Factorio Forums

TL;DR

Add an additional filter to the upgrade planner that matches any module, similar to the "Empty module slot" filter that matches empty module slots.

What?

Currently, we can use the upgrade planner to:

1. upgrade a specific module to another specific module (e.g. prod 1 to prod 2, or prod 1 normal quality to prod 1 uncommon quality)
   
   by choosing the source module as the filter, and the replacement as the upgrade
2. insert a specific module into empty module slots
   
   by choosing "Empty module slot" as the filter, and the replacement as the upgrade

But if you want to override the modules (e.g. you want to replace all installed modules with prod 3 modules, regardless of what modules are currently installed in the machine), you have to add filters for each and every module (e.g. 12 separate filters in vanilla Space age, or 11 if excluding the replacement module which isn't needed as a filter) to the planner:
A hypothetical "any module" filter would reduce this to a single source/replacement entry.

The "any module" filter should *not* match empty module slots, so that players have the option of either combining "any module" with "empty module slots" (for a total of two entries, still manageable) or choosing only one.

Why?

To make it a bit easier to create upgrade planners that simply set all modules to a specific module.

This I strongly agree with. If you take into account all of the qualities, you'll probably need to create an upgrade planner with hundreds of rules.
An "Any module" option in the "From" column and "Any quality" option in the "To" column would reduce these instructions to a single line.

> If you take into account all of the qualities, you'll probably need to create an upgrade planner with hundreds of rules.

Quality actually isn't that much of a problem here - you can create a "from" filter of any quality, e.g. Speed 1 (any quality), Speed 2 (any quality), ... and so on. In the end, it's 12 rules for the modules and another rule for "empty module slot". I've created one update planner with all these "from" filters, and now I just make a copy of this planner when I want to replace with a new module. It's still a lot of clicking though when setting the "to" replacement of all these filters, so an "any module" filter (and/or the ability to copy filters with shift+left click and shift-right click) would still be useful.

Quality is a problem if you have varied qualities of modules available for upgrade. Like say I have one stack or rare quality and one stack of uncommon quality modules. If I wanted the bots to use both, I'd have to create a rule separately for both qualities.

This! Also we need option in upgrade planner to increase quality of item. Right now you need to set separate rule for every item and quality, so to upgrade blueprint that has assemblers, solars, accumulators, modules, inserters I need at least 5 rules every time I want to increase quality