Factorio Forums

TL;DR

One of the last things you can’t do in remote view: pick up an item from a belt with bots without deconstructing the belt.

What ?

Add a filter that you can remove items on a belt with bots (similar to the remove items from ground one). Ideally, also allow us to specify which items.

Another option is to allow these items to be picked up in remote view if you press the related hotkey. This can generalise well to any item, on the ground and on a belt.

It is fine if the belts need to be stopped temporarily to make this possible.

Why ?

When ‘my friend, definitely not me’ accidentally spills some items on the wrong belt in remote view, it is pretty tricky to get rid of it. If you do this just before a sea of splitters, you pretty much need to deconstruct an enormous amounts of belts or add filter inserters everywhere to get rid of the contamination. Just being able to pick up the items from that belt would be very helpful. It also feels a bit counterintuitive that you can pick up items from the ground in remote view, but not items on belts.

Some general "sweep debris" command which would make con/logi bots sweep stuff from the floor (be it ground or belt) would be nice indeed...

I also found myself in a position, where this would be very useful.

Usually it's a short belt piece that's polluted with unwanted items. I deconstruct the area, then press ctrl-z to undo, so it's constructed again. Not the nicest solution, but works with minimal effort.
To just pick up items from the ground, create a deconstruction planner and configure its filter. In the section with the box, there is a special "item on the ground" icon. This will mark items on the ground for deconstruction, which means they will be picked up by construction bots.