TL;DR
When you have a ghost building (or module or item) in your cursor, the number of available items in logistics storage should be shown.What?
When you're building a ghost, or inserting ghost items, it would be nice if the cursor showed how many items were available, like it does when you have physical items in your hand. The networks to check would just be based on which networks would be able to build the ghost. For instance, if you have an inserter ghost, and you're inside your base's network, it shows how many inserters are available in provider and buffer chests. If you're out in the field, and building ghosts near your personal roboport, it could give a total count of how many matching items are in your inventory. If the ghost you're building overlaps multiple networks, it would either show the networks separately (with little icons?) or just show a sum. If the ghost is completely outside a network, it would instead show an X and zero, giving immediate feedback that the ghost is outside a network.Why?
The main reason I want this is for quality ghosts. When upgrading buildings to higher quality versions, I frequently find myself switching to my logistics view to see how many, say, rare accumulators I actually have available. There's no point ordering my bots to upgrade a bunch stuff to epic if I only have one epic in storage, especially when I might have 30 uncommon available. Combined with the Shift+Ctrl+Scroll hotkey for changing quality levels, this would make it very easy to see what qualities of buildings I have available. It could also give improved feedback on how a ghost will be built. Is it going to get built by my personal network, or by the base, because I've run out of something?Further improvements
If this feature makes it in, there is room for improvement in related areas. My initial proposal only would affect basic cursor ghosts, but having feedback for dropping blueprints would be nice too. You get a nice summary of the items in your selection when using a deconstruction planner; a similar summary could show when you're stamping a blueprint, including not only what is in the blueprint, but how much of each building is actually available. Having immediate feedback for, "Do I have enough buildings to build this?" would be very nice. And now that landfill can be placed under ghosts automatically, there's no way to know how much landfill a blueprint is going to use until after you stamp it.If you wanted to get really fancy, you could also include expected travel time for ghosts to be built, but that's probably asking for a bit much, and would be much more difficult to calculate.
