Advanced zone using

Let’s pretend i have this little boxhouse of mine http://clip2net.com/s/3hLPwlH
Blue pixel is where my char is staying and ready to craft stuff, orange and red pixels are important shit i want to craft from. So, orange is accessible and red is not. There’s green wall on the way that i want to keep for aesthetic reasons. My suggestion is to use zone manager to expand this default craft range. Maybe even use pathfinding and tile counter to prevent exploits like crafting from completely unaccessible sites http://clip2net.com/s/3hLQEIv. I really hope we can have a good use of it.

Maybe simpler would be to just have the craft radius go through walls.

I do think though that the zones have a lot of potential good ideas. I think one really cool thing would be auto-drop zones. One of the most tedious things about the game is dropping all your loot into assorted piles. What if you could simply apply parameters to each pile, then whenever you return from a supply run you simply dance all over the piles and it the zones sort your stuff automatically? The only challenge would be making the parameters flexible enough. It would be nice to always drop torso gear on the torso pile, or scrap metal+chunk of steel+lump of steel+sheet metal on the metal raw materials pile.

strongly disagree. many exploits possible, like crafting from the other side of impregnable walls with enemies around.

otoh, we could use pathfinding to access an area of around 10 tiles worth of walking when crafting, provided that if he does access any item outside LOS, the char will automatically move until he can grab said item, then return to the start point. (ensuring that everyone with LOS to the tile where the item is will see the character)

That one would be really hard to do with current system. Crafting doesn’t support any moving.
10 tile pathfinding would be much easier, but it would still require some clever programming not to get incredibly slow. Current pathfinding only supports finding a path from start to destination, not finding all reachable points withing x tiles. It wouldn’t be hard, but it wouldn’t be as easy as changing “rl_dist(a, b) < 6” to “pathfinding_distance(a, b) < 6”.