Crafting Priority

[MatthewJMimnaugh]

TL;DR

Craft things NOW... or much later.

What ?

Ever have along cue of things you want to build, but something suddenly comes up that needs to be done NOW. Well, it would be nice to hold a hotkey and in order to have the current craft command to take “Priority 1.” It would have to be implemented in such a way as to have different priorities, rather than just “send to the front of the cue” as that would keep sending things to the front and that might not be the intention. 1 and 2 would probably suffice, but High, Medium, and Low (3) would cover just about everything (perhaps plus Emergency and Backburner (5) for flavor).

Why ?

Emergency situations and/or adaptability to changes in priorities.

How ?

Hotkeys, or better yet a little toggle above the crafting menu with buttons 1-5/Red-Blue that, when pressed, will put an outline on the boxes of the things being crafted. Higher priority things get crafted first.

[Koub]

The devs have explicitely sait that no, never.
Source : viewtopic.php?p=377447#p377447

[MatthewJMimnaugh]

The devs have explicitely sait that no, never.

Well, that's depressing. Perhaps a mod, then.

[Tekky]

The reason the Factorio developers don't want to implement this is that they want to encourage the player to automate and don't want to make handcrafting too powerful.

However, to me, it feels like bad game design to deliberately make the interface annoying, in order to discourage the player from doing certain things. In my opinion, the player should be discouraged from doing things using game mechanics instead of annoying interface mechanics.

In the following thread, I suggested a game mechanic which would sufficiently nerf handcrafting to allow the "queue to front" suggestion to be implemented:

viewtopic.php?f=6&t=62508 make hand-crafting only possible when stationary

Although my original suggestion was not well received, many players agreed with me that the current situation is unsatisfactory and that the "queue to front" feature should be implemented. One person presented an interesting counter-suggestion to my suggestion which would sufficiently nerf handcrafting to allow the "queue to front" suggestion to be implemented. Other players argued that the "queue to front" feature should be implemented without handcrafting being nerfed.

Maybe you would like to join into that discussion?

[bobucles]

Currently hand crafting takes all the items required for crafting and holds them in a magic space. You can see this for yourself by doing a big craft, the items vanish and go into the queue. If you can customize the queue, you can basically abuse magic storage and break the inventory system. Just start crafting a few thousand gears, cancel some, build your thing, resume crafting gears. Unlimited inventory space. The hand crafting system would have to change before any type of queue management is allowed.

The player is never meant to use hand crafting as anything more than a stopgap measure for odd recipes and the like. So why put so much effort into a fancy construction queue? In this case the lack of fancy hand crafting helps to discourage the player from playing hand crafting simulator. That isn't what Factorio is about.

[Tekky]

Yes, you are right that the inventory crafting system can be exploited. However, it can already be exploited now, even without priorities. Therefore, the best solution to prevent the exploit would be not to remove ingredients from the inventory, until the ingredients are actually used. This should not be too hard to implement.

Also, implementing a simple "queue to front" feature when holding the SHIFT button down would also be easily to implement. Having more complex priority management, as suggested by the original poster, would be nicer, but not really necessary.

[5thHorseman]

There used to be a mod that I'd use that you could set up a queue of things to hand craft, and whenever you were low on any of those items it would craft them one at a time, automatically. This had 2 very nice effects, the first of which was the expected "you always have belts so long as you have raw materials" and the second is "you rarely are crafting 500 things and suddenly realize you need a pumpjack."

Sadly I cannot for the life of me remember the name and Google is failing me.

[fishycat]

There used to be a mod that I'd use that you could set up a queue of things to hand craft, and whenever you were low on any of those items it would craft them one at a time, automatically. This had 2 very nice effects, the first of which was the expected "you always have belts so long as you have raw materials" and the second is "you rarely are crafting 500 things and suddenly realize you need a pumpjack."

Sadly I cannot for the life of me remember the name and Google is failing me.

Sounds like HandyHands: https://mods.factorio.com/mod/HandyHands

[5thHorseman]

Sounds like HandyHands: https://mods.factorio.com/mod/HandyHands

It does but that's not it. This one had a gui where you could say, for example "Craft up to 50 yellow belts, 50 yellow undergrounds, 50 yellow splitters, 50 yellow arms, 50 blue arms, 10 blue assemblers, 500 yellow belts, 100 yellow undergrounds, 100 yellow splitters, 200 blue arms" etc.

[fishycat]

Then it must be Auto craft: https://mods.factorio.com/mod/autocraft