Make Captive Biter Spawner upgrade automatable again

[Mooncat]

Suggestion

Add (back) the ability to upgrade Captive Biter Spawners with bots.


Backstory

Once upon a time, Captive Biter Spawners were upgradable by bots. We could shift-click them with spawner of higher quality on the cursor to tell the bots to upgrade them. It was very useful if you want to upgrade multiple spawners to legendary without having the spawners already crafted.

But then, when 2.0.47 landed on the stable branch, things changed.

Captive spawners were no longer upgradeable using ghosts. This has been reported (670552), but sadly, has also been classified as not a bug.

By searching through the forums, we can see some related bug reports and they might be the cause of the change:
636417 - [2.0.16] Upgrade planner incorrectly supports captive biter spawner - Not resolved yet
670461 - [2.0.43] Biter spawner upgrading is possible, but not from upgrade planner - Resolved

Reason

The reason I made this suggestion is simple: Factorio is a game of automation. We should allow more things to be automatable rather than removing the features of automation.

Also for self-interest, I have setup a biter egg farm at the tragic timing when 2.0.47 was landed.

Screenshot 2025-05-24 161709.png (287.54 KiB) Viewed 328 times

I have placed the spawners before 2.0.47, made recyclers to upgrade biter eggs, made the setup to craft legendary spawners and ordered the bots to upgrade the spawners when any legendary spawner is crafted by leaving upgrade orders on the spawners.

This is the setup for crafting the spawners. The circuit network is mainly doing two things:
1) Insert biter eggs only if the cryogenic plant has enough of the other non-spoilabe ingredients
2) By using the [Read recipe finished] signal and a memory cell, it controls the cryogenic plant to craft the exact number of spawners I needed

i.e. No spoilage would ever occur if power is always on
i.e. The whole thing was automated.

Screenshot 2025-05-24 161733.png (1.34 MiB) Viewed 328 times

The upgrade process is slow because legendary eggs don't appear often. It didn't finish before 2.0.47 was landed.

The update has ruined it. All the upgrade ghosts disappeared. Bots no longer upgrade them. And I figured it out only because a legendary spawner has spoiled in the provider chest.

Since captive spawners can only be upgraded manually, I have to add a speaker to send global alert whenever a legendary is crafted, and my character is now stuck on Nauvis to finish the job. It is no fun.

Here is the blueprint, with the speaker, if anyone is interested: pastebin

I can see that Rseading didn't close 636417. And the response in 670552 also stated that it was a side effect. Hopefully it is a sign that the devs are still working on the solution and I wish the solution is to bring back the ability of automating the upgrade (and placement) of Captive Biter Spawners.

As a side note, I don't really care if the spawners cannot be deconstructed by bots. Being non-deconstructible actually makes it funnier, and the correction process is still not too tedious as we can just fire artilleries to clear them, which can be done remotely.

[Stargateur]

but robot can still PLACE bitter spawn no ? and so then you just need to plan a "non legendary" bitter that will produce a "legendary" bitter spawn somewhere else and then delete old one.

[h.q.droid]

but robot can still PLACE bitter spawn no ? and so then you just need to plan a "non legendary" bitter that will produce a "legendary" bitter spawn somewhere else and then delete old one.

Just tested. Now you can manually upgrade from inventory, or place new biter spawner ghosts. But you can't place an upgraded version over an existing spawner and let bot do it.

[Mooncat]

but robot can still PLACE bitter spawn no ? and so then you just need to plan a "non legendary" bitter that will produce a "legendary" bitter spawn somewhere else and then delete old one.

THIS!

This is the answer I actually needed. I actually didn't think of placing spawners as ghosts on empty space because the lack of ability of shift-clicking on existing spawners made me think that it was not possible to shift-click at all. Also my factory is tight in space so it's a bit of a trouble to make another area for spawners. Not ideal, but it is still a solution for my problem. I will take it for now. Thank you!

(I still want them to be upgradeable by bots. Being able to shift-click on empty space but not on existing spawners to upgrade feels much weirder than being able to shift-click but not deconstructed by bots.)

(to be fair spawners are weird af)