Factorio Forums

Several suggestion regarding crate/train stack management:

1. When shift-clicking or ctrl-clicking inside own inventory, crate limit (red cells) should not prevent from doing so. It's frequent situation when you drop extra iron/copper/engines to a crate already full to red limit. Those red cells should limit inserters, not a player.

2. When shift-clicking inside a crate, such click should first fill current non-complete stack in player inventory/toolbelt, and only when all local inventory stacks are full, it should pick a whole new stack from the crate. It's frequent situation when you pick power poles/inserters having just 3 left, and effectively you get 50+3 clobbering your inventory slots. Those extra 3 would hang forever in your inventory because 50 from toolbelt are consumed first. Then you drop those extra 3 back to the crate. And red limit does not allow you to do so with just shift-clicking. And you do it manually then.

3. Regarding (2). Can a toolbelt be summed up with inventory? I mean avoiding situations when you have 13 inerters in the toolbelt and extra 50+14 inside your inventory. It'd better be always 50 on the toolbelt and remainder inside the inventory. Automatically. Also when you place those items, it would be good to see the overall counter how much you have left (e.g. 113 inserters) instead of toolbelt slot value.

4. When some cell is marked in a train wagon for specific item type (middle-click), that item type should not be able to go to any other cell. currently when all marked cells are full, items of the type start filling unmarked cells. so if you want say 50 repair packs in a specific cell in a wagon, you have to middle-click all other cells with copper ore, it's a tedious task. otherwise you risk to get a wagon full of repair packs.

5. It is probably a good idea to give any crate that middle-click possibility. This way you may for example use one single crate to store both medium and big poles, both limited to 2 cells. And mix many other similar production outputs to a single crate. I understand that this will render circuit network even more useless than it has already become with red-cell marking.

Hm. Your suggestions don't explain, how that should work then and what you do with the side-effects.

For example #4 makes no sense, cause either a stack has a filter or not. If not you can logically put in anything.

If that changes, everything changes.

The same kind of implications do the other suggestions have. It's not thought through the end...

About side-effects:

1) When you do shift-click or ctrl-click dropping an excess, I assume you do it with the crate already containing those items. So there are no side-effects.

2) This change will add one extra shift-click to pick say two full stacks from a crate in addition to current almost-depleted one. The whole idea is that if you want 3 full stacks of stone in your inventory, you make 3 shift-clicks. If you want one full stack of power poles, you make one shift-click. Target situation is more important than the process itself. It's like "should removing non-existent file return an error" - no, it shouldn't. Target condition "file does not exist" is what we are looking for. Same for getting stacks from the crate. You care for what you get in your inventory+toolbelt in the end, not the process of extracting exactly 50 items.

3) I see no bad side-effects here. The point is that toolbelt always has 50 items (for inserters and poles) when you have backup inside your inventory after one is placed. You don't care about how much is there on the character's toolbelt slot - you care about how much inserters do you have overally including your inventory - so you know if you can finish this smelting line or have to run for more inserters, so you don't get no-more-inserters interruption in the process.

4) My point is that if a stack has no filter - it would accept an item only if that item is not reserved for some other stack on the same wagon. That is - having an item marked for some stack in a wagon should ban that item from being put to unfiltered stacks. Stacks are connected in a sense that they belong to the same wagon, so filtered stacks are eligible to affect behavior of unfiltered stacks. I described the case - will to waste at most 50 repair packs per wagon requires you to mark all unfiltered stacks as filtered for specific ore type. Otherwise your wagon will soon transmit 30 stacks of repair packs instead of ore.

5) I see no bad side-effects here either. Except that circuit network and smart inserters become more useless.

To #4: It is a problem, cause of all that support questions that ask then "Cannot fill my wagon, help!?", "It worked pretty until I added a filter, now I have some stacks, that have that items left; I can take items out but nothing will be added!"...

The rest: solves some issues (that especially you have), but introduces others. I won't discuss the details; cause it would be a quite boring discussion and nothing, where a dev can dig out good stuff.

What's right about this topic is, that the handling of stacks etc. needs some renovation, but it doesn't make sense to add some fixes and believe that's it. I think it must be completely rewritten. At least I don't think I can add any good point to this, cause the current handling is already quite complex (I think one man-year of work).

I add this to viewtopic.php?f=80&t=307 Gamepad/controller support (also keybinding)

1,2,3 could be an option in the menu for they do not affect game mechanics. 4,5 are better be discussed in some train thread.

Regarding 2 and 3 - it already happens this way inside inventory (perhaps some settings checkbox like items grouping already affects that), my proposal is about toolbelt items. That is - they should be primary and have 50 items when your overall storage of item type is 50+ This logics may be limited only to toolbelt slots that you have marked with middle-click.

