Allow custom Upgrade Planners to generically upgrade Quality

[BlueTemplar]

First, see how you can select (non-any) quality without selecting any specific entity with a deconstruction planner :
(or an inserter filter)

decon_planner_quality.png (405.53 KiB) Viewed 883 times

See the green checkbox ?

But if you try to do this for an upgrade planner, the checkbox stays greyed out :

quality_upgrade_planner.png (203.71 KiB) Viewed 883 times

(not even with other quality levels than Any above)

But an Upgrade Planner ought to be even more powerful than this :
we should be able to even select Quality = Any, NOT pick any items, confirm the dialog, and get a custom upgrade planner that upgrades the quality of ANY entity !
Something looking like :

custom_quality_upgrade_planner.png (10.45 KiB) Viewed 883 times

with an icon like :

quality_upgrade_planner_icon.png (2.5 KiB) Viewed 883 times

P.S.: Not sure if this might also need some kind of opt-in «also upgrade tier» checkbox, for when you do want to upgrade both quality and tier across many entities with a single upgrade planner ?

[BlueTemplar]

See also the very related (but not as powerful) mod :
https://mods.factorio.com/mod/quality-upgrade-planner

[Wappinhat]

Issue: It's very time consuming creating an upgrade planner for every item when targeting qualities. For example a spaceship would require every thruster, solar panel, cargo hold etc created in an upgrade planner

Solution: Being able to shift+alt+scroll wheel to adjust item qualities on individual items in a blueprint and/or on all items under components on the left in a blueprint

Another idea is to be able to create an upgrade planner with only qualities and no items selected - this way someone can click and drag on each component they would like to upgrade

[Koub]

[Koub] Merged into an older thread with a suggestion trying to address the same issue

[MEOWMI]

I'm surprised this isn't in the game already. (I understand why but it would make so much sense.)

+1

[Romayne]

TL;DR

There should be an option to select and filter quality in the same way inserters can to upgrade all entities of a specific quality to some other quality.

What?

Have the quality selectors be able to be selected in the planners as options in and of themselves.

Why?

In a game with such QoL and ease of use, there is no reason I or anyone else should need to do this:


Instead, there should be options like this to save on time. Quality is often shifted around as surplus/deficits of a material in specific qualities requires deviations from preset/existing quality in a blueprint -- hand-placing it all sucks.

[Koub]

[Koub] Merged into an older thread with a similar suggestion.

[VarmintLP]

TL;DR

Down-/Upgrading the quality of items

What?

You know how it's annoying to always upgrade everything to a higher quality once it's available? Like your solar panel parks or battery parks. Well would be awefully nice to be able to shift + Alt + U or similar to get a blueprint to select multiple items in a larger area for upgrading or give the upgrade tool a second option with alt or ctrl to enable quality upgrades while holding the upgrade blueprint. Would be great to select a large amount of factorys and just replace them with a rare or legendary version, once it's in stock for the drones of course.

Why?

It would make it more convenient and faster to upgrade / downgrate a large factory area to a better quality rather than pressing Q on each item then E to change quality then hover over the item and placing it. Would be super useful for long time players.

Sorry if this was already posted here or implemented but I do think it would be cool to have.

[forums.mattias]

You can already make an upgrade blueprint for quality and bulk upgrade with it.

[SetazeR]

Counteroffer - allow crafting lower quality stuff with higher quality ingridients.

[Koub]

[Koub] Merged into an older thread with the same suggestion.

[Pzixel]

01-05-2025, 13-43-36.png (127.27 KiB) Viewed 246 times

Ideally it should look like this and work the same way as upgrade planner works on belts/splitters/inserters/... I don't suggest to change current planner behavior, I suggest that when for example control or alt are hold the planner enters the "quality update" mode and *then* allows to upgrade quality. This way the old UX is preserved and the new feature is implemented.

