Factorio Forums

TL;DR

Add a blacklist option to turret priorities and the ability to save groups of targets

What?

Actually two feature requests in one. The first is to let turret priorities act as blacklists of targets rather than whitelists, just as a toggle similar to inserter filters. The more complex feature is the ability to synchronize several turrets to the same filter settings, similar to logistic groups, so that all turrets on a surface can be updated.

Why?

The motivation for both features comes from adding a variety of monster types, in particular MFerrari's Explosive/Frost/Toxic Biters and Fulgoran Enemies. Several of these enemies have 100% resistance to certain damage types e.g. Explosive enemies are immune to explosive damage, while Fulgoran robots are immune to electric. In some cases, it would be much easier to just list the immune targets rather than the 90% of enemies that are vulnerable to a turret's damage type. Additionally, priorities may change as various thresholds are met with infinite damage research, but in practice I see it used more for testing and debugging turrets for a surface.

Welcome to the forum.

The second one (shared groups of targets) could be done even now by setting those groups in a constant combinator and wiring them to turrets, with their Set priority list enabled.

Following that, the first one (blacklist) could be done by having one global group of all enemies, then a group of blacklisted enemies (negative values of signals).
As turrets ignore negative signals, they will set their priority targets to only positive signals, effectively blacklisting those negative ones.