Factorio Forums

So I’m playing IR3 for the first time and oh man, it there a lot of crafting needed…
That made me think o a something I’d really find very useful.
I’d like a mod where you can set the amount of a certain item you want and if you have the raw materials in your inventory, you’d auto craft it if you have nothing else in your crafting que.

Let’s say you set steam inserters to 20. If you have the raw materials available, you’d start crafting these until you have 20 or you run out of materials. If you start crafting something yourself, you’d jump the que to the front, so no hold-up.

As you gather more and more resources, you’d craft all the items you set as having a minimum in your inventory.

If you can work without GUI, I implemented something:
https://mods.factorio.com/mod/idle-crafter

Or something likes this, which has also other features:
https://mods.factorio.com/mod/HandyHands
https://mods.factorio.com/mod/HandyHandsRefactored

The second claims to be the same but better UPS

Thanks for pointing those out!

I should note that IR3 intentionally makes handcrafting painful to strongly encourage automation. In my personal experience of it, you should focus on automating intermediates so that you're only hand crafting buildings, then work on automating the buildings.

I feel that this is a very deliberate design choice for IR3 in particular, so be careful before going crazy on the handcrafting mods.

Isn't "automating handcrafting" literally the point of everything else in the game (assemblers, robots, circuits)???

PFQNiet wrote: ↑

Fri May 12, 2023 2:08 am

I should note that IR3 intentionally makes handcrafting painful to strongly encourage automation. In my personal experience of it, you should focus on automating intermediates so that you're only hand crafting buildings, then work on automating the buildings.

I feel that this is a very deliberate design choice for IR3 in particular, so be careful before going crazy on the handcrafting mods.

That's a certain philosophy, which is not necessarily the optimal, most efficient one. Automation and handcrafting are 2 quite different things, but with a common part. Automation is rather for bulk production, while handcrafting is a lot more precise and faster to decide, what to craft. The automatic intermediates crafting is faster, if you don't have assembler setup for it, etc. Common part is, you can craft things, simple as that.

Also, handcrafting is a limited crafting option like an assembler with crafting speed 1 and no power requirement, which should be used in order to be fast and efficient. If you can manage to use it non-stop, you are faster, right? Of course, if you miss to automate intermediates, you will be stuck very fast on handcrafting them, but it can boost, if you are pre-handcrafting, when you would otherwise be idle.
This is, where those mods kick in. Don't be idle, always use your internal assembler to craft something, which you will need sooner or later. And don't waste time to decide, what you need to precraft.
Of course, precrafting can be dangerous, when you dedicate resources to the wrong things, which are not needed. Otherwise, buffering up intermediates or whole malls can be dangerous, too.