Grinder Inventories Dont Drain to Cargo - spare me the manual labor, I'm an engineer)

Large grinder networks need better inventory automation and transfer performanceI would like to discuss a problem that becomes increasingly noticeable when building large automated recycling systems.

I built an automated ship recycling center using a large network of grinders. All grinders are connected to each other through the conveyor system, and the network is connected to a large central cargo container.

Technically, the conveyor system works. When individual grinders become full, excess components are eventually transferred to the central cargo storage.

However, the grinders do not continuously empty their inventories into the cargo container.

As a result, after dismantling a large ship, a significant amount of material remains distributed across many individual grinder inventories instead of being collected in the main storage.

In my current system I have around 150 grinder inventories. Some individual grinders can retain approximately 16 tons of components after a large recycling operation.

This creates several problems.

1. The central cargo inventory does not represent my actual stockWhen I check my main storage, I cannot see how many components I actually own because a large percentage of them may still be distributed throughout dozens or even hundreds of grinder inventories.

For an industrial base, centralized inventory visibility is very important.

2. Emptying grinders manually creates excessive micromanagementAt the moment I have to open the inventory interface and manually transfer components from grinder after grinder into the main storage.

This becomes extremely repetitive when dealing with a large recycling machine.

The purpose of building an automated industrial system is to reduce manual work. Instead, the larger my recycling system becomes, the more inventory management I have to perform manually.

3. Large inventory transfers cause noticeable performance delaysThere is also a performance issue.

When transferring a large amount of components from one grinder inventory into the central cargo container, the game frequently pauses for around 2–3 seconds, and sometimes longer, before the transfer is completed and I can continue working with the inventory.

When this has to be repeated dozens of times, the inventory management itself becomes very slow.

Possible solutionsI think industrial blocks such as grinders and drills need some form of automatic inventory output.

For example:

• Keep local inventory empty
• Automatically push output to connected cargo
• Drain all
• Transfer all inventories from selected block group to cargo
• A functional Conveyor Sorter mode that continuously pulls items out of selected inventories

Ideally, a grinder should be able to operate as a processing tool rather than also becoming a long-term storage container.

A player could choose a cargo container as the destination, and all recovered components would automatically move there whenever conveyor capacity is available.

This would make large industrial systems much easier to design and operate.

Why I think this mattersSpace Engineers encourages players to solve problems by building machines and automation.

Large recycling facilities, mining systems, automated shipyards and logistics networks are exactly the kind of engineering projects the game makes me want to create.

But inventory management currently does not scale together with the engineering.

The larger and more automated the machine becomes, the more manual inventory work the player receives.

I would really like to know whether improvements to industrial inventory management, conveyor automation or the Conveyor Sorter are planned for future updates.

I built an automated ship recycling center so I would not have to dismantle ships by hand — and somehow I ended up with a new profession:

operator of 150 grinder inventories :)