As my town grew and expanded with many different buildings I noticed that my Hearthlings needed to move furhter and further to get resources needed for crafting or food to eat. I could build a few storage chests near the crafters but off course the newly gained resources are stored in the nearest available item container with the right filter. So if you would want to have wood both near the blacksmith and the carpenter than you’ll have to build them close to eachother and store the wood nearby. Not a problem in early game but as the game progresses and you might want a second carpenter the resource management gets more complicated.
So my suggestion to solve this problem is to not only make a filter option for containers but also a request option. You could set a chest near the blacksmith and set it so that it would request to have at least 10 iron ore and 10 wood for example. Hearthlings that are enabled to haul would haul the requested items to the container if the number of items drops below the desired level.
Off course you need to make sure that Hearthlings don’t get the wood from another container that requests the same items, that would make an infinite loop of a Hearthling getting resources out of one ‘requestor chest’ to another and than brining it back and forth again until the end of time.
Since it is mostly usefull near the end of the game it is also possible to not implement this for all item containers but only for a specific endgame chest. Maybe this is something for the engineer to make, he could take a basic item container such as a wooden or stone chest and add a bit of bronze or iron to it to make a new container that has the ability to request items.