Factorio Forums

TL;DR

Add a circuit control to chests that controls the number of locked (red) slots.

What?

All circuit-connected chests should have an additional, toggleable circuit mode that reads a specified signal (default L?) and controls the number of locked slots in the chest. If the signal is <= 0, all slots are available. If the signal is higher than the number of slots, then the max number are locked.

When this functionality is enabled, the number of locked slots cannot be controlled manually.

Why?

Thanks to the selector combinator, it's now possible to do logic on items by the stackload. For instance, in my recent game, I built a mall blueprint where I used a constant combinator to specify the item I wanted and the number of stacks I want to keep in the network.

If I was building the mall manually, I would just lock slots on the chests to accomplish this. But to do so in a blueprint, because the locked slots are not parameterizable, I have to link up a machine and configure it to disable when the quantity in the output chest is above the number of stacks. This requires a selector combinator, which is quite expensive.