Smarter adding of modules to assembling machines

[DanGio]

There's plenty of "mistakes" the game let you do. You can put prod modules in pumpjacks[...]

AFAIK this is not necessarily a mistake for non-depleted oil fields ?

Yeah I was wondering that just before posting

I honestly don't know.

[BlueTemplar]

That's just more thought-reading magic. How should the engine know when you think that wasting fractions is ok and when you think it's not? And why should the engine be engineered for your thought pattern? It's not realistic. And overloading the game with more shortcuts every time anyone comes up with a new edge case isn't the solution.

Yeah, I myself prefer my later suggestion of the introduction of Ctrl+right click to half-fill the module slots.

Imho the easiest would be to simply introduce a "module planner". Drag a frame around the relevant machines → a gui pops up and asks you what modules you want. Ofc that's pretty similar to the already existing blueprint solution but more overpowered because it doesn't require bots or time.

Btw, the devs have already stated that (paraphrased from memory) "making pre-bot building easier" isn't something they have much interest in. See the upgrade planner for example.

Uh, why would this be a separate tool from the upgrade planner ?

[netmand]

A fair portion of UI feature requests are to make things that you can already do more convenient, so I'm not sure what to tell you.

I substantiated my request by providing a handful of examples that apply to me. The forum is where others who aren't me can provide additional input, I don't speak for anybody else. If my examples don't convince you, that's OK too.

I didn't mean to lead this into some pedantic discussion of what a request/suggestion/idea is. As you imply, This is the right forum to promote and discuss such things. However, I'm not here explicitly to be convinced, but to counter-point that your proposed change would damage my user experience. This is why I suggested doing this through a mod and leaving vanilla alone. (or did I not say that?)

I thought more deeply about this particular feature just now, and realize that it already may be quite complicated. ctrl-click needs to know what it can place or extract and it does need to know what you have on the cursor (or lack thereof) and compare its destination. It almost seems to follow the same logic as inserter; and if that uses the same functions under the covers, you would be potentially limiting what inserters do. Maybe adding a lot of UPS? Some experimentation is in order, I can't wait to get back to my game...

[JasonC]

I thought more deeply about this particular feature just now, and realize that it already may be quite complicated. ctrl-click needs to know what it can place or extract and it does need to know what you have on the cursor (or lack thereof) and compare its destination.

Of course ctrl-click already has some awareness of what you are holding and what can be inserted; that's why you can't overflow inventory or insert unacceptable items when inserting. The mechanism is already there.

[sparr]

When I ctrl+click efficiency modules into a tier 3 assembler, I'd like only 2 to go in, not 4 (unless there are already 2 in there, in which case it would be nice to insert two more, maybe?).

[Koub]

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