Awesome, thank you all for the answers

Controller level four is just the point where i'm starting to think about rewriting my scripts so that I can have dedicated miners and dedicated haulers rather than combines so I can see now how a container under the miner's position will help enormously.  

I'm gonna have to think a lot more deeply on having a central storage and using its level for economy control, maybe I have too much bias towards lean processes.  Does anyone ever search for or conduct hit and run (haul) attacks on outlying or singleton rooms with fat storage?  And can you use storage to responsively spawn a burst of defenders? or are spawners too slow for that even with sufficient energy on hand?

thanks again

re: sparr, no worries neighbor  I can see from the email alerts that it was a once off border incident rather than intentional attack, thanks for letting me know.

hi, I'm very new so this may be a dumb question.

I notice that we get the ability to make containers and storage very early on, but I'm wondering what use people have for these in rooms with low controller levels?

I'm guessing that containers and storage are not automatically connected to the spawn capacity like extensions, so about the only use I can see would be as fuel bunkers for towers.  I'm just wondering whether I'm missing anything obvious so I thought I'd ask:

what are people using containers and storage structures for early on in the game?