[2.0.21] No way to remove damaged items from logistics storage remotely

[supremecool]

While the player is off-world there is no way to filter damaged items out of logistics storage using remote view to either repair or recycle them. This is an issue with recipes like personal laser defense, which not only requires an entity that is likely to be damaged as an ingredient, but also benefits strongly from quality.

I found that my setup for crafting legendary personal laser defenses had deadlocked because damaged laser turrets were inserted into the assembler, blocking any non-damaged turrets from being inserted.

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This issue cannot be resolved in remote view because trashing the damaged turrets only moves them to storage, where they will eventually get requested back into the machine, and there is no way to specify a ghost cursor for damaged entities. The only way to fix this deadlock is to either have the player travel there to manually take the damaged turrets and repair them, or to remote build hundreds of turrets until the damaged ones get placed.

Adding logistics filters based on the health of items would probably be too complicated to implement compared to the benefit it would add. Instead a simpler fix could be that damaged items should never be used to fulfill logistics requests, instead leaving them in storage permanently until a player decides to manually deal with them.

[tinker9]

I think this bug also existed in 1.1, I've seen it a few times before.

Here's an alternative fix: damaged and undamaged items can be placed in machines together, and the whole stack inherits some of the damage (like the spoilage averaging formula).

There are good reasons for damaged and undamaged items to be kept separate in player inventory and chest/platform storage. Propagating damage there would be annoying. But as soon as they're put in a machine, I'm pretty sure damage is ignored, and not propagated to the products. So combining stacks and averaging the damage there is harmless.

(Averaging damage also avoids a "cheat" where you deliberately combine damaged items in a machine to "repair" them.)