Factorio Forums

TL;DR
Allow = Any quality in request

What?
in space platforms/trains/logistics/inserters you can request items/set filters. currently you cannot specify to request a specific ammount of any quality.
the reason provied in-game by hovering over the in-game lower-bounds box says "You selected a filter that matches more then one quality. In this case, you can only select a trash filter, but request cant be used for its ambiguity"

Why?
I would like to be able to put quality modules in science assemblers on other planets and have space platforms auto request all science that is avaliable.
currently it appears that I would need to use diffrent options which makes "all request satisfied" a impossible condition

Yeah it is ambiguous, but i feel like there is a solution if they introduced 3 new filters:
"Any quality > " (From highest quality to lowest)
"Any quality < " (From lowest quality to highest)
("Any quality * " (Any order, be it item's internal ID or whatever, requester simply don't care)) << This might not even be necessary

So if i have:
- Provider chest with 10 common gears, 5 uncommon gears, 2 rare gears
- Requester chest asking 6 "Any quality > " gears below rare quality
Bots would bring 5 uncommon gears and 1 common gear.

Typical use-cases are science packs of any quality, any requests for recycling. Sometimes you just want that 1 specific thing, scrap the rest. Platform could request best turret or asteroid grabber there is available on the planet, etc.
Anyway with rules like this it is no longer an ambiguous but well defined request.

As long as the UI makes it clear that it's a really unusual thing to do. The situations where it will screw you over are fewer than the ones where you'd want it.

You could never reliably use it to request items for an assembler automatically, because it could get full requests of every item but not enough in any one quality to craft any quality level. Bots aren't going to bring any more because the requests are all filled, but the assembler won't do anything either.

The only real use I can think of for this would be something like turrets or solar panels where you can always substitute one for another. And even then, I don't think I'd like it if it brought me all uncommons when I had rares available, or vice-versa.

Would make inter planetary logistics much easier to manage.

I have a hard time figuring out what's causing the issue, seems fairly "logical" to want "a 1000 of this, no matter the quality"

Loving the game but I think it's the first time I really see a truly non ergonomic part of the game and I'm not anywhere near a power user/player doing weird stuff.

Anyways hope it gets picked up and improved!

This not working was a real surpise to me. I hope this can be fixed in the future

I would also greatly appreciate this, it would make things much simpler...

What i will say is that if you are using a requester chest for assemblers, you can use circuits to set the recipe based on the signals. For applications where truly any quality would work not having the option proves tedious though.

Please, this is sorely needed. My malls use logistic storage chests with the filter set to whatever item that assembling machine is building. This works great, as under normal circumstances, this allows my logistic network and construction robots to items from the mall, as well as store them in the mall when they're deconstructed or trashed.

Without the ability to accept any quality in the logistic storage chests, I may end up with higher-quality buildings thrown in chests other than the mall chests, which is an issue.

I sketched a thing in paint, ascending and descending sort option would appear in the existing list. If it was made 2 columns dropdown it might also look neater: If you select "ascending" with "any", it would select from all qualities.
If you select "ascending" with "uncommon", it would select from all qualities uncommon and upwards.
- If first 2 lowest qualities are enough to fill the number of wanted items then it wouldn't look for more.
- This is not a order X amount of each quality that fits the quality filter, the X is total items.