Factorio Forums

Upgrade planners can already upgrade entities,
and modules within entities.
The next step is to allow upgrading recipes within entities.

It wouldn't have been of that much use before
(except I guess in mods with a lot of item tiers),
but it becomes very necessary now that there's a second dimension to upgrades, with SA's Quality.

I guess this would require some kind of checkmark «Upgrade recipes rather than entities» at the bottom of the menu for custom Upgrade Planners ?

mmk, glad I found this so I don't need to make a duplicate!

TL;DR

Upgrade planner/parameterized blueprint should be able to alter quality of entities

What?

I want to be able to set quality of all recipes (and quality priority output of splitters) via either parameterized blueprint, or via an upgrade planner.

When I'm building multiple parallel factories to deal with quality, often I end up with the exact same design for the non-common quality factories. Going through each one and changing the quality of every machine and filter is a pain.

Therefore, changing the quality that a machine accepts/a splitter (and possibly even inserters) filter out should be something that I can easily change.

Note that this is a direct shift from one setting to another. So if I have a splitter filter filtering uncommon out, and another set to 'all quality' (see picture 2), the all quality one should not be changed.

Why?

See picture 1 for example.

Explanation of picture:
I've been making a quality science factory on Vulcanus, and the left side is common quality, while the right side is all the other qualities. uncommon, rare, epic, and legendary all have the exact same building layout, with the only difference being the machines are accepting different quality of inputs, and the splitter filters are filtering out different tiers of items.



It's a pain needing to go through the whole setup 3 times (not counting the time I initially set up the build) and change every single recipe and splitter filter by hand.

Thanks, you were much better at explaining the (same) context than me !

The second (lower) splitter also shows a quality only filter, which I use a lot in these parallel factories. Being able to quickly set those is part of the suggestion.

Wow, this potentially deserves its own thread :
«Upgrade filters with Upgrade planner» !
(Or maybe not, since it works so much better together in this context ?)

And yeah, I can totally see how you sometimes would want to do "all of the above", so instead of :

I guess this would require some kind of checkmark «Upgrade recipes rather than entities» at the bottom of the menu for custom Upgrade Planners ?

It probably should rather be 3/4 checkboxes with :

Upgrade :
☒ entities
(☐ modules) ?
☐ recipes
☐ filters

Also, related :
Allow custom Upgrade Planners to generically upgrade Quality

I don't think checkboxes is a good idea.

My first thought had been to do this via parameterized blueprints, and the upgrade planner idea had only come to me later, but either way, it's the same core.

If I go with the upgrade planner UI, I'd want to do something like
and just drag that all over the parallel factory to upgrade it.

Then I could have a second one that could look like this
And this would upgrade any filter that is based on quality, so:

* Splitter filters (if it's only quality, or quality + item, but NOT any quality. NO quality = normal, so that would be affected)
* Assembling machine recipes (this is the one you originally suggested)
* Filter inserters (if any of the filters are checking for the FROM quality, they should be changed)

There are some edge cases, such as if you're checking for greater than/less than quality, but I think those should also be upgraded..


For the modules, that can already by done. They even added in the 'no module' icon so you can easily remove all modules, or add modules when there are none.
For the filters, you can currently change what item an inserter/splitter is filtering, and you can even change the quality, but only if there's an item. If you're filtering for pure quality, then you can't change it (blueprint claims 'Nothing to parametrise') (which, side note, is a typo. Should say parameterize. But that's something else that I'll post on the bug forum now that I've noticed it.. I retract that cause some research shows it to be an accepted alternate spelling)

Taking a look at that related thread, it's almost what I'm suggesting, but not quite. That suggestion is to upgrade buildings, not recipes/filters.
The two are somewhat conflicting and would require some generic "structure" and generic "filter" and generic "recipe" icon. Ahh, ok, that's you meant with checkboxes! I get it now. I would do it as generic icons (kinda like the signals/unsorted tabs that show up in a few UIs) rather than checkboxes. More detailed control to do it as icons cause checkboxes would apply to the whole planner whereas icons would let you target only specific upgrades (i.e. can upgrade a filter from uncommon to rare at the same time as upgrading common buildings to uncommon).

OK, this was a bit rambling (I tend to think things through as I type up replies and leave my whole thought process there so you can see where I got my thoughts from), so I hope it all makes sense!

Glad I searched; had this exact request. <3