Merge requester chest settings on blueprint placement

[JackGruff]

For example, there is a requester chest set to 50 x stone and 30 x iron gear wheel.

I place a blueprint of another over it which had been set to 50 x iron gear wheel and 60 x electronic circuit.

The requester chest's setting has now been changed to 50 x stone, 50 x iron gear wheel and 60 x electronic circuit.

I mean to imply the higher amount is chosen in case of conflict.

This may be very useful with mirroring blueprints, as it lets you have assemblers easily share an existing requester chest.

[ssilk]

So this is a good example to have it in a mod. I don't see the need for that in vanilla yet.



More explained: Blueprints are just the plan and not how it will be printed.

Currently we have two simple methods for printing (without shift and with shift-key pressed), both algorithms include some generally good rules like not printing miners, when nothing to mine, deconstruct trees etc.

Now you want to have a very special rule implemented. But what if I say I want to have behaving it completely different? Take the minimum number? What if others want to have more special rules to be implemented. What if the rules are super useful, but cannot be implemented both at the same time?

[JackGruff]

After giving it some more thought, I stand by my idea but change my mind on choosing the higher amount when there is a conflict, it should rather add them.

Allow me to use a real life analogy. Sam and Bill want you to put things into a box. They do not know the other has asked you to deposit in the same box. So what do you think they expect to see when they come to get their things?

• Sam finds his things, is satisfied. Bill doesn't, he is not pleased.
• Bill finds his things, is satisfied. Sam doesn't, he is not pleased.
• They each find what they expect and excess. Each takes what they want.

Now in Factorio, Bill and Sam are just machines, we can't offend or surprise them that their box was shared

There are many things in this game that one can say are special rules. Look at the default requester amount: it was first just one. Then it was changed to something else. Remember how that annoyed so many? We had to download a mod to set it to 1. When it was one, we were all happy, cause we would rather increase it ourselves then have deal with an unexpected surge in consumption.

So, now I ask, how is my proposed behavior unexpected and what would rather it be?

[Rednax]

This would be very useful, but also rather unintuitive.
How would the player know that the game behaves in this way?
There are already various features in Factorio that have this issue, and all of them have 'improvement' suggestions, which are really just alternative implementations. E.g. how the rail planner works.

I therefore agree with the above statement that this should be a mod, not a base game feature. Having said this, I do think that it would be nice to have a few of these mods with official support. Potentially even included in the main download, just not activated by default.

[OldVamp]

maybe if it was a separate blueprint, say an "upgrade plan" you could slap over an old build to swap out to higher grade machines and modules, and mark other stuff for removal in the way.
That could merge request and such.
Like when upgrading from a 2 wide furnace with a placeholder belt to a 3 wide furnace