Factorio Forums

Note: This falls into more into the category of an accessibility problem, and less incorrect behavior. The behavior here can also affect accessibility when trying to cancel a craft (collapsed or not) because the individual steps of a recipe do this as well, but the rest of this post only talks about the collapse button when the full view is active.

What did you do?
I was crafting many items alternately that take a short amount of time to craft, and then pressed the expand button.

What happened?
The collapse button moved at the bottom of the screen once every time a craft was finished which made it very difficult for me to close the crafting tree when following the button and trying to click it.

What did you expect to happen instead? It might be obvious to you, but do it anyway!
I expected the collapse button to be anchored to a specific spot on the screen, like how it is when the crafting tree is closed. This would allow people who are not able to "chase" the button to be able to close the menu before the crafts finished.

Does it happen always, once, or sometimes?
This happens every time there is a large number of quickly crafting steps on the crafting tree.

If you can reproduce the issue, provide the exact steps!
The steps to reproduce this problem are as follows:
1: Get a large number of iron and copper plates.
2: Quickly try to craft iron sticks and copper cables, like shown in the image below.
3: Press the expand button.
4: Try to follow the position of the collapse button (as if you were about to press it), you will have to move your mouse constantly at a somewhat high speed (depending on gui size).

Attached is my log file.

This is a long-standing interface issue and as my wrists get older, it becomes more relevant.

The issue is not limited to the "collapse" button; if you are actually trying to remove a crafting item from the middle of the list, every entry in the list is constantly changing position thus making it difficult to select the correct item to cancel crafting for. Since the elements in this list are designed to be interacted with and not just a display, it would be nice if all items retain a stationary position but at a minimum, I agree the collapse button should be stationary so you can at least collapse the queue reliably.

FYI a workaround for the "Collapse" button is to hit "M" twice (whatever key you have bound to bring up remote view/map). When you exit remote view the handcrafting queue will be collapsed again. This doesn't help for tinkering with recipes in the queue.

Maybe the queue could be right-aligned instead of left-aligned but it might have to anchor to the quick bar instead of the ammo/vehicle HUD and that seems disruptive to how the UI's been for awhile.

One solution is to play the game as it was intended to be played, by automating crafting of stuff. Alternative solution that would be possible is to halt crafting queue when it is expanded, that way it would stop moving and you could cancel crafting in the middle but that creates a lot of extra overhead or the gui as it would have to send input actions to stop or resume crafting in all relevant gui changes. Easiest solution would be to have the collapse button in its own independent bottom most row but that would not help with your case of cancelling in the middle. I am not considering this to be anything more than a minor issue, not sure if i would consider this a bug at all.