Tool belt improvements

[syltrand]

1.On the tool belt, the slots reserved for a specific item (aka. middle click) should always be filled automatically if you have any of that item in your inventory. Half the time, my toolbelt is empty when there's a bunch of that items in my inventory.

example: Say I have conveyors reserved in a slot, then lay a whole bunch (item is in hand), then open the inventory to select an item, the conveyors will trade place with it and stay in the inventory, leaving my toolbelt empty.

2.Items in a reserved slot should not be used for crafting.

example: creating more fast inserters than I have inserters will use all my inserters, leaving my toolbelt empty.

[thetoolcrafter]

Isn't this more of a bug????
Idk, but I can tell you it really annoys me as well.
Hopefully a Dev will notice

[SquarelyCircle]

Good call. As it stands, this feature merely limits what you can put into spaces... which doesn't make any sense.

[Rseding91]

Good call. As it stands, this feature merely limits what you can put into spaces... which doesn't make any sense.

The filtering system has absolutely nothing to do with the quickbar. It just happens to be enabled for the quickbar. As such: it makes perfect sense that it works like it does.

Any different behavior would be a completely new feature unrelated to inventory filters.

[aober93]

Good call. As it stands, this feature merely limits what you can put into spaces... which doesn't make any sense.

The filtering system has absolutely nothing to do with the quickbar. It just happens to be enabled for the quickbar. As such: it makes perfect sense that it works like it does.

Any different behavior would be a completely new feature unrelated to inventory filters.

Perhaps why we are posting under "ideas & suggestion" right .olool

[Ragnaman]

One can quickly fill tool belt by opening inventory and ctrl+click in empty inventory square: that will fill your tool belt as per filters set.
The tool belt however works fine for me. If i have 400 belts in my inventory i can place them all by selecting a belt from my toolbelt and just using that without "refilling" my toolbelt.

[golfmiketango]

One can quickly fill tool belt by opening inventory and ctrl+click in empty inventory square.

Amazing. But bad.

Kind of exciting that, after a year of playing factorio almost every day, I continue to learn new subtle features of the user interface. And definitely amazing that factorio offers such a rich interface under a relatively simplistic veneer...

But, also, frankly, imo this is more of a negative than a positive. There ought to be a central place in the user guide where every vanilla-supported UI feature / gesture is briefly documented, so that if someone wants to learn everything through direct study, they can. I'd gladly trade the "excitement" of occasionally learning a new trick, like this, for the knowledge that I actually know how to play factorio, and am limited only by the constraints built into the game, and my creativity.

Factorio suffers from the same disease, in this regard, as Civilization 5. UI features, keyboard gestures, etc., are almost hidden from the user like easter eggs, to be slowly discovered over time, through word-of-mouth or, especially for those at an intermediate phase of learning, occasional desperate googling and long-shot youtube tutorial skimming.

Anyhow I appear to be making an off-topic rant, again, so I'll leave it at that.

Actually, in the interest of being psuedo-on-topic, if a bit thread-hijack-ey, here's another feature I'd really like to see: the ability to hot-key individual toolbelt rows. It's not terribly important in vanilla, but in modded environments that offer 3+ tool-belts, the single "toggle toolbelt" key is a rather woeful way to navigate to a particular place. Even in vanilla, this would still be quite nice, as if you could type, i.e., ctrl-shift-1 1 to access the first item in the first toolbelt, then you wouldn't have to worry about which toolbelt was currently active to get where you're going, increasing twitch-factor.

[Rseding91]

... Factorio suffers from the same disease, in this regard, as Civilization 5. UI features, keyboard gestures, etc., are almost hidden from the user like easter eggs, to be slowly discovered over time, through word-of-mouth or, especially for those at an intermediate phase of learning, occasional desperate googling and long-shot youtube tutorial skimming.

Or, you could read the control settings and know every single control the game offers in less than a minute.

[golfmiketango]

... Factorio suffers from the same disease, in this regard, as Civilization 5. UI features, keyboard gestures, etc., are almost hidden from the user like easter eggs, to be slowly discovered over time, through word-of-mouth or, especially for those at an intermediate phase of learning, occasional desperate googling and long-shot youtube tutorial skimming.

Or, you could read the control settings and know every single control the game offers in less than a minute.

