Upgrade planner and automatic upgrades

[factoriouzr]

It would be useful to have an upgrade planner blueprint that works similar to the mod with the same name where whatever you select will be upgraded (factories, belts, inserters etc).

As an extension to this, it would be great if you could enable upgrade mode on your logistics network and whenever you have reached your limit on any type of item (eg. blue belt), the construction robots will look if you have any belts that are slower and deconstruct one and replace it with the blue belt. This way it would make upgrading large factories a lot easier without draining your resources because it would only do it if enabled and if you have already reached your logistics limit that you set for that good.

The picking of the entities to upgrade can be settable in a GUI that will persist across saved games, just like the envisioned blueprint sharing functionality and would be a great extension to it.

This would be great for upgrading factories, belts, splitters, underground belts etc.

[ssilk]

I go with this suggestion until the part with replacing belts with slower variant.
Using (pseudo intelligently) slower belts can break belt physics; that is in my eyes too sophisticated and too special usage, cause it doesn't work in general for every case... I someone really uses that he can still use some kind of mod.

Added to viewtopic.php?f=80&t=30575 Fast Upgrade (Belt->Splitters, Small Chests -> Bigger Chests... etc.)

[Deadly-Bagel]

Yeah you don't want to take away options. For example, someone might be using burner inserters to feed their turrets so in the event of power loss their defences don't stop working. Burner inserters work better on yellow belts so you don't want them upgraded. Forcing the upgrade removes this functionality and is the wrong way to go.

An improved upgrade planner would be better, where the bots just fast-replace entities with specified upgrades. If you want to passively upgrade your whole factory, just hit the whole lot with the upgrade planner and it would happen passively.

[factoriouzr]

Yeah you don't want to take away options. For example, someone might be using burner inserters to feed their turrets so in the event of power loss their defences don't stop working. Burner inserters work better on yellow belts so you don't want them upgraded. Forcing the upgrade removes this functionality and is the wrong way to go.

An improved upgrade planner would be better, where the bots just fast-replace entities with specified upgrades. If you want to passively upgrade your whole factory, just hit the whole lot with the upgrade planner and it would happen passively.

Well, first of all, there is no "wrong way to go". That's up to the player and individual play styles.

Second, it's hard to select a large factory with the upgrade planner. You would have to walk your entire factory in a grid search pattern. This is completely boring and you could easily miss sutff.

Third, as soon as you hit everything with the upgrade planner, that would drain all your available resources to upgrade things (which is not what I want as I stated before) and it would also deconstruct everything even when you don't have the replacement parts to put in it's place. This would tare down your defences, walls, turrets, etc. This would also disable belts and factorioes and deconstruct everything.

What I want is when you reach the logistics limit of an item, say 500 fast belts, then one fast belt is removed and one slower belt is replaced. Then the next time you reach 500 fast belts, the process repeats. This would allow you to keep the stock level of the goods you want while still upgrading safely, incrementally, and automatically. You could also define the rules for what to upgrade just like in the upgrade planner mod. This way, if you don't want to replace yellow belts, just don't define that rule. You could also just enable and disable the automatic upgrade process whenever you want so if you don't like it you don't have to use it, but if you do like it, you have it available.

[Engimage]

Personally I do not like the idea. Upgrading staff automaticly will always cause blackouts etc. Undesired shortages etc. You should always see what are the planned consequesces. This is why existing planner is a good tool.
Even in this form it is not in vanilla game yet.

You are talking about much more complex stuff where the system has to intelligently search for possible upgrades and issue them one by one while there is no logic on how this should be done. It is too complex to search for entities which are within a certain logistic network, and issue a replacement on some logistic network condition. I am sure this effort if not worth development time.

[Deadly-Bagel]

that would drain all your available resources to upgrade things (which is not what I want as I stated before) and it would also deconstruct everything even when you don't have the replacement parts to put in it's place.

I pointed out it needs a fast-replace status, similar to fast-replacing a belt with a higher tier, that allows the entity to function as usual then when a robot and upgrade is available it just replaces it, and puts the old one into the logistic network.

And the size of your factory is relevant to the amount of production. If your factory stretches fifteen zoomed-out screens, yes that's a lot of assemblers and belts to replace but if it can't handle that then wtf is it doing? Likewise a little factory might not have much production of something but not a lot to replace. Though with the 'to be upgraded' status above all you need to worry about is that production doesn't strip your factory of resources (should never be a problem, but ideally set up a system that retrieves the old units, upgrades them and sends them back out) and that if you're provided with assemblers or belts from logistics then you have an appropriate stock beforehand.

[factoriouzr]

that would drain all your available resources to upgrade things (which is not what I want as I stated before) and it would also deconstruct everything even when you don't have the replacement parts to put in it's place.

I pointed out it needs a fast-replace status, similar to fast-replacing a belt with a higher tier, that allows the entity to function as usual then when a robot and upgrade is available it just replaces it, and puts the old one into the logistic network.

And the size of your factory is relevant to the amount of production. If your factory stretches fifteen zoomed-out screens, yes that's a lot of assemblers and belts to replace but if it can't handle that then wtf is it doing? Likewise a little factory might not have much production of something but not a lot to replace. Though with the 'to be upgraded' status above all you need to worry about is that production doesn't strip your factory of resources (should never be a problem, but ideally set up a system that retrieves the old units, upgrades them and sends them back out) and that if you're provided with assemblers or belts from logistics then you have an appropriate stock beforehand.

You missed the point I think. It's about automation so that the player doesn't have to go around and select everything to upgrade. The way it works now, even with the upgrade planner mod, as soon as you upgrade a region, it would deconstruct everything and use up whatever products you have now to build with (likely using up all your stores of items so that everything else in your factory crawls to a halt). Why implement a different partial feature as you suggest? How is your solution any better when it doesn't address my concerns? Might as well just implement the feature fully (what I suggested, or something very similar that solves all the issues I mentioned).

[daniel34]

Obsolete, see this topic instead: viewtopic.php?f=6&t=38427