Factorio Forums

By 'quick insertion of items' I mean CTRL+left/right clicking while holding items in hand. I don't know how is this feature called officially.

Right now if I hold an incomplete stack of items in hand (eg stack of 10 items that stack to 50) and I Ctrl+click on a building, full/half of the current stack is inserted (that is 10 or 5 items for left or right click, respectively). This is the behaviour that I would expect.

After this first insertion, however, the stack on hand resets to full stack (if there are enough items in the inventory), so consecutive Ctrl-clicks will insert full/half of the max stack. This strikes me as a bug rather than a feature.
So right now the alternative is through a tedious inventory grind, which is the opposite of being fun. Or some counter-intuitive magic: viewtopic.php?f=18&t=7699&start=10#p60860

Why is this important? Consider very early game when one has to distribute limited fuel resources between multiple furnaces/burner miners. Or load new turrets with some ammo but not too much because other areas will need to be protected, too. Not to mention the risk of losing too much ammo if the turret gets destroyed.
Later, distribution of inputs into temporary setups.

I expect someone to come along and explain to me that I should automate all of this because the game is meant to be played that way and it's worth it from the long term perspective. I agree but not all that I build is meant to have long term perspective. And if I want to build something temporary for a quick short-term effect, it will be always faster to do it in a most simple way possible, even if I have to fiddle with inventory .. so why not make it a bit more convenient?

There is intermediate solution without needing to grind the inventory, but you have to drop items via machinery UI. For example with turrets I stick to having 15-25 bullets in each of them. Open inv, right-click (hand got 50), drop into turret (hand got 0), right-click on turret ammo (hand got 25, turret has 25). Now you can drop these 25 to the next turret. If you want to further half it, drop 25 to inventory, right-click turret ammo again (turret/hand contain 12-13), drop what's in hand to another turret. Same with coal on early furnaces.

Harkonnen604 wrote:There is intermediate solution without needing to grind the inventory, but you have to drop items via machinery UI. For example with turrets I stick to having 15-25 bullets in each of them. Open inv, right-click (hand got 50), drop into turret (hand got 0), right-click on turret ammo (hand got 25, turret has 25). Now you can drop these 25 to the next turret. If you want to further half it, drop 25 to inventory, right-click turret ammo again (turret/hand contain 12-13), drop what's in hand to another turret. Same with coal on early furnaces.

That's exactly what I've been doing and what I meant by 'inventory fiddling'.

Well, nice point then. I actually didn't know about ctrl-click to fill machinery, just to clean it up you have your point. I think it should refill only if stack reaches zero - that's good proposal.

But on the other hand one part is still missing - you still need inventory fiddling to get that damn initial stack of 25 ammo in your hand to fill turret with just 12, and that is hard to do with automatic inventory grouping (a nice feature most of the time). So in addition to your proposal I'd ask to make ctrl-right-click inside inventory empty slot to drop half of what you hold. Currently ctrl-right-click in inventory empty slot behaves same as ctrl-left-click in inventory empty slot - it just grabs a full stack of what you are currently holding. From this perspective I think this is now not a proposal, but a bug because logical intension of ctrl-left-click is to drop everything and logical intension of ctrl-right-click is to drop just half of it (so empty inventory slots behave same way as machinery in the wilderness). The reason it does not happen - that damn automatic refilling of hand stack after the operation which does not happen in machinery UI but does happen for inventory and for wild no-UI drops.

Harkonnen604 wrote: you still need inventory fiddling to get that damn initial stack of 25 ammo in your hand to fill turret with just 12, and that is hard to do with automatic inventory grouping

Yeah this is another problem. Perhaps there is a reason why there isn't a simple selector, where you click on a stack in some way and you can select the quantity to be picked up in a pop-up, either by dragging some slider with a mouse or by typing the amount on keyboard.
For one, I would gladly give up half-stack for this.

Well, I think it's because hand stack auto-refilling is too aggressive (happens in more cases than it should be). There can be debates if such behavior is intended or not, but the fact that ctrl-left-click and ctrl-right-click in empty inventory slot do the same thing (and this thing is unexpected) - is definitely an interface bug

It also seems that this behavior was introduced in 13.x, probably as side-effect of implementing toolbelt stacks auto-refilling from the inventory, but it also happens for pieces of coal not on toolbelt.

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