It would be nice to be able to create a structure much like the automaton chests, that we can use to create automatons to gather materials in a set location.
The automatons themselves would have a limited work lifespan requiring the player to crasft new cores and place them into the structure (much like wood to fuel fires) the cores would be consumed to generate an automaton that would gather any nearby resources within a radius and place them in the chest/structure to be picked up by the player at a later point.
Each structure would have a maximum of 3-5 automaton capacity spawned at a time. (1 core used per individual spawn)
The automatons already have a solid template to work with (rook cores spawn rooks that break resources, and pawn cores spawn pawns to transport them) they move slowly already which would also work for balancing this feature. There would be no need for a player to set behaviors like with a companion as they would behave nearly exactly as wild automatons already do.
All in all this would be a nice way to slowly and passively gather resources. And to further balance/reduce game performance impact they could be made to not function (or be spawned) unless the player is within the realms the structures are in.
