Factorio Forums

TL;DR

Allow players to automatically sync logistic groups with platforms

What?

I don't know how many people know about this, but currently blueprints can be exported as logistic groups:
1. Copy the platform (or something else) 2. Go to a space hub (or constant combinator) 3. And paste into "add section" That is a cool UX feature, and together with platform-to-platform transfers makes it easy to have a ship collect materials for another ship from all planets.
So I designed a prometheum collector, blueprinted it and sent out my other ship to collect items. The ship was built, loaded with eggs and sent off to do it's job.

It got damaged, tweaked, damaged again, tweaked. After every tweak I had to copy/paste the blueprint, so after several times I figured this could be automated.

The idea:
In some way, allow us to create a logistic group that's synchronized with entities from a given surface.
For example, I'm building a ship. That ship starts as a space hub and some foundations. In the space hub UI, I click "Export as logistic group", name it and that creates a logistic group with that name. If I built a belt ghost on that ship, that belt ghost gets added to the logistic group. If I remove a foundation tile, that tile is removed from the logistic group.

Possible features:
Filters for construction requests/built entities. It would make it possible to request only entities that are missing from the platform.
Exporting planet surfaces as logistic groups. It was mentioned in https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-428 that having roboports report construction requests is not feasible, I think this might be a solution that won't tank performance. To have a UI to attach to and to not break immersion by having some magic full planet scanner, that feature could be tied to radar coverage (multiple radars/roboports that cover the same area and export to the same group would have to deduplicate the entities, but I believe the radar coverage already is registration-based and that should help )

Why?

Designing ships is insanely fun. But going through planets to see which planet has what items, then going through UIs of ships to add appropriate requests is very immersion breaking and I would gladly see some tools to automate it away.