Factorio Forums

TL;DR

Make it possible to have two-stage non-rocket assembly machines, and single-stage assembly in rocket silos.

What?

It should be possible for any recipe to be two-stage, requiring completion of a sub-recipe in order to progress on the main recipe. This could then be used in other kinds of assembling machine prototypes.

If per-recipe doesn't work, then at least it should be possible to make arbitrary assembling machines into two-stage ones.

Why?

Currently, rocket silos are the only machine in the game that assembles products into an internal, inaccessible inventory, before assembling those products into a single bigger product. They're also the only launch pad in the game. There's no particular reason these things need to be the same thing.

We could easily have two-stage assembly machines which act like a big factory assembling vehicles from parts, for instance. This would be a cool thing for conceptually big recipes like vehicles and maybe even some particularly massive buildings like the nuclear plant.

It would also potentially step us towards separating the construction of rockets from their launch, such as by allowing different rockets with different speeds and capacities to launch from a single base rocket building.