Factorio Forums

What?

Similar to how you can build out of your character inventory by clicking on an item and placing it on your cursor, I propose you should be able to select items from the space platform inventory, just with ghosts instead.

Why?

Right now both left and right clicking an item in the space platform hub does not do anything. In your character inventory, clicking an item places the item on your cursor, and allows you to place said item (if it is a building), or 'z' drop it into machines (for modules). This is useful when building on Nauvis, for the rare items that aren't on your hotbar.

In space, you cannot select items out of the space platform, which does not match the character inventory behavior. Yes, you can select buildings off of your hotbar, or use the new 'e' menu, or pipette. However, this can be cumbersome, particularly now with quality.

Additionally, buildings in the space platform hub do not have highlighted counts in your hotbar, making it unclear how many of each item you have remaining. I suppose this could be a separate feature request: since there is only one inventory in space, the platform hub, your hotbar when in space platform nav view could show the counts of items in the hub inventory instead.

Summary

• General quality of life
• Matches character inventory behavior and thus muscle memory
• Upon reaching space, you get access to a whole new set of buildings, which do not exist on your hotbar yet
• You are incentivized to send quality buildings to space, which generally also do not exist on your hotbar
• You can see clearly which buildings exist in the inventory, available to build with. Useful if you are short on eg particular inserter types, or have assorted quality buildings.

Enjoying Space Age so far!

I agree with this 100 percent. Especially since as I was trying to find some way to do it, I shift clicked a stack of belts and they were instantly shot down to the surface, after having just arrived by rocket moments earlier. I found this to be quite disconcerting, as it essentially works the same way as logistic trash slots in the player inventory, but I can't get an item onto the cursor in the same way. Can we pretty please have this feature? Thanks for the great game!!!

TL;DR
When looking at the contents of a storage hub, let me click on items to place/build them on the space platform.

What?
At the moment you always have to check what is on the platform, close that menu, open the "e" menu, navigate to the correct item, select the right quality, and then get a placeable entity. Clicking on the item right in the storage hub menu does nothing.

Why?
When building space platforms I often send up mixed rockets of items with different qualities, depending of what is available on my planet. Then I end up constantly opening the storage hub to see what I still have on the platform, closing the hub and navigating to the item again.

Building on a space platform with available materials should be more like building directly from your inventory on a planet. Going to the "e" menu should only be necessary if you want to place ghosts of items that are not on stock.

you can use the pipette tool to select from the hub

Seconding this, with additional reasons:

• I found this suggestion thread because my beginner friend got very frustrated with the space platform hub behavior not matching player inventories, and I was hoping there was some solution.
• The real distinction is between controlling a character and using remote view. However, it's possible a player reaches space without setting up a logistic network (especially with "Logistic system" gated behind space science). Building from a single inventory that nearly-instantly constructs made my friend expect player-like controls rather than construction bot / ghost controls, and I agree.
• Even as an experienced player, I found it jarring the first time I left-clicked in the platform hub inventory. Factorio controls usually make me feel powerful, and a left-click no-op just feels wrong. I responded by switching to pipette for everything, but that's not a natural change for a beginner who's only placed from their inventory before.
• The current behavior may help players adopt hotbars or pipette for ghosts as they use construction bots more. However, that will happen naturally with a Nauvis roboport network or when using remote view on other planets, where the ghost cursor's differences feel appropriate, as you wait for a construction bot to fly across your base (delayed construction) from the random chest with your desired item (not a single inventory).

Left-clicking in the platform hub inventory putting a ghost on the cursor would be the least-intrusive way I see to resolve the most here.

Thanks for the expansion! Space Age has already brought me hundreds of hours of fun.