Factorio Forums

Often we see a situation where we need or want to craft many items in-hand - but we don't necessarily need that item immediately (this happens often with ammo). Meanwhile, we start working on another project where we realise we need to build something now (a random inserter or belt, for example) - but the crafting queue is going to take a long time to complete.

Presently, the way around this is to: add the inserter to the in-hand crafting queue; cancel all the ammo from the queue; then re-queue all the ammo. This is tedious. This also sometimes causes inventory overflow as the ammo's ingredients are returned to the player's inventory.

The suggestion here is to have a way to specify that the item you want to make should have a higher priority over the existing queue. It doesn't have to be a modifier key - but that would probably be the simplest way to do it. When doing so, the items would be added to the front of the crafting queue instead of the back.

EDIT: Found a video (from Bentham/MangledPork) which has an example of the problem: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_9cOhKH ... ex=4#t=785

This is one of the very frequent suggestions.
More on this topic here viewtopic.php?f=6&t=10222 (and probably tens of topics if you make a research with "crafting queue" )

I didn't even read anything past the title...

But there are times when you've set a fairly large queue (Which might look tiny when you set an even bigger one later), and then... on crap, I just need 1 more chest, like, right now! you have to cancel building everything to make a chest.

If I was able to say "Put this chest to the beginning of the queue and build it NOW!", that would be useful.

A mod was recently released to accomplish this https://mods.factorio.com/mod/QueueToFront

I also find it very annoying that I must cancel my entire crafting queue whenever I notice that I urgently need to craft one small item.

Here are a few more threads in which this has been suggested:

viewtopic.php?f=6&t=62338 Double ended crafting queue
viewtopic.php?f=6&t=49361 Rearrange hand craft queue - QOL
viewtopic.php?f=6&t=41594 Ctrl+click to add to front of craft queue
viewtopic.php?f=71&t=63092 Reorder crafting

The fact that a "queue to front" feature has been suggested so many times demonstrates we are not the only players who find this annoying.

This suggestion has been repeatedly declined by the Factorio developers. In this post, Factorio developer Twinsen states that the hand-crafting interface is supposed to be annoying, because they don't want to make hand-crafting too powerful. They want people to automate instead.

I fully agree with Twinsen that hand-crafting should not be made too powerful, because the goal of the game is automation. However, discouraging hand-crafting by deliberately having an annoying inflexible interface (i.e. an interface without a "queue to front" feature) does not seem the right thing to do. In my opinion, there are better ways to discourage hand-crafting. For example, in this thread, I proposed that the user should be required to be stationary in order to hand-craft.

In other words, I fully agree with Twinsen that hand-crafting should be annoying, because the goal of the game is automation. I just disagree with Twinsen about how hand-crafting should be annoying. Instead of making the interface annoying, the game should make hand-crafting annoying in a way that fits better with the game.

However, as some people have argued in the threads mentioned above, the speed limitation of hand-crafting could be considered sufficient to encourage automation and discourage hand-crafting. It should instead be the job of the tutorial (or a mini-tutorial) to warn a new player that he may be doing something wrong if he is queuing up too many items in his hand-crafting queue instead of automating them.