With electricity being talked about, a system that could detect daylight and turn on/off certain systems like flood lights on the outside of a base, or sentries posted around. If there were timers for crop growing or drawing water out of the ground with pumps like the Pump Jack. Solar Panels and the works.
With wiring, a house or even several houses could be powered by a single large generator from farther distances. As power runs out at maybe 10%, then lights dim to conserve power as well as certain systems like sentries or cameras could be shut off should they be added.
This may have already been suggested time and time again, but why not. Some parts may take mods to create rather than vanilla.
I love the idea of automation, Any game that I can I make working lightswitches all over my base! Its the reason I build 3 wide roofs in minecraft because I need room for the redstone lamps.
I don’t actually thing a day time/night time detection system has been suggested before; if so, it’s clearly not something that comes up often.
Being able to automatically turn off things that aren’t useful during the day and have them come on during the night, while things useless during the night are also turned off, would make base building a lot more efficient and enjoyable. I definitely would love to see this, with manual timers too. Manual timers would basically have something do something every x seconds/minutes/hours.
A variety of niche wiring components would be fun to have, and I’d support their implementation provided the mechanics for wiring allowed for easy implementation of said components. Minecraft, Terraria, and Starbound are great examples of games which involve wiring and a wide variety of components, such as logic gates, sensors, and wire output having an effect on the world (such as pistons in Minecraft).
Naturally, before any of this can be implemented, the foundation for the wiring mechanics must be developed by Nelson (and is also naturally a lower priority task than, say, food mechanics). I’d imagine that power and logic signals would best be two separate things, either carried in their own wires or carried in wires together but independent of one another. This would allow for information from certain things such as solar panels to be transmitted to a circuit network (much like Factorio’s circuit networks) even if power output was disabled.
Logic signals on a circuit network should probably function almost exactly like how they do in Factorio, with various signal names with associated values (e.g a signal is named “A” and has a value of “3”) as to allow for even deeper and more complex signalling. A component could also have various details about it that would be (optionally) signaled to a connected circuit network. Again, like Factorio. Lets use a generator as an example. It would have various details, such as fuel level, power consumption, and power not being used. Lets say it is powering a small base and at a specific moment it has 25% fuel left, 70% of its power produced is being used, and 30% is not being used. The generator is set specifically to output the fuel level under the signal with the ID of “A”. Any device on the circuit network will be able to read this signal and will see the value of “25”.
Sorry for the long reply, I tend to ramble. I still love this idea, and I really hope Nelson looks into this specifically.