Motivation: currently the only way to upgrade quality is to create a upgrade item and manually select which items to upgrade and to which quality. This is very tedious and this is the exact reason why update planner can be applied directly to belts and inserters. It would be a very huge QoL if we could do this for quality as well: it's arguably even more important for quality, becaue belts and inserters is like 4 items and only has 2 upgrades, while quality is dozens of items of 5 levels each.

Proposed behavior: change all items within selection with the same item of 1 quality tier higher.

[AileTheAlien]

Proposed behavior: change all items within selection with the same item of 1 quality tier higher.

I don't think this would be very good if your buildings have different qualities. I'd always want to change to a specific quality, not just +1 of the buildings' current qualities. In your picture you even show this - an uncommon, rare, and epic building, all changing to legendary.

when for example control or alt are hold the planner enters the "quality update" mode and *then* allows to upgrade quality.

I think it'd be about as easy to use, if there were wildcard-buildings to choose, and then use the existing UI for the rest. It'd be similar to the "each" (yellow) signal from the circuit UI, that does something to each thing it touches. So, you'd pick the "each building" wildcard, and in the quality selector, pick your target quality. This would also work for the "from" part of the upgrade UI, so you could for example, upgrade all common and uncommon buildings straight to legendary, but leave your rare and epic buildings alone.

[Kalanndok]

Hmm...where's the problem?

The upgrade planner CAN already upgrade the quality of items.
Just select which entity (with quality) to replace with which entity (with quality) and the upgrade planner will execute the task.

And for quality...you don't want all entities to be upgraded in quality. There are some where quality is irrelevant like belts, tiles, pipes and everything that has to do with rails.

[Pzixel]

Hmm...where's the problem?

The upgrade planner CAN already upgrade the quality of items.
Just select which entity (with quality) to replace with which entity (with quality) and the upgrade planner will execute the task.

The problem is that you need to list every single item for every single quality. So like 50 buildings, 5 qualities. That's a lot of clicks. There is a reason why upgrade planner doesn't require you to make "belts -> better belts, inserters -> better inserters" blueprints, beacuse they are so common and annoying to make.

[Pzixel]

I don't think this would be very good if your buildings have different qualities. I'd always want to change to a specific quality, not just +1 of the buildings' current qualities. In your picture you even show this - an uncommon, rare, and epic building, all changing to legendary.

It's a picture from a mod, it works a bit different from how Upgrade Planner currently works (with item tiers, not qualities), I just included it to show how it roughly should work (but not exactly). In my games I often want to upgrade quality 1-2 times, because before you go all ahead on quality you just get random items. So in my current run for example I'm on Vulkanus and just craft chem plants until I have 10k common plants. At some point I have enough of uncommon to replace my production with them, and I do it to increase production. Then at some point in future I will have enough rares to do the same thing and will do this process again. Because chances are smaller and smaller for higher qualities it's a very useful feature to upgrade just one level up, at least before you get recyclers (and this might be the first 50-100 hours of the game at least). Anything more advanced can just use upgrade planner directly.

I think it'd be about as easy to use, if there were wildcard-buildings to choose, and then use the existing UI for the rest. It'd be similar to the "each" (yellow) signal from the circuit UI, that does something to each thing it touches. So, you'd pick the "each building" wildcard, and in the quality selector, pick your target quality. This would also work for the "from" part of the upgrade UI, so you could for example, upgrade all common and uncommon buildings straight to legendary, but leave your rare and epic buildings alone.

This is actually a very neat idea. The main problem with creating a manual blueprint is the need of listing every building, which is very tedious. Each in upgrade planner would fix this from a different angle indeed.

[Kyralessa]

It's already possible for inserters and splitters to filter on quality regardless of item.

This would just be extending the same feature to the upgrade planner.

[Koub]

[Koub] Merged into an older thread with the same suggestion.

[Pzixel]

While this proposal is considered - I found a blueprint book with pre-filled upgrades. Of course it won't work for new items/modded items, but at least this is something. I share it and have my deep thanks to the author: https://factorioprints.com/view/-OBrcQdLsOJHRw-kxLJF