Build queue improvement.

[ofca]

I've decided to build power armor mk2 in-hand. This was a bad idea at the current state of the game, as it takes hours to build and you're effectively unable to build anything in hand for this time - and if you decide to cancel the build, you end up with football stadium-worth of materials on the ground

Ideas:
Make build process periodically "pick up" things from the inventory that weren't there when starting the build
i.e. in the mean time I improved advanced circuits production considerably and have 200 of them in inventory, yet build insists on creating new instead of using the ones from inventory.

Add a "gief dis nao!" function of some kind, which immediately puts the item in front of the queue (after currently building item, and splits the stack so if you're building 100 advanced circuits, it splits this build), so you can build transporter belts or inserters without interrupting the big build.

What do you think?

[Enterpriser1995]

Nice one!

I'd really like something like it!

[FishSandwich]

You can cancel anything in queue, without losing anything it's already built, and restart it. That'll make it use items from your inventory.

[ofca]

Hence the 'improvement' in the thread title

[Gandalf]

I like this a lot. Sounds both feasible and practical to me. :3

1. The idea of automatically incorporating picked up items: As Fish says you can just reset the building process, however if you have many items queued that can be quite tedious.
Prime example: Building lots of transport belts in groups of five (because you want them NOW) and realizing you didn't have any cogs. You could cancel all the belts again once you picked up the cogs, but it'd be much faster and more convenient if it could do that on its own. Obviously this would mean, that raw materials that are no longer needed get released back into the inventory.
It might lead to some minor confusion: Say you're making said transport belts without any cogs in your inventory. You then pick up some cogs from a chest for some other purpose and they immediately disappear from your inventory, getting replaced by iron. Might be a little weird for beginners. I don't think it's too bad though, there's definitely more confusing stuff in the game.

2. Moving stuff to the front of the queue: also cool for when you have many things queued and you just wanna fix that one missing inserter real quick… Maybe ctrl+click on a recipe could unshift instead of push the item to the queue (potentially omiting the item that is just being made).

[ssilk]

I think your first suggestion is scratching on the core of factorio. The target is to automate. The target is definitely not to craft everything yourself. Why did you even consider that? That's the good question in this case. it's much easier.

What you need are other mechanism, for example something, which shows you the actual crafting time: https://forums.factorio.com/forum/vie ... f=6&t=1226
So that you can see, that it doesn't make sense to craft it now. You can rethink your strategy earlier.


To your second: many suggestions about changing crafting queue:

Most interesting start is here: https://forums.factorio.com/forum/vie ... ueue#p9519

This is your suggestion: https://forums.factorio.com/forum/vie ... ting+queue

Slightly Related:
https://forums.factorio.com/forum/vie ... ting+queue

[Gandalf]

The target is to automate. The target is definitely not to craft everything yourself.

Not everything, but some things. And there's no reason why the queue couldn't be a little smarter for that.

[ssilk]

Ok. How should this system determine, if a new item, that's added to my inventory should eventually (if not yet produced and still needs to be crafted) be taken for this crafting or not? Because maybe I want to use it for the next thing I want to craft and not for this. I ask, cause this is an important question.

[Gandalf]

It should always take the item, simple as that. It makes no sense to keep it for something else you'll craft later. Either you have to craft whatever intermediate item now, or you'll have to do it later, the outcome is the same. However if it is used right away you may still decide to pick up more of it to save overall time.

[ofca]

I wanted to post exactly that, but Gandalf beat me to the punch

[FishSandwich]

It should always take the item, simple as that. It makes no sense to keep it for something else you'll craft later. Either you have to craft whatever intermediate item now, or you'll have to do it later, the outcome is the same. However if it is used right away you may still decide to pick up more of it to save overall time.

So if I'm crafting 10 smart inserters, and pick up 10 normal inserters that I want to use immediately, I can't do that because they're forced into the smart inserter? Sorry, not convinced.

[ofca]

Then pick up 20 normal inserters, or disable this functionality in options - making inserters is quick and out of scope of this feature. This is useful for high end stuff especially in concert with drones delivering for example circuit boards, which I would wish were immediately consumed by the production queue.

[JimiQ]

Then pick up 20 normal inserters, or disable this functionality in options - making inserters is quick and out of scope of this feature. This is useful for high end stuff especially in concert with drones delivering for example circuit boards, which I would wish were immediately consumed by the production queue.

Even better - new hotkey that'll recount/reuse newly picked items into queue

[FishSandwich]

Then pick up 20 normal inserters, or disable this functionality in options - making inserters is quick and out of scope of this feature. This is useful for high end stuff especially in concert with drones delivering for example circuit boards, which I would wish were immediately consumed by the production queue.

That was one example of how this feature doesn't work, there are many more, you have to consider all situations, not just the ones that suit your needs. Like, what if I want to pick up some items just for transportation? I wouldn't want them thrown into anything I'm crafting, and I don't want to have to disable an option every time. Having it as a hotkey as JimiQ suggested actually makes this a workable idea though.

[ssilk]

It should always take the item, simple as that. It makes no sense to keep it for something else you'll craft later. Either you have to craft whatever intermediate item now, or you'll have to do it later, the outcome is the same. However if it is used right away you may still decide to pick up more of it to save overall time.

This won't work well. Fish said it already, if I just pickup something, that I want to transport while building. And many more such situations. You need to think through all situations.

[ofca]

Hotkey or option satisfies everyone, even ignoring the fact that building new items consumes items from your inventory, so this would just be natural and expected. I would personally opt for a hotkey to _NOT_ auto-consume the pickup for the build queue, to suit your needs instead of troubling everyone else on the planet (knowing at the same time that even you won't be using it)