Factorio Forums

TL;DR

When you have a ghost building (or module or item) in your cursor, the number of available items in logistics storage should be shown.

What?

When you're building a ghost, or inserting ghost items, it would be nice if the cursor showed how many items were available, like it does when you have physical items in your hand. The networks to check would just be based on which networks would be able to build the ghost. For instance, if you have an inserter ghost, and you're inside your base's network, it shows how many inserters are available in provider and buffer chests. If you're out in the field, and building ghosts near your personal roboport, it could give a total count of how many matching items are in your inventory. If the ghost you're building overlaps multiple networks, it would either show the networks separately (with little icons?) or just show a sum. If the ghost is completely outside a network, it would instead show an X and zero, giving immediate feedback that the ghost is outside a network.

Why?

The main reason I want this is for quality ghosts. When upgrading buildings to higher quality versions, I frequently find myself switching to my logistics view to see how many, say, rare accumulators I actually have available. There's no point ordering my bots to upgrade a bunch stuff to epic if I only have one epic in storage, especially when I might have 30 uncommon available. Combined with the Shift+Ctrl+Scroll hotkey for changing quality levels, this would make it very easy to see what qualities of buildings I have available. It could also give improved feedback on how a ghost will be built. Is it going to get built by my personal network, or by the base, because I've run out of something?

Further improvements

If this feature makes it in, there is room for improvement in related areas. My initial proposal only would affect basic cursor ghosts, but having feedback for dropping blueprints would be nice too. You get a nice summary of the items in your selection when using a deconstruction planner; a similar summary could show when you're stamping a blueprint, including not only what is in the blueprint, but how much of each building is actually available. Having immediate feedback for, "Do I have enough buildings to build this?" would be very nice. And now that landfill can be placed under ghosts automatically, there's no way to know how much landfill a blueprint is going to use until after you stamp it.

If you wanted to get really fancy, you could also include expected travel time for ghosts to be built, but that's probably asking for a bit much, and would be much more difficult to calculate.

+1 for this, especially since mods can't modify the GUI (I tried making one then found out mods can only create GUI, not modify the game's ones).
An implementation like this would be great:


This could be displayed everywhere a click will cause a ghost, so for example, display this as well in the quickbar, for items that aren't available currently in the inventory.

TL;DR

Show how many of an item are available in a logistic network near the cursor if you are holding a ghost of that item

What?

I want my cursor to tell me if this ghost/module request is ever going to get built/fulfilled.

Why?

Before placing ghosts I often find myself pressing L then ctl+f to check if there are better quality alternatives available or making sure that item is available on that planet. It would be nice to have that information be more easily available.

When building normally, the number of chests (or other items) in your inventory is displayed alongside the item on the cursor.

In remote view, where you can only place ghost entities, display the item count as well but show the quantity available in the nearby logistics network instead.

show available items in logistics storage when building in remote view

thanks