Rearrange hand craft queue - QOL

[Severenger]

TL;DR

Allow the player to click and drag items in their hand crafting queue.

What ?

20170606152642_1.jpg (14.17 KiB) Viewed 12791 times

In the image above, I'm hand crafting 19 speed modules. This is going to take some time... but I urgently need those 5 stack inserters. I'd like the option to click and drag those inserters to the front of the queue so they are built before the speed modules. Since the stack inserters are dependant on the fast inserters and gears, they'll come to the front of the queue too.

Why ?

How many times have you queued up a whole bunch of things thinking "I'll hand craft this while I do other things", only to realise you need 3 inserters immediately. Now you have to destroy your queue, add 3 inserters, then recreate the queue.
Or am I the only one who queues up hundreds of science packs?

[Mendel]

While I do support this idea, I just have to ask... why would you hand craft 19 speed modules

Well, sometimes if I want something crafted while I do something else, I would just pop up a temporary assembler or two, put a chest next to them, give them the recipe of speed modules (or whatever) and just ctrl click stacks of ingredients to the assemblers. This takes way less time than hand crafting in the end and you can hand craft something else while you´re doing this.

Generally, if you don´t really need anything hand crafted right now, you should probably just hand craft a bunch of gears or copper wires since having those in your inventory will generally speed up any future hand crafing of stuff that you will likely need soon. But always even better to automate as soon as possible... and I generally automate putting gears, wires and even green circuits in boxes in several places of my factory so that outside of the very early game I pretty much never need to handcraft gears and wires at least and handcrafting stuff like belts and inserters will be super snappy.

bro mod tib: One thing I like to do is to have stacks of often needed stuff in steel boxes or provider boxes inside a factorissimo factory that I keep in my inventory. Then if and when I need any often needed thing quickly, I just place the factorissimo building down, go inside it and pickup or let bots pickup whatever it is I needed, then mine the factorissimo back up to my inventory and go on with my business.

[Severenger]

The speed modules in the screenshot were for demonstration purposes only Though I'm ashamed to admit I've hand crafted waaaaay more than 19 in the past

I'm sure newer players would really appreciate this feature. I could've used this feature so much when I was still fairly new. Back when I used to hand craft hundreds of items at a time.

[Koub]

The current opinion the devs (or at least the GUI specialist) on this topic :

We had many discussions about improving the crafting queue, including special shortcut to queue to front. After long thoughts I have strong feelings against improving the crafting queue like this, for an important reason: it won't force you to automate. If you were able to queue to front many players will act as walking assembling machines, constantly crafting things, since it would be an efficient way to play. I very often see new players spend many minutes crafting green science packs, sometimes even waiting there until their hand crafting is finished. Adding queue to front will only aggravate this problem. By making it annoying the way it is now, it forces new players to think "if only there was a way to do this easier...".

Source : viewtopic.php?f=38&t=48033&p=279398

[Severenger]

I understand where they're coming from, but I disagree with their reasoning. Making a GUI "annoying the way it is now" seems like a badly designed system. The user interface and user experience can make or break a game for some people. Rearranging the queue just feels like a feature that should be present. I've tried to do it, friends of mine have tried to do it, everyone tries to do it. It's sort of a natural thing to do, you know what I mean? People are going to rearrange their queue the long way regardless. It's not really discouraging them to do it, it's just making the process frustrating.

New players are always going to hand craft a lot of items. You eventually realise hand crafting is much slower and thus start to automate more and more. It's just part of the learning curve. For example, my first playthrough saw a lot of red and green science being hand crafted. Setting up automated green science alone was a daunting task, so it was easier to just do it all by hand. Now I hand craft the bare minimum red science, and fully automate green. This decision had nothing to do with my frustration at the GUI. It's because I realised it was faster to automate.

"...it won't force you to automate". Nothing will ever force the player to automate. If the goal is to stop players from hand crafting, instead of making the process annoying, they should be encouraging automation while discouraging hand crafting by other means. Hell, I think the fact that assembly machines can craft more items, each at a faster rate than the player is incentive enough. An annoying GUI is not the answer here, and never should be.

[Factory Lobster]

I suspect a lot of people feel neutral about this or don't really care. On the one hand, yes it is annoying to be in the middle of crafting 5 of something with a really long overall craft time and realize that you need some quick things first (like inserters), but on the other hand we understand we are playing a game based on production efficiency and automation. We acknowledge that we are being lazy by handcrafting too much (lol because of "lazy bastard" achievement), but one day we won't have to do that anymore.

