Factorio Forums

TL;DR

Both blueprints and upgrade planner should have a option for bots to place the highest quality building available.

What?

Upgrade planner could have an option to set a desirable quality for a building to have eventually, and it would be upgraded to any better quality until the desired one is placed.
Blueprints could have a checkbox to allow placing lower quality buildings, and those would be automatically marked for upgrade.
This would also apply to modules.

Why?

Using quality at scale gets bothersome when adjusting with limited supply of quality buildings, making you drop it altogether or make you wait to unlock legendary quality and base everything around it.

Instead of this We get this This solution would make the whole quality system less opt-in and smoothen copying base blocks that benefit from it.
Whole idea came to me when producing quality quality modules, I kept returning to them to swap the currently equipped modules to freshly crafted new higher quality ones.

+1, this'll fix two separate issues with quality:

Right now, starting quality grind after unlocking legendary is a bit of a pain, as you need quality quality modules, and constantly upgrading modules to the next available quality is a bit of a manual chore.

But, additionally, people often go directly to legendary, because managing intermediate qualities is a pain. If you could setup hands-free upgrades for your whole base, it makes sense to start with quality much earlier.

For upgrade planner, I think we want stepped upgrade logic: if you want to upgrade assembler from common to legendary, but only rare is available now, it is upgraded to rare, but there's still a task left to further upgrade it to epic or legendary, once those become available. And, ideally, there should be priorities here: if I set one assembler to target legendary, and another to target epic, the legendary should take precedence.

+1!!!!!!!!!!!!!!