Factorio Forums

Some of the old toolbar functionality was lost, and while this is mostly an improvement, a few changes to restore functionality would be nice.

The functionality that was there before.

-Store Items in toolbar. Items are stored in the expanded inventory. Side note, did expanded toolbar research get converted to a +10 inventory slot research?
-drag items to toolbar . This is already possible.
-swap items to toolbar . Currently if you drag a shortcut to the toolbar, it drops the item and picks up the item in the toolbar. Old behavior would swap the item if unlocked, and error out if locked. I suggest it should replace the shortcut with the new one.
-swap items in toolbar. Currently, if you drag a shortcut in the toolbar to another slot, it copies the shortcut. Expected behavior is to swap the shortcut with the targeted slot. If empty, the old slot is now empty and the new slot is the shortcut. If not empty, swap the two.
-craft-to-quickbar. on crafting a placable object, place a new shortcut in the current toolbar pair, unless it already exists somewhere in the two visible toolbars. This can be toggled on or off just like personal roboports or leggs.
This restores the functionality some people expect from the toolbar, but lets other people turn it off.
-Left click selects the shortcut's item. Right click picks it up, letting your copy the shortcut. Middle mouse button lets you add a new, or remove that shortcut depending on if it is empty or not.


Control scheme.
Rough goal is to limit interactions to two mouse buttons instead of three.
Left click interacts with items, looks more like picking up shortcuts or items, but not adding/removing them aggressively. Lets you swap them, or add new ones. This is for normal use.
Right click adds/removes specific shortcuts as advanced.

You have 3 states. Pickup Item. Pickup Shortcut. Empty hand.

Left click blank space. Does nothing.
Left click shortcut. Picks shortcut's item up for placement.
Left click blank with item selected. Blank space becomes shortcut. Old shortcut removed. (Simulate moving the shortcut)
Left click shortcut with item selected. Select new shortcut's item.

Left Click blank with Shortcut selected. Move shortcut to new location.
Left Click shortcut with Shortcut selected. Swap shortcuts.

Right click blank space. Open up shortcut picker menu.
Right click shortcut. Pick up Shortcut.
Right click blank with item selected. Blank space becomes shortcut.
Right click shortcut with item selected. Replace shortcut with new item's shortcut.

Right Click blank with Shortcut selected. Copy shortcut to new location. Old shortcut remains.
Right Click shortcut with Shortcut selected. Replace target shortcut with new shortcut. Old shortcut remains

Right click outside toolbar with shortcut selected. Remove shortcut.

Possibly add middle mouse button back in, to "Lock" a shortcut, making it undeletable and un-movable until you middlemousebutton it again. So you can't accidently move it or w.e. Dunno

The control scheme for toolbar feels wrong to me.

Left click picking up full stack and right click half stack is consistent with inventory and chest.
Middle click removes the filter like wagon inventories.

Spelled out like this it should make sense but I just can't work with it in game. I keep wanting to remove or change to a different item with right click for some reason.

Why does a middle click with an item in hand not overwrite a slot in one click?
Instead we have to remove it with middle then place it with left.

What I spelled out is how I think it ought to work. Not how it currently works. I think.
Admittedly I am still getting used to the new controls, but yea. I would like the advantages of the new system with as much user friendliness I can get away with. As it is I ran into a few weird things I don't like.


Didn't consider half stacks. Although honestly we need a better way to interact with inventories anyway. I am not sure what behavior I want yet tho, so yea.

I want to suggest another possible solution for (re)arranging the shortcuts in the quickbar:

click+hold-drag moves shortcut
ctrl-click+hold-drag copies shortcut

to delete item drag to space outside the quickbar border

I think this resembles common workflow for moving and copying items and therefore is understood quite intuitive.

Ranakastrasz wrote: ↑Thu Feb 28, 2019 5:43 pm What I spelled out is how I think it ought to work. Not how it currently works. I think.
Admittedly I am still getting used to the new controls, but yea. I would like the advantages of the new system with as much user friendliness I can get away with. As it is I ran into a few weird things I don't like.


Didn't consider half stacks. Although honestly we need a better way to interact with inventories anyway. I am not sure what behavior I want yet tho, so yea.

Sorry if i wasn't clear.

Your proposal is a sensible way on how to improve the currently working mechanics.

Left click blank with item selected. Blank space becomes shortcut. Old shortcut removed. (Simulate moving the shortcut)
Right click shortcut with item selected. Replace shortcut with new item's shortcut.

these especially would solve most of my problems with the toolbar.

As windows user there are some mouse actions I do without thinking:
left: select, pick up and drop
right: open menue (mostly what currently is middle to select filters)
middle: pan around

Factorio breaks right and middle functionality moving pan to left in map view and right half a stack in hand.

Why is halving a stack this important? This function easily could be moved to a less prominent keybind opening a popup to enter an arbitrary number for a new stack.

Halving a stack is kinda important in that we already have it, and people often use it, to slowly and inefficiently distribute resources into assemblers, furnaces, or burner drills inserters or w.e.

Its a stopgap measure that you should really never have to use, because it isn't in the spirit of, ya know, automating everything. But its up there with crafting t3 modules in your inventory from scratch in things that you can do, but are inconvient, but people do them anyway because it is sort of easier than automating it. Sort of.

Something like a "Drop maximum inserter cap into entity" would be awesome. As in, 5 coal, 10 bullets, and 2 recipes worth of raw materials. That would honestly fix it. As would that distribution mod, but not as well.

TLDR: It is used commonly for manually distributing resources into entities in a haphazard and semi-random fashion.

Ranakastrasz wrote: ↑Thu Feb 28, 2019 8:21 pm Something like a "Drop maximum inserter cap into entity" would be awesome. As in, 5 coal, 10 bullets, and 2 recipes worth of raw materials. That would honestly fix it. As would that distribution mod, but not as well.

Sounds like a good option for <modkey>+<drop item key>. See my suggestion thread over here: viewtopic.php?f=6&t=65125

Ambaire wrote: ↑Thu Feb 28, 2019 10:04 pm Sounds like a good option for <modkey>+<drop item key>. See my suggestion thread over here: viewtopic.php?f=6&t=65125

On that thought, we really need a stickied megathread for all of these toolbar tweaks, because it is really a serious sidegrade. A lot of nice new features, but the compleixty penalty is painful. Friend couldn't figure out how to use it until I explained it to them, whereas the old version they never had trouble.
It didn't help that their mouse didn't have a middle mouse button, admittedly.