Some thoughts on improving Upgrade Planner

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Sir_Jeffrey_Q
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Some thoughts on improving Upgrade Planner

Post by Sir_Jeffrey_Q »

Here are a few thoughts of my own I'd like to mention, from my experience with this feature the last couple weeks.

Upgrade Planner and Mods

The first major thing I've run headlong into with the vanilla upgrade planner, as opposed to the old mod version, is how it interacts with mods. In the old version, all items we able to be "upgraded" to any others. Now, I see why this has been changed, to only upgrade things to like items, but one consequence to the limited selection of options now is that I can no longer use upgrade planner to upgrade modded entities.

In particular, I've run into problems with upgrading my rails to mod rails from the Beautiful Bridge Railway mod. I'm not quite sure what the solution to this is, other than perhaps ensuring the modders know it is their responsibility to make their items included in the upgrade planner as is appropriate.

Upgrade Planner and the Toolbar

The second thing I would love to see is some adjustments to the Upgrade Planner and its use on the tool bar. I would love to have it remain an item in the quickbar, and saving custom "upgrades" you add to it to the one you can access from there, instead of having you to keep one in your inventory to keep those changes. The only problem I can see would be that then your custom upgrade selection would override the default, blank one.

The easiest solution (and one I'd love to see regardless) would be to include a dropdown menu of some sort in the planner, to be able to access many different saved lists of upgrades. I know the GUI for the upgrade planner has yet to be finished, so maybe this is already in the works, but I figured I'd mention it anyways.

Upgrade Planner and Blueprints

The third thing I would love has to do with the interaction between blueprints and upgrade planner. In the mod, the blueprint was held in hand, and then you opened up the planner to upgrade the blueprint. Now, it is reversed, and you hold the planner, open the blueprint, and then upgrade the blueprint that way. Now, I get that with the change to the blueprint library, there are benefits to forcing the user to place the blueprint in the inventory first, thus making a copy of it separate from the library, that you can then change using the planner.

I do wish there was a way to go the other direction as well, however, and allow the user to upgrade blueprints from within the upgrade planner's GUI. The reason for this is that I often will keep only one set of blueprints in my library, say, with everything made with early-game things, like a book of balancers made of yellow belts, and then use the upgrade planner to temporarily bring copies of those blueprints up to red or blue belts when I need them. With the mod, it was quick to grab the blueprint, go directly to the upgrade planner, see if everything was upgrading that I wanted to include, and then upgrade the blueprint. Now there is a bit more juggling that must be done, as I have to drop the blueprint in my inventory, open the GUI for the upgrade planner to ensure everything is accounted for, close it, grab it, and then open the blueprint's GUI where I can finally upgrade it. Not much more, but annoying when you do it regularly.

I do like that upgrading it from the blueprint's GUI lets you see the changes take place then and there, but it has also led to it being a lot slower for quick upgrades that I do regularly with blueprints. Again, I'm not sure if these are things that you are planning to implement with the finalized GUI for the upgrade planner, or what the best solutions to some of these problems are.

Upgrade Planner and Ghosts

The final thing I was wondering is about upgrading ghosts, before the items are placed. There aren't a lot of times I've wanted this, but there have been enough that it's been a wish of mine to see it included. Mostly I tend to want it when I have a really large blueprint, and I only want to upgrade part of it, or if I've taken a copy-paste of something, and want to easily upgrade it without redoing the copy and paste with a blueprint instead and upgrading that, etc.

The biggest time I've wanted this feature is when I want to upgrade sections of my base I laid out early, but now want to actually build it with a higher level of entities. I often enjoy laying out large sections of my base really early as blueprints/ghosts to ensure everything will fit the way I want, yet by the time I get to the point that I'm building sections of it I have better belts or assemblers to use, and wish I could upgrade them as ghosts, to make it so I build them right the first time, instead of having to go re-upgrade them later on, once I place them at a lower level of equipment.



These aren't huge things, but I figured I'd include my feedback on this, so you have it. I'm sure others will have their thoughts to add, either to challenge these ideas or to add to them, so I'm down to hear other's feedback on it. Also, hope it wasn't too long and overly detailed...
I have loved this new update overall, and have really loved a lot of the things that have been added. I was also going to include a request to give the toolbar items their own hotkeys as well, until I opened the game today and saw they had already been added in the changelog. Thanks heaps! Love the game!

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