Spoilage percentage filtration

[Loup&Snoop]

Then I humbly request the global moderator to merge threads.

[Koub]

Then I humbly request the global moderator to merge threads.

I got you covered
[Koub] Merged several threads with the same or similar suggestions.

[lNORDl]

I strongly support this suggestion, but I think freshness filtering could be taken one step further:

Freshness should be a property of the item filter itself, similar to Quality.

Right now freshness is treated as a special inserter setting: an inserter can prefer the freshest or most spoiled item available.

This is useful for answering:
"Which one of these items should I pick first?"

But it cannot answer a much more important question:
"Should I pick this item at all?"

For example, I cannot express:

• Yumako with freshness >= 75%
• Agricultural science packs with freshness >= 50%
• Pentapod eggs with freshness < 25%

This makes freshness fundamentally different from Quality from an automation point of view. Quality is part of the item selection/filtering system, while freshness is currently a special-case priority setting.

Treat freshness like Quality in filters

When selecting an item, we already have an additional selector for Quality.

For spoilable items, I would add another condition next to it:
Freshness: Any / > / >= / = / <= / < [percentage]

For example:

Code: Select all

Agricultural science pack | Any quality | Freshness >= 75%

The important part is that this would be part of the item filter, rather than another special setting added separately to individual entities.

That means the same concept could naturally work everywhere item filters are used.

Quick note: I don't mean a free-form percentage field where you could enter arbitrary values like 47%. I mean a small set of fixed freshness thresholds, similar to Quality tiers — for example 25% / 50% / 75% / 95%.

What this enables

This would make it possible to build much more deterministic Gleba logistics.

For example:

• Split off everything below 25% freshness from a main belt and send it to recycling/disposal.
• Guarantee that critical production chains only receive sufficiently fresh ingredients.
• Load only sufficiently fresh Agricultural science packs into rockets.
• Separate fresh and nearly spoiled products using splitters.
• Request only sufficiently fresh items through the logistic network.
• Count or react to items of a particular freshness range with circuit logic.

The last point is especially interesting: right now I can easily ask the circuit network "how many Yumako do I have?", but not "how many Yumako above 50% freshness do I have?"

Freshness is one of the central properties of Gleba items, yet from the automation perspective it is mostly invisible.

Why I think this fits Factorio

This doesn't remove the spoilage challenge.

It gives the player better tools to solve the spoilage challenge.

Factorio normally gives us very precise control over logistics and lets us decide what to do with that information. Freshness currently feels unusually opaque compared with other item properties.

And from a UI perspective, this could reuse an abstraction that already exists: the item filter selector and its Quality setting, rather than introducing more entity-specific freshness controls.

In other words:
Quality tells the filter what kind of item I want. Freshness should be able to do the same.

Guys, please support this suggestion if you feel the same way. I really think the ability to sort and filter items by freshness is essential for Gleba, and the fact that similar suggestions keep appearing regularly shows that this is not just my personal pain point.

Just a few most recent posts highlighting the same pain point around spoilage control:
viewtopic.php?t=135673
viewtopic.php?t=130680

P. S. Screens with UI/UX examples I generated with GPT

[Amarula]

I really like the idea of treating freshness like quality, allowing it to be filtered or selected anywhere you can filter or select items.

[foreground]

I, too, have been wishing for this feature ever since Space Age came out.

When I am debugging my Gleba factory, I can see many things I want it to do. These nearly-spoiled items on the belt need to go there. Those items need to get burned before they cause trouble. These items need to turn into science if they are fresh, or into base resources when they are no longer in good condition. When I am physically there on Gleba making decisions about my factory, I will optimize and debug things based on the freshness of the items on belts and in chests.

Many of those decisions are things I currently cannot get my factory to do automatically. There are important sustainable factory logistics decisions that I can make by hand, but that I cannot automate.

To me, this is very frustrating. I am standing there throwing eggs into the incinerator when they reach the 20% freshness mark, and then find that I cannot get my factory to perform that same procedure for me. The information is there -- it's on the items, and I'm basing my own decisions on it -- but my factory doesn't have access to it. This is a situation we would ideally never be in when playing factorio.

I consider this antithetical to what makes factorio so much fun. If I can see the key information and base decisions off it, my factory should be able to do the same. Playing against this limitation isn't fun for me. Having the ability to filter on a freshness threshold on inserters and splitters would solve the problem nicely; I can think of a few alternative designs that would scratch the same itch, but they all seem inferior to me, so the proposal here seems like the way to go.