Sorting Quickbutton / Overriding Autosort

[EDI]

Hello!

I used the search function and looked for suggestions concerning the autosort feature, sorting in general, etc. I found threads about various inserters/sorters/... but none concerning the inventory interface.

The suggestion I have is to make the inventory a bit easier to manage.

Example: I have 100 magazines and 5 turrets. I want to have a balanced defense, so I aim to put 20 into each of them.

As of now, it is needed to perform a lot of clicks, until each turret has the desired amount of 20 magazines.

Select half of the stack, insert it into turret 1. Take half of it back, so that 25 remain, and put 5 into the weapon quickbar, the remaining 20 into turret 2.
Go back to turret 1, take out 5 magazines into the weapon quickbar.
50 magazines remain. Select one half of them, put 5 into the quickbar, the remaining 20 can be inserted into turret 3.
5 of the remaining 25 go into the quickbar - the 20 from the quickbar go into turret 4, the remaining 20 in the inventory into turret 5.


My naive solution for this would be - disable autosorting the inventory. This makes it possible to prepare the stacks of 20 beforehand, but the amount of clicks remain the same. Also, the inventory would become cluttered eventually.

Suggestion 1: To counteract the cluttering in general, I would suggest a hotkey to sort the inventory and/or a button in the UI to perform an action similar to what the autosort feature does regularily. Alternatively, the autosort checkbox would be easier to reach, if it was placed directly on the UI, rather than "hidden" within the option menu.

An even better solution for the example above - in my opinion - would be to drag-split the resources. I know that the devs probably don't like the comparison, but in Minecraft, it is possible to drag a selected stack in order to split it into a variable number of inventory slots. I would like to see a similar feature here.

Suggestion 2: I'd like to be able to left click the 100 magazines (from above example), and left-click-drag them, while hovering over 5 empty inventory slots. As a result, each of the slots now contain 20 magazines - which can be easily shift-clicked into the turrets.

This doesn't only affect turrets - also early game labs could be supplied manually with greater ease (also coal for stone/steel furnaces, etc.)

Cheers!

[hoho]

Toggleable autosort (right within the inventory screen) would be awesome. An extra hotkey to sort (but not turn on autosort) even more so.
Drag-split was the reason I wanted to reply here after reading the title but I see you already mentioned it. Yes, that would be nice to have


If adding the autosort toggle is too much effort then enabling drag-split only on the toolbelt slots would be a nice alternative

[Rahjital]

You may already be aware of this, but you can switch autosort on and off in the options menu. It's not a hotkey to switch it on demand, but if you don't mind your inventory cluttered, you could leave it off permanently.

[EDI]

... the autosort checkbox would be easier to reach, if it was placed directly on the UI, rather than "hidden" within the option menu.

Yes, I am aware of this option. I find it hard to reach though, and I'd like to toggle it on/off whenever I want to split a stack. In fact, I'd rather keep the sorting off, and just press some hotkey/UI button to sort the inventory once, if I feel the need of a defragmentation.

I do like my inventory sorted, and I don't want it to be cluttered. In general, autosort is awesome - however I want a (quick) option to split a stack of items, without them "snapping back" immediately. (See my original post for clarification)

[ssilk]

Example: I have 100 magazines and 5 turrets. I want to have a balanced defense, so I aim to put 20 into each of them.

I don't understand, why this is needed... I do it so: I fill 50 in the first turret. Then split that 50 and got 25 in the turret and 25 in my hand and fill that into the next turret. The first two now have 25 items. The rest of 50 in my pockets are splitted also and fill 25 into the third. Then I split again and fill 13 in the fourth and 12 in the fifth. I choose the fourth and fifth so, that they are not at the first front-line. So I've about - hm - 12 clicks or so?

And BTW: Evenly filling all gun-turrets is inefficient and useless:

I said it yesterday: If I have 5 turrets there are two ways to fill them:

A) You are in the very beginning of the game. You need every piece of iron plates:

I craft 25 bullets and put 5 into every turret. By hand. One-time job. (I would like to have a "5 items at once").

B) You are about 10-60 minutes later. You have got now some more materials.

I craft 6 inserters, a chest and 4 belts. The 100 bullets are made in 1-2 assembly machines.
I place the chest, fill in the 100 bullets, place an inserter and the belts, to feed the turrets and inserters to fill the turrets from the belts.
The inserters now fill 10 bullets into the turrets. In my chest are then about 70 or so left (50 in the turrets and some on the belts). I will have a lookup for the bullets. Later on, I replace the chest with a requester chest so that it requests always 20-40 bullets.

[EDI]

My current approach is almost identical to what you posted, the only difference being more clicks vs. lower accuracy. The goal would be less clicks and maximum accuracy at the same time

It's not only about bullets and turrets. It was merely an example. The very same thing applies to laboratories and boilers as an example. Maybe, labs would be a better example, since they work fastest, if all of them have the same amount of items stockpiled. The more structures you have to distribute your resources to, the harder it is to balance them manually. Especially, when their count is not part of 2^n.

If the building count was 2^n, our suggested methods are exactly equal and at maximum precision, but even then it results in a lot more clicking than necessary, in my opinion.

[ssilk]

To your situation with the labs: Well, in the very beginning I can understand that. I have only 2 labs or so and it is useful to fill them with equal amounts. But before that you need to craft it. I craft 10 or 20 (20 is four right mouse clicks) and split then.
If I'm able to produce more than those 20 at once I'm so far to create assemblies for that and fill the produced potions in the labs.

So, please, explain me your situations, when you need to fill something exactly. When something doesn't work for you, if it has one more in a row. Or similar.

I never split the items in equal parts (only by random or in some very special situations in the beginning - like mentioned - where it matters if you produce first one item of this and then an item of that or so).

If I would need to split into equal parts the whole time, then - I give you my hand to it - I wouldn't play this game.

[hoho]

Let's say I have 3 science labs and 120 science packs. One of them has 25 of that type of item, one has 4 and last has none.

In that situation I'd just shift-right click half of the stack to the empty one (it has 60, 60 left in inventory). Next to get half of the leftovers is the one with 4 and it'll get half of my inventory twice (30+15) to now have 45 and 15 left in inventory. Last one would get that.

By the end I'd have 60, 45 and 40 packs in the labs. Yes, not equal but close enough. I'd be making new packs before those run out anyway. Main thing is I did it with just four clicks (not counting selecting the actual buildings). That's roughly how I do all my splitting of stuff now. Depending on amount of buildings needing filling I might need to do more "half stack to building, half back" steps but generally that gets me good enough results.


Even drag-split wouldn't have helped me in this situation much because of the inequal starting conditions of the labs. Pretty much THE only place where it would have helped would have been when all of them were empty.

[ssilk]

Let's say I have 3 science labs and 120 science packs. One of them has 25 of that type of item, one has 4 and last has none.

[deleted lots of how to]
If I have that much I don't bother me with thinking about that. I built a belt and let the inserters feed the labs.

[EDI]

I would have used the feature of drag-splitting quite a lot of times myself, but I do understand that it's probably not worth the hassle of implementing it into the current system. I still would prefer the autosort feature to be toggled from within the UI rather than browsing the options menu - after all the game is about automation, and autosort falls into that category (at least from my perspective).

However the final decision might be, I want to thank you for your insights!

[ssilk]

Thanks for this. Postings like that are one reason, why I make this.

The discussions about that brought me to the horrible insight, that there are people outside, which craft everything on their own and that we need more good tutorials about automation.