calculate, this should be easy to implement.

This simple change could massively expand the utility of conveyor sorters and alleviate the need for scripts to help manage inventories. One could for instance make a simple container with a conveyor that drains all of the items placed in that specific container and distributes the items into a sorted station inventory. Right now in vanilla this is quite difficult to do, both due to loops and due to risk of pushing items into docked ships or draining them from docked ships in the process.

Sure, a workaround would be possible with event controlers and timers i presume (detect wares, wait for a bit, turn off input to container and begin draining. reset once empty), but it is quite cumbersome and not beginner-friendly (especially not for those who aren't actually engineers/programmers). Using whitelists/blacklists should be much more intuitive as the game already uses those to make sorters work and players are used to them at this point.