You can learn a lot there, undoubtedly. And I have. But, case in point is above -- it's not a key-binding but a subtle way a particular action affects gameplay that is not really explained anywhere official, to my knowledge. If you need more examples, looking at the key-binding screen doesn't tell me:

• That if no red-and-green wires are connected to a power pole then shift-clicking will disconnect all the copper wires
• That a single right click will move a single item between stacks, but only certain stacks, and which ones
• That you can mine biters -- but only under particular circumstances, and which
• That you can mine fish
• That you can connect wires to machines using blueprints
• That shift-click construction-robot train-track-building will try to automatically guess the correct direction I want the track to go, until I press "R", after which a new mode of train-track-building-requesting is activated that allows me to explicitly specify the direction of the track being placed
• Which items will shift-left-click into trash slots and which will shift-left-click into the hotbar

I'm pretty sure I could go on like above for some time -- those are just the first several that come to mind. Many UI features in factorio are not bound to keys but to mouse gestures, or are so-to-speak "overloaded" in that they mean different things in a context-dependent manner. Like I said, that's not necessarily a bad thing, in fact I think it's mostly good. But occasionally, especially as new players tackle the learning curve, this can be quite inscrutable, and hard to find an explicit explanation of how it actually works, in practice. And the lack of a comprehensive "these are all the UI things in factorio" page in the guide turns it into a kind of easter-egg hunt at times.

[golfmiketango]

• That if no red-and-green wires are connected to a power pole then shift-clicking will disconnect all the copper wires
• That a single right click will move a single item between stacks, but only certain stacks, and which ones
• That you can mine biters -- but only under particular circumstances, and which
• That you can mine fish
• That you can connect wires to machines using blueprints
• That shift-click construction-robot train-track-building will try to automatically guess the correct direction I want the track to go, until I press "R", after which a new mode of train-track-building-requesting is activated that allows me to explicitly specify the direction of the track being placed
• Which items will shift-left-click into trash slots and which will shift-left-click into the hotbar

One other note about this. Some of these things, like mining biters and fish, are pretty harmless and actually do make for reasonable easter eggs. Others, like disconnecting copper wire from poles, and laying train tracks how you want them, don't. To be clear, the only thing I'm advocating for is the latter. In other words, I'm neither meaning to advocate for nor against harmless easter eggs in factorio's UI -- only that a comprehensive guide to day-to-day gameplay controls doesn't really exist and probably should, eventually, before it's released.

[Deadly-Bagel]

... Factorio suffers from the same disease, in this regard, as Civilization 5. UI features, keyboard gestures, etc., are almost hidden from the user like easter eggs, to be slowly discovered over time, through word-of-mouth or, especially for those at an intermediate phase of learning, occasional desperate googling and long-shot youtube tutorial skimming.

Or, you could read the control settings and know every single control the game offers in less than a minute.

I couldn't find the binding for "Disconnect rolling stock" (V by default I think).

1.On the tool belt, the slots reserved for a specific item (aka. middle click) should always be filled automatically if you have any of that item in your inventory. Half the time, my toolbelt is empty when there's a bunch of that items in my inventory.

example: Say I have conveyors reserved in a slot, then lay a whole bunch (item is in hand), then open the inventory to select an item, the conveyors will trade place with it and stay in the inventory, leaving my toolbelt empty.

Get into the habit of dropping items from the cursor, Q by default isn't it? This will automatically drop it into your toolbelt if there is room, and if there is a reserved slot it will fill the rest of the stack from your inventory if possible.

[daniel34]

Or, you could read the control settings and know every single control the game offers in less than a minute.

I couldn't find the binding for "Disconnect rolling stock" (V by default I think).

Because it is simplified and just called a train:

factorio-train-shortcuts.png (19.92 KiB) Viewed 7359 times

[golfmiketango]

1.On the tool belt, the slots reserved for a specific item (aka. middle click) should always be filled automatically if you have any of that item in your inventory. Half the time, my toolbelt is empty when there's a bunch of that items in my inventory.

example: Say I have conveyors reserved in a slot, then lay a whole bunch (item is in hand), then open the inventory to select an item, the conveyors will trade place with it and stay in the inventory, leaving my toolbelt empty.

Get into the habit of dropping items from the cursor, Q by default isn't it? This will automatically drop it into your toolbelt if there is room, and if there is a reserved slot it will fill the rest of the stack from your inventory if possible.

