Possible Hopper Improvement, Not to Automate, but to make it Useful

[McDuckington]

The current state of the Hopper is that it loads items into a machine, which is nice, but the issue comes from having to manually collect it. Nice in theory, but it doesnt really make the process any faster, or passive.

I understand why we cant have an autograbber, because then wed just be playing Factorio, but a massive improvement on the Hopper would be if it worked on all 8 surrounding tiles.

This way you can get at least up to 8 items from it before having to go back and grab them all

 

[Freizeitfarmer]

I think the Hopper should do exactly this... taking back the final product so each tool gets automated but just 1:1. So one needs one Hopper for each tool.
At the moment the Hopper doesn't make sense. And so I don't use it at all.

 

[FilthyGorilla]

Honestly yeah that would be nice, also forces weird layouts so you still aren't placing stuff optimally and there's a bit of effort involved, just not as bad as they are now.

I will say that the hopper is a lot better on devices like mobile where you have weird interaction mechanics when loading and it's just a slow process, especially when processing unstackables with deconstructors, I use them for gold and hoppers are the only thing that makes it feasable.