Add a Crafting Menu tile for "favourites".

[Taurondir]

NOTE: The "green" tile backing (left, the right one was painted manually) was me hacking the PNG files because my eyesight is not great and I wanted a way to more easily see which tile was selected.

TL;DR

When a game is running a TON of Mods, locating something you want to make takes a long time.
(... then you go a new game with new Mods and the positions of every item is different and have to memorize new positions again).

What ?

Suggestion would be to add a "Favourites" Sub-Crafting menu that stays blank until you add items to it, basically a "quickbar" for the Crafting Menu

Might look like this (old on Left, idea on Right) -- https://imgur.com/a/zbUiQU1

Why ?

On servers where (lots of) Mods change every new map, trying to find things (at least for me) involves a TON of using the "text filter" up top and then a lot of pecking keys to get the right things, even though technically, at any given point in time the actually amount of things you want is only 20 or so.

My assumption - and this might be massively incorrect - is that it might be trivial to add such a thing anyway, as the underlying game code already has quickbars and ability to lock spots in inventory menu, so if that system was extended to the Crafting Menu, it would mean that "locking" a tile there would make a copy of that tile and append it to the "Favourites" sub menu.

PS: as far as "this could be just a Mod" I did not think Mods could change the Crafting menu area "on the fly" that's why I suggested it here.

[ssilk]

I really like this idea. Everthing depending the crafting menu can use the idea, that the player can change the icons.

was so free to link the image in:

[BlueTemplar]

This would indeed be a nice addition, but considering what you want to achieve, you could maybe use the quickbar + Hotcraft as a workaround ?
https://mods.factorio.com/mod/HotCraft

Directly handcraft items from your inventory or toolbelt by hotkey, without even browsing the recipes list: just grab a stack in your hand and use ALT-1, ALT-2 or ALT-3 to queue 1,5 or 10 more items for handcrafting.
1.0.3 - also craft an item you selected with the pipette tool if you don't have any of that item in your inventory

[Taurondir]

Yea, that's kind of the thing I was aiming at, its just that at the moment because of lack of available keys, those kind of shortcuts are kind of nightmare-ish. In order to craft from the bar via Mods, it's still a lot of finger acrobatics. I haven't seen one that does it directly when the item is zero.

My suggestion would make use of the same "muscle reflexes" that are already ingrained with the standard shortcuts.

Like I said, I had been thinking about it for a long time, basically since I have been on servers with 20+ mods running, and even then I only suggested it as it kinda-sorta seemed something that might already be ballpark available game code, well, I can hope.