Factorio Forums

My designs for a robot-based factory tend to have exactly one provider and one requester chest and 2 assembly machines.

Being able to specify which slot items go to is great for saving space with the crafting of two items that have the same ingredients. An example are Straight and Curved Rail. Both take Stone, Iron Rods, and Steel. If I could put a filter in the chest as to where the items went, then I could have a chest that is half full of straight rails, and half curved.

You could use the same system for filtering the hotbar, middle click, then specify what item goes into the slot. Maybe you could also have the copy-paste functionality, also.

I belive that in chest you can use middle mouse button to set filters

As beny said, it's already possible, either with smart inserters(for the chests) or middle clicking and choosing your filter(for toolbelt).

I've tried setting filters using the middle mouse button on chest slots, but it's not working. What am I missing?

PaulV wrote:I've tried setting filters using the middle mouse button on chest slots, but it's not working. What am I missing?

With chests you have to use smart inserters. From what I can remember the middle click applies to cargo wagons and your toolbelt.

Related suggestions:
https://forums.factorio.com/forum/vie ... f=6&t=2549
https://forums.factorio.com/forum/vie ... f=6&t=4984

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In my opinion such suggestion is only going around the problem. The problem is how to limit number of available items inside of a logistic network. It makes no sense to do that not only for one assembly / for one item-type. It is eventually easier to do that for limit that with the chest-limitations, but on long term makes no sense to me, cause it makes only problems, if you need to mix both setups.

The first thing I do after reaching logistics is to reprogram all chest-limits to smart provider settings. THAT could be part one of the idea, to automate that step. I think of some tool, that finds chest limits and replace the inserter/chest with a combi of chest, smart inserter ready programmed, depending on the assembly.

Part two is, that It makes sense to limit numbers per network and the smart inserter has a default, depending if it inserts or outputs "Limit to this produced item defined in current network".
That provides to have statistics of production/current available items in the current network. Everybody knows, that this right window, when you hoover a logistc chest, has do be redone, cause it cannot show the number of all items, when you have too much.

I can reach that config-screen (current logistic network, production setup), in many ways, for example in the producing assembly, the smart inserter or generally with the L (for logistic) key.

Much more ideas into that direction. Hysteresis programming (after X items reached turn off one factory), removing needed items out of the requester chest/turn off requesting to make them available for more important stuff and such things. Stuff like that can improve factory performance a lot.