Factorio Forums

When interacting with an assembler or other crafting machine, there is a "gear" icon that you have to click on to open the set recipe dialog and change the machine's recipe.

If the player has a item or a ghost in their hand, then they should be able to e.g. Shift+Click on the "gear" icon to set the machine's recipe directly. This would skip the set recipe dialog and set the recipe based on the hand-contents.

In general it may make sense to support super-force recipe-setting via Ctrl+Shift+Click without needing to click into the machine and interact with the "gear" icon since this icon only exists when a recipe is already set.

Examples:

When setting multiple machines to different qualities, the player could Alt+Scroll through qualities and then "force-set" recipes to avoid tedious interactions with the set recipe dialog.

The player would be able to, e.g. know what they want to craft from the Factoriopedia, and then use the Pipette Tool (Q) to select what they want and then "force-set" recipes based on the ghost in their hand. Especially with more-complex mods this would make it easier for the player to set recipes without needing to search through large set recipe dialogs.

Unless I misunderstood you, there currently is something similar already in the game: you can Shift+Right Click on an assembler with a recipe already set and then Shift+Left Click on any other assembler (including holding down and dragging across multiple assemblers) to copy over the recipe. This way you only need to go into the "gear menu" once for any set of recipes.


I agree with the Alt+Scroll idea for qualities though: I have tried a few mods to add that, and its a QoL game changer.

what if this item have multiple recipe ?

Stargateur wrote: Thu May 07, 2026 8:30 am what if this item have multiple recipe ?

I would expect this to do the same thing that "Set Recipe" does when using the circuit network.

This should also work for recipe signals (which are different from finished product signals). For example Pyanodons has many alternative recipes, but it also has a mod setting that adds new signals for every recipe.