Allowing More Patterns in the ME Interface

[Leche-Caliente]

Right now we are limited to a maximum of 36 patterns in a single ME Interface. In my cursory investigation of this, I was told that there are no code limitations that require this limit, if that understanding is incorrect I will certainly remove this discussion.

I feel that the 36 pattern limit is too low and that increasing it would improve the game by reducing the need to spam interfaces, ultimately leading to less cluttered designs. The downside is that this would make setups easier because of less channel usage. I am not sure about how much the late game is balanced around channel availability, so hopefully someone else can comment on that.

There are obvious UI limitations to increasing pattern capacity; just by looking at the interface as it is now I believe that it should be possible to add four more rows, for a total of 72 patterns, without ui issues. This would bring the interface ui to 10 "item" sized rows total plus the player inventory (in comparison a compressed chest has nine rows plus the inventory).

This could be achieved using the already present pattern capacity cards by increasing how many are allowed to be slotted into an interface; I also heard a suggestion for an even more advanced card that would be unlocked at UV and allow for the extra pattern slots, but I am not familiar with that tier so I am open to suggestions about balanced crafting recipes.

[S4mpsa]

We survived years with 9 patterns per interface and now 4x that isn't enough?

[Leche-Caliente]

Personally I don't see the balancing necessity for the limit, but maybe I'm missing something from the perspective of higher tiers. It seems to me that it mostly just contributes to there being more ticking entities in the world that serve ultimately redundant purposes.

[boubou19]

then you end up with chunk bans because you put all of them in a single interface. As Sampsa pointed out, we survived years with 9 patterns per interface. 4 is already generous and more would just trivialise infrastructure setup with no downside at all. i'm closing this.