Harkonnen604, please avoid double posting. Thanks.

Sorry for that. It's just 2 days passed since my last message in this thread, so no one would read this additional message if I would add it via edit.

Harkonnen604 wrote:Sorry for that. It's just 2 days passed since my last message in this thread, so no one would read this additional message if I would add it via edit.

Keep in mind that Factorio development goes since 2012. And will last very sure longer than next year. So keep your ideas in mind and wait for the right moment.

In other words: It makes no sense to post an explosion of ideas, cause that will also not be read.

Harkonnen604 wrote:Several suggestion regarding crate/train stack management:

1. When shift-clicking or ctrl-clicking inside own inventory, crate limit (red cells) should not prevent from doing so. It's frequent situation when you drop extra iron/copper/engines to a crate already full to red limit. Those red cells should limit inserters, not a player.

2. When shift-clicking inside a crate, such click should first fill current non-complete stack in player inventory/toolbelt, and only when all local inventory stacks are full, it should pick a whole new stack from the crate. It's frequent situation when you pick power poles/inserters having just 3 left, and effectively you get 50+3 clobbering your inventory slots. Those extra 3 would hang forever in your inventory because 50 from toolbelt are consumed first. Then you drop those extra 3 back to the crate. And red limit does not allow you to do so with just shift-clicking. And you do it manually then.

3. Regarding (2). Can a toolbelt be summed up with inventory? I mean avoiding situations when you have 13 inerters in the toolbelt and extra 50+14 inside your inventory. It'd better be always 50 on the toolbelt and remainder inside the inventory. Automatically. Also when you place those items, it would be good to see the overall counter how much you have left (e.g. 113 inserters) instead of toolbelt slot value.

4. When some cell is marked in a train wagon for specific item type (middle-click), that item type should not be able to go to any other cell. currently when all marked cells are full, items of the type start filling unmarked cells. so if you want say 50 repair packs in a specific cell in a wagon, you have to middle-click all other cells with copper ore, it's a tedious task. otherwise you risk to get a wagon full of repair packs.

5. It is probably a good idea to give any crate that middle-click possibility. This way you may for example use one single crate to store both medium and big poles, both limited to 2 cells. And mix many other similar production outputs to a single crate. I understand that this will render circuit network even more useless than it has already become with red-cell marking.

Lets see
1) Always frustrating when i want to throw red belts back into my supply crate that is limited to 4 slots but can't without manually placing each stack. TAKE ALL MY THINGS cuz i hit the button intentionally to give you all my things.

2) I dunno...part of me thinks this is a good idea and part of me thinks it's not such a big deal'

3) Very much like the idea of a total qty county on the tool belt. This would probably work as StackQty(TotQty). This should also display on the counter when held in the hand.

4) I think I would rather see trains work like a standard chest so i can block X number of slots in addition to filtering. I'm not a fan of losing my overflow which sometimes is intentionally desired.

5)This one is a can of worms and I am not sure i like the idea of removing too much of the complexity provided by the system as is. Yes I want filtered chests but I am not sure what it costs in terms of simplifying problem solving mechanics.

Shokubai wrote:1) Always frustrating when i want to throw red belts back into my supply crate that is limited to 4 slots but can't without manually placing each stack. TAKE ALL MY THINGS cuz i hit the button intentionally to give you all my things.

Yes, that's the biggest issue regarding stack management that forced me to make this topic.

Shokubai wrote:2) I dunno...part of me thinks this is a good idea and part of me thinks it's not such a big deal'

It becomes more of an issue when you are inventory-size limited. So you want to grab exactly 50+50 inserters instead of 50+50+7 wasting extra inventory slot for those 7.

Shokubai wrote:4) I think I would rather see trains work like a standard chest so i can block X number of slots in addition to filtering. I'm not a fan of losing my overflow which sometimes is intentionally desired.

Reason behind this proposal is that current implementation eliminates possibility of partial slot filtering - you either filter no slots or have to filter all 30 slots. Filtering just some slots does not lead to intended results when filtered items are allowed to be dropped in unfiltered slots. There is no need to add extra wagon just to deliver walls, turrets and repair packs, I'd rather reserve three slots in some ore wagon and put smart inserters for extraction at the outpost. Current mechanics of wagon slot filtering forces me to mark all other 27 slots for ore, so I don't accidentally get wagon full of repair packs. Setting up 8-12 smart inserters to extract just ore is a lot easier for you may shift-right-click/shift-left-click on inserters.

Shokubai wrote:5)This one is a can of worms and I am not sure i like the idea of removing too much of the complexity provided by the system as is. Yes I want filtered chests but I am not sure what it costs in terms of simplifying problem solving mechanics.

Yes, this is a can of worms and I shouldn't have mentioned it in this thread