The precise mechanics of stack-control and inventory management are the type of thing I'm talking about. To this day I still can't quite figure out exactly how it all works. By now, I guess, I have some kind of non-conscious muscle-memory of how to get certain things done, but I still couldn't tell you what I'm doing or why it will work. The main thing I'm thinking of is: "When, exactly, are items automatically moved from character inventory slots to reserved toolbelt slots (because clearly it does happen)?" But there are other things that confuse me, i.e.: "if new items go into my inventory where will they land?"

The recipe I currently follow is simply to try not to think about it much and hope it will do what I mean, which almost always works, except when I'm trying to play stack-move shell-games, at which point I sometimes have to make sure the quantity I expect to be somewhere actually is. The interface is impressively flow-friendly and natural, which is great -- but I do wish I fully understood it "intellectually."

[SHiRKiT]

Factorio currently does a poor job of explaining hotkeys and interactions.

[BenSeidel]

"When, exactly, are items automatically moved from character inventory slots to reserved toolbelt slots (because clearly it does happen)?"

That one is easy. They will go to the toolbar when their item prototype has the flag "goes-to-quickbar". As an additional overloaded behaviour, when control-clicking, they will be put into the auto-trash when the item prototype does NOT have this flag. Fun isn't it?

"if new items go into my inventory where will they land?"

If you have the auto-filter on then they go in the same order as they appear in the crafting menu. So, radars should always be last.

[syltrand]

What if instead of being actual storage space, the tool belt would be a place for your shortcuts, which will drawn from inventory automatically ..?

Is this a question of immersion vs gameplay?

I have my inventory constantly open, sometimes I wish I could leave it open and to the side or something...

[thereaverofdarkness]

2.Items in a reserved slot should not be used for crafting.

example: creating more fast inserters than I have inserters will use all my inserters, leaving my toolbelt empty.

If it refused to use those, then players would wonder why they can't craft something they have the parts for.

I think it would be better to include something in the tutorial explaining and reminding you that hand-crafting some stuff can make you run out of other stuff.

[Xeanoa]

2.Items in a reserved slot should not be used for crafting.

example: creating more fast inserters than I have inserters will use all my inserters, leaving my toolbelt empty.

If it refused to use those, then players would wonder why they can't craft something they have the parts for.

I think it would be better to include something in the tutorial explaining and reminding you that hand-crafting some stuff can make you run out of other stuff.

I think items in the toolbar should be used, but items in a reserved toolbar slot should be exactly that: reserved, and not be used.

[golfmiketango]

"When, exactly, are items automatically moved from character inventory slots to reserved toolbelt slots (because clearly it does happen)?"

That one is easy. They will go to the toolbar when their item prototype has the flag "goes-to-quickbar". As an additional overloaded behaviour, when control-clicking, they will be put into the auto-trash when the item prototype does NOT have this flag. Fun isn't it?

Actually, I think you're answering a different question than the one I mean: something like, "which I shift-click, which items go to trash slots and which go to the toolbelt?"

What I'm wondering above is stuff like, for example:

(note: since I can't remember for sure, I'm pretending below that ammo stacks to 50. I think maybe it's actually 100... maybe it changed recently, or something? But let's just pretend for a moment that it's 50, even if that's wrong, for purposes of discussion.)

• Let's say I have 50 ammo in my toolbelt, in a reserved toolbelt slot. And 1000 ammo in my inventory slots. And say I plunk down a turret and put a half stack (25) in there from my toolbelt. Now, I press "q". How many ammo are in my toolbelt, 25 or 50?
• Same scenario, but now let's say I empty out all 50 ammo from my toolbelt with a stack-transfer to a second turret. How many ammo are now in my toolbelt, 0 or 50?

[Rseding91]

2.Items in a reserved slot should not be used for crafting.

example: creating more fast inserters than I have inserters will use all my inserters, leaving my toolbelt empty.

If it refused to use those, then players would wonder why they can't craft something they have the parts for.

I think it would be better to include something in the tutorial explaining and reminding you that hand-crafting some stuff can make you run out of other stuff.

I think items in the toolbar should be used, but items in a reserved toolbar slot should be exactly that: reserved, and not be used.

Everyone is still missing the part where the filters aren't "reserve slots". They're *filters* that prevent other items than the type given from being put in that slot. Nothing more nothing less. The "Inventory with filters" inventory type has absolutely nothing to do with the quickbar.

If you want to suggest new mechanics that's fine but saying filters should work differently is the wrong suggestion as it would also change how cars work and how cargo wagons work and how anything with an inventory that has filters works.