[Ranakastrasz]

<Not Entirely Serious

What we really need is to remove the ability to queue at all. Allow you to queue a single recipe as many times as you want, but don't let you queue two recipe types at all.
After all, Assembly machines only do one recipe at once.

In effect, you would have to do each sub-set of a recipe, like making copper coils first, then circuits, then gears, then mining drill, each as a manual step.

/>

[Factory Lobster]

<Not Entirely Serious

What we really need is to remove the ability to queue at all. Allow you to queue a single recipe as many times as you want, but don't let you queue two recipe types at all.
After all, Assembly machines only do one recipe at once.

In effect, you would have to do each sub-set of a recipe, like making copper coils first, then circuits, then gears, then mining drill, each as a manual step.

/>

Well, I'm entirely serious when I say "hell no" to this. Automatically crafting each sub-component of the product you want made me so happy when I started playing this game, after years of irritation juggling a personal inventory of 30 different raw materials/items in Minecraft. No thanks.

Unless this is part of the joke

[urza99814]

I see another possible issue here. I already tend to exploit the craft queue, and this would make that so much easier. When you add anything to the queue it pulls the material from your inventory immediately. So if you need temporary inventory space you can just craft something BIG, do what you need, then cancel the craft and get your items back. The biggest barrier to doing this is that it doesn't work too well if you need that extra inventory space to craft something else, BECAUSE you can't change the order.

So if I want to craft some speed modules and need to pick up extra circuits but my inventory is full, I can craft a nuclear reactor to make space, grab the parts, queue up the module, then cancel the reactor. If I need n SEVERAL speed modules, then it gets difficult... You grab parts, queue one module, grab more parts, queue another, then cancel the reactor before it finishes and your inventory is full again so you have to queue up another one and repeat the process.. That gets hard to manage pretty quickly. But if I could move stuff around in the queue? That gives me infinite inventory. Queue a hundred reactors, grab more parts and queue a hundred modules, grab more parts and queue a hundred inserters... And whenever I need something specific just move that to the front of the line. You don't even have to queue the exact items you need as you could cancel stuff one at a time to get the parts back to craft something else which you can then boost straight to the front of the queue.

[Tekky]

The original poster's suggestion has already been suggested numerous times, for example in the following suggestion thread:
viewtopic.php?f=6&t=41594 Ctrl+click to add to front of craft queue

An annoying GUI is not the answer here, and never should be.

I fully agree with this statement.

[Factorie]

I believe the point of not having this is because hand crafting is supposed to be annoying. Automation is supposed to make things easier.

[Koub]

My personal experience : hand crafting is currently just ennoying enough to encourage me automating things earlier than I would have automated them if there was QOL queue control, but not ennoying enough to completely discourage me from handcrafting - with parcimony.
I have also pleaded in favor of queue rearrangement ability in the past, but I'm not so sure it would do good to the game overall.

[Syrchalis]

Making an interface deliberately annoying and not investing time and resources to make it less annoying are two different things.

Crafting queue has simply not changed and I feel like the devs' reasoning is relatively solid.

[Tekky]

If the developers want to limit hand-crafting, they should not make the interface more annoying, but instead make hand-crafting cumbersome in some other way.

For example, one could force the player to stand still whenever he does some hand-crafting, because the player must use a stationary hand-crafting machine. Also, it could require several seconds for the player to unpack his hand-crafting machine after stopping to move, so that he must stand still for several seconds before he even starts crafting.

If that is the price for a nice, flexible crafting GUI, then I would gladly pay it.

EDIT: Meanwhile, this suggestion of mine has its own thread.

[Syrchalis]

If the developers want to limit hand-crafting, they should not make the interface more annoying, but instead make hand-crafting cumbersome in some other way.

For example, one could force the player to stand still whenever he does some hand-crafting, because the player must use a stationary hand-crafting machine. Also, it could require several seconds for the player to unpack his hand-crafting machine after stopping to move, so that he must stand still for several seconds before he even starts crafting.

If that is the price for a nice, flexible crafting GUI, then I would gladly pay it.

Me for example I would highly prefer the current implementation.

In your example you made the interface "great" from "okay" but made the gameplay aspect "really really bad" from "great". Standing still would ruin the already boring early game even more. I know you meant your suggestion more of an example of the direction it could go, but I honestly doubt it would end up better than it is now.