Factorio Forums

I propose on top of the desired output recipe have a little box you click and hold the mouse button on and you drag upwards to increase the multiplier/down to lower for how many items you want created. This way you can walk away and not need to sit and wait and not end up with WAAAAY more items that you required. See attached pic for visual mock up

IMO, this is what chest limits are for. Or inserter wire conditions. Or logistics network conditions.

Agreed, there are many ways to achieve this already.
But! The machines itself have some internal stack to accumulate untaken items and it seems arbitrary. F.e. furnaces hold up to the whole stack size of the product. It improves qol yarly game, but later on it is rather messy if one decides to move the existing smelting array into new place, for example. So the proposal actually does make some sense and the problem need to be thought about.

What I would suggest is to improve the internal logic: the machine output buffer size limit should stick to different values depending if there are any inserters touching the machine as input or not. So if the machine is by itself, the buffer limit should be larger; if the product may be taken away by inserters - then buffer set to lower limit.