REQUEST: Copy train/S-Ship rosters, change station/planet rules, keep specific goods and prioritise ship orders

[DragonRT]

I've been playing Factorio off and on since 2015. The Space Age expansion transforms my favorite game of all time into something even better which I just would not have thought possible. Here's a few minor requests for features which I feel are currently missing:

1. I cannot see a way to copy a station order rule set and it seems like it should be an easy addition. I know you can copy an entire set by copy and pasting the ship hub but that's a bit too much.

2. Ability to change station order. Maybe I'm missing something but I can't move a station/planet to before another one, you seem to have to delete it from one place and add back to another.. which would be OK if you could copy and paste!

Answered - I was indeed missing something - you can hold the mouse down on the striped area which lets you drag the station/planet destination about.

3. Ability to stop a ship from off loading specific goods. A blanket - don't unload at this station/planet affects all items. A workaround I've found is that you can order the same item back from the planet but you have to do this on any planet you visit. (AFAIK). Why? As an example - So that you can keep say 100 barrels on nuclear fuel in the ship cargo for the ship itself.

4. On ships specifically it would be nice to have a feature where you can prioritise a ship build (for example) over the planet supplying goods. currently it seems that supply ships get the priority. Obviously you can stop the ships arriving or clear their orders but then you have to restart it all. To come extent priorities would be a great addition to the bot network as far as I'm concerned!

5. Ability to request goods from a specific ship. This is another request that you can kind of workaround but a good QOL feature as far as I'm concerned.

[DragonRT]

Updated my post. I should point out that these features may have already been requested. I did a quick search and found a couple of reddit posts with similar comments to (1) and (3) on them.

[IsaacOscar]

By "ship" you mean space platform right? And not something added by a mod?

I don't get the point of suggestion #1, and suggestion #3 seems redundant with #5.
The Problem with #4 is you might need stuff like ammo or fuel cells to keep your platform alive and working. So I'm not sure.

#5 makes sense, although it might get tedious if there are multiple platforms you want the good from.

[IsaacOscar]

Also, your suggestion #1 is tangentially related to 122417. and 119485, also if you have platform groups you could then have landing pad requests for an entire group.


I think 121977 and 120367 are better than your #4.

And #5 seems to be the same as 121846

[DragonRT]

By "ship" you mean space platform right? And not something added by a mod?

I don't get the point of suggestion #1, and suggestion #3 seems redundant with #5.
The Problem with #4 is you might need stuff like ammo or fuel cells to keep your platform alive and working. So I'm not sure.

#5 makes sense, although it might get tedious if there are multiple platforms you want the good from.

Yes - this is vanilla Space Age.
Yes - "ship" = Space Platform

1. As an example:
Say you have a set of rules to be completed before the ship arrives at a planet - wait for all requests to finish, both fuel types are at 90%, water and ammo are at certain levels (etc) You have to set this manually for every stop, I would like to be able to copy the rules and paste to other stops.
I use a workaround where I have a combinator that I copy to each Space Platform (I have 7) and then have one rule which asks the combinator if everything is OK but this means it is harder to adjust and less clear/awkward if I want, say more fuel on a certain stop. It is a QOL feature request.

3. and 5. It would depend on how they were implemented but yes if they implemented 5. then this should provide a workaround for 3.

4. Yes priorities might screw things up and I would imagine the devs have considered priorities in other parts of the game several times. However having the option to have them would be then a choice. Currently on my current playthrough to get a platform built over Nauvis I have to manually stop all my other ships from visiting

5. Again having the ability doesn't mean you are forced to use it.

Overall Space Platforms are dealt with almost as if they were trains but there are many differences.. space platforms can all be at the same station (planet) at the same time but are all being emptied or filled by the same source. Trains can have their own station in the same location so the player chooses the priorites rather than the game.

Hope that explains my suggestions more clearly.

[DragonRT]

Just to add to this, in particular with ship order/request priorities:

I have had one of my platforms sat at Nauvis probably for over an hour of game time waiting for the supply of a few items. When it arrived it received part supplies then other platforms arrived and, for some reason, took priority from it.

Supplies are available on planet in full slots/shiploads -
Example the ship is requesting 800 rockets (or so) and there are almost 5000 available on planet but it isn't getting them. At a guess there have been at least eight visits by other platforms that have received their supplies and left and even come back for more.

Obviously I can manually supply the rockets (etc.) but I don't understand why this is necessary.

My suggestion of being able to assign priorities to platforms would work around this but there is either a bug here or something I am fundamentally not understanding about supply requirement slots for platforms.

Anyone have any ideas about this?