Exclude toolbelt items when manual crafting

[Boogieman14]

Something that has bothered me for a while now is that when manually crafting an item that requires another often-used item as a component (for instance, and perhaps most noticable, pipe-to-ground using 10 pipes). Especially when the amount of components consumed is big, it can get a bit frustrating to craft a few pipe-to-grounds and then having to craft a bunch of regular pipes because they have all been consumed. Perhaps this annoyance could be slightly alleviated if manual crafting would ignore any items that are in a toolbelt slot, so you'd at least still have a few pipes on hand to make those above-ground connections.

[Kavukamari]

I agree, that way we could protect our pipes that we actually want to keep and craft away the ones in our main inventory, I've had the same problem with things I want getting crafted and having to grab more materials as well

[bobingabout]

Often true with blue research packs.
shift click blue science... oh look, where did all my inserters go.

it isn't that I didn't have enough metal to make more inserters, its that I was short on batteries, but no, it had to eat all my inserters, so I'm stuck unable to build anything untill the queue goes down.
okay, lets cancel, add some inserters to the build queue and start again
they all vanised again, because it likes to prioritise items that already exist, rather than those in the build queue...

[Peter34]

Something that has bothered me for a while now is that when manually crafting an item that requires another often-used item as a component (for instance, and perhaps most noticable, pipe-to-ground using 10 pipes). Especially when the amount of components consumed is big, it can get a bit frustrating to craft a few pipe-to-grounds and then having to craft a bunch of regular pipes because they have all been consumed. Perhaps this annoyance could be slightly alleviated if manual crafting would ignore any items that are in a toolbelt slot, so you'd at least still have a few pipes on hand to make those above-ground connections.

This bothers me too, especially since I hand-craft the first 100 to 150 Green Magic Potions that I need, before I get around to setting up automated production of them. And doing so eats up all my Yellow Inserters from inventory. And my Belts. And then while i'm hand-crafting the Potions, I find myself unable to actually actively play the game, since I dont hve any Belts or Inserters to plonk down to expand my factory facility.

(A playstyle change fix would be to only ever hand-craft 20 Green Potions at a time and to always remember immediately after to hand-craft 20-40 Belts and 20-30 Yellow Inserters. But I find that hard to accomplish in practice.)



I think a better solution, than your toolbelt one, would be to change the game, so that if you Ctrl+Click on an item in the crafting interface, the item's crafting cycle is set up from scratch, going from basic materials such as Iron Plate, Copper Plate, Brick and Steel, ignoring any pre-existing intermediate materials that are already in your inventory.

Ctrl+LMB crafts 1 such item, analogous to vanilla LMB crafting 1 (but utilizing intermediate mats from inventory).

Ctrl+RMB crafts 5, analogous to vanilla RMB. And Ctrl+Shift+LMB crafts as many as possible, analogous to vanilla Shift+LMB, except with the Ctrl key - again - it ignores pre-existing intermediate mats and crafts everything from the basics (thus the amount of basic mats you have determines how many you can craft with Ctrl+shift+LMB).

[ssilk]

If you craft 100-150 green potions by hand you do definitely something wrong. FACTORIO is about automation, and not a hand-crafting game.

The problem with the pipes and inserters goes away, if you are getting used to craft pipes after you craft underground pipes, or inserters and belts after I craft a green potion. It's just to get used to it, and that is, why the crafting queue exists. if you need the pipes and inserters exactly in this moment, you haven't planned forward: I know I need to build up my furnaces, then I don't craft green science yet.

[Radwan]

Sometimes I set assembly machines to produce an ingredient which I will later use to craft things manually. In this case I want Factorio to use this ingredient for crafting (take it from my toolbelt/inventory).

Sometimes I have some very important things which I'm planning to put somewhere/use later, but they accidentaly get used in manual crafting. In this case I didn't want Factorio to use items from my toolbelt/inventory for crafting.

Simple solution to this problem would be 2nd version of manual crafting which would not use items from your inventory/toolbelt (clicking crafting with some modifier key). You could choose if you want to craft using possessed items or creating all ingredients from scratch. However there is another problem.

There are situations when I care just for some specific ingredients not being used. For example: I have some inserters and transport belts in my inventory, and I want to craft green science packs by hand. I'm setting up these inserters right now on my iron production, and while I'm doing so I want science packs to be crafted. Obviously I don't want inserters to be used in the crafting process, but I don't mind transport belts being used to speed things up.

The first solution that came up to my mind is marking items. You could tell Factorio which items are forbidden to use in manual crafting.

This is how I see this whole problem being solved.