Factorio Forums

TL;DR

I want to recommend that space station auto request material for construction slots should be ignored

What?

The change is fairly simple (I think): in the auto request for materials slot for a space platform, if the request is zero, that item should not be blocked from supplying other space platforms.

Why?

If you use a space station supplying ships and you leave the "auto request missing construction materials" on, said station will not supply arriving ships any materials it used for it's own construction (even the remaining requests of it are zero). Thus you have to pay attention and toggle it on/off depending on the station needing any building done on itself or not.

While with the suggested behavior you can simply leave it on.

Bump, the current behaviour is awkward.

I came here to report the same issue. I thought this was a bug and was quite frustrated until I realized I had to disable ‘Auto request missing construction materials’.

This doesn’t make any sense to me, so I suspect it’s more of an oversight than a deliberate choice. I agree with you: if a space platform needs 0 of an item and another platform needs a number higher than 0, that first platform should send the required items to the other platform.