Factorio Forums

TL;DR

n/a

What?

When a lab with "Set Research" enabled has no active condition it should allow and restore the manually selected research and queue to what it was before being overridden.

Why?

When using "set research" to research gleba science as it arrives the player has to set up a queue in the form of conditions to return to some main focus instead of being able to use the regular queue for when no condition is active. If "set research" allows manual researching while no condition is active and restores the previous manual queue, removing entries if they have been researched while overriden, this would allow using set research like a temporary interrupt for the manual queue without negatively impacting the other use case.
edit: If a manual queue was set before "set research" is enabled it stays intact until a condition becomes active at which point it is overridden. This would further make the proposal the more intuitive behaviour in my opinion. (That or making it so "set research" cancels everything when no condition is active ig)

I very much agree.
In my opinion, "set research" lab control should insert the specified tech at the front of the queue when there is a valid condition.
This needs some considerations as a result I believe:

• If the specified tech was previously manually added to the queue, it may need to be removed from the queue since it likely can't be in the research queue twice

• If the queue is "full" then the last tech should get bumped off, a little unfortunate, but I can't think of a better way personally. There may be a better way.

• Should the state change from a valid tech condition to no valid tech condition, then the previously specified tech should be removed from the queue, and the manually added techs (if there were any) will remain in the queue.

I wish you would just set the research conditions in the old and trusty research window. And could manually insert stuff, etc.
Having to go look where my labs are and which one I connected to the circuit network is very flow breaking, when you just had to press one key before.

You would still need to wire up the labs though in order to pass a signal. Personally I like the implementation of how to input conditions and tech. I just don't like that doing so precludes you from manually using the tech tree at all once you do.