Factorio Forums

show all items in selection lists option should work for factories

I moved your first post about this to ideas and suggestions.

When technolgy research unlocks a recipe, it enables it in GUI. Player not being able to set a recipe on a machine is the only thing that prevents players from producing those items before they researched required technology. That's how it always worked and that's why what you are suggesting here is not a bug, but suggestion for a change.

@OP : At least the 4th thread you start with the same suggestion. :
viewtopic.php?f=6&t=28954

posila wrote: ↑

Thu Jul 30, 2020 12:08 pm

I moved your first post about this to ideas and suggestions.

When technolgy research unlocks a recipe, it enables it in GUI. Player not being able to set a recipe on a machine is the only thing that prevents players from producing those items before they researched required technology. That's how it always worked and that's why what you are suggesting here is not a bug, but suggestion for a change.

That depends on how you look at it. First of all, you allow selecting not yet researched entities on other GUIs like the hotbar, chests, logistics requester GUI, etc. You even added an option to enable showing all unresearched items in these GUIs recently. Also there was a bug where the checkbox wasn't being respected for the logistics requests and unresearched items were not shown. This was very recently fixed. Factories are another thing that is not respecting this setting. There is no reason to not allow setting recipes on factories for things that are not researched. Respectfully, I understand that the implementation was done this way, but it can be changed. Developing a game is all about change. A factory can be changed to only work if the recipe is set and it's researched in addition to having all the inputs. There are already checks for the factory once the research is done and the recipe is set that it won't produce free items without having all it's inputs in the correct quantities present, that is has power, etc. All I ask is that you add one more check for the research being completed and let us set the recipe before it's researched. Just because a design decision was made 5 years ago or more, doesn't mean it shouldn't be changed. This decision doesn't make sense and is inconsistent with how the rest of the recipes and game works.

The way I look at it is that kovarex made a change to make the game better (in his opinion), but because half of the internet explodes whenever we change anything about the game, he also added option to make it work as it used to. In some cases, the option didn't make everything work as it used to, therefore it didn't work as intended, so it was a bug and got fixed.

Recipe selection already works as it used to regardless of the option about items (not recipes), so there is no bug to fix.

The idea of showing all recipes is not completely unreasonable (but I would say unlikely, considering a change was just made in opposite direction - lists that used to show all items, don't show all items by default anymore), so somebody who decides about these things might want to consider it sometime, so I moved the first thread to appropriate subforum (instead of Not a bug like this one). However, I am not that person and this is not the time.

Lastly, the proposed change of "check if recipe was researched" for example screws over mods and scenarios that can set disabled recipe on machine from script and have the machine work. So that's also a reason why this is not gonna be "just a bug fix."