Factorio Forums

TL;DR

The special deconstruction-planner-only signals ('Item on Ground', 'Entity Ghost', etc.), currently default to normal quality, and thus only affect things of normal quality. They should instead default to the 'Any' quality so that they affect everything.

What?

Deconstruction planners have a handful of special, virtual signals which, rather than specific entities, represent classes of items: 'Item on Ground', 'Entity Ghost', 'Tile Ghost', and 'Item Request Slot'. These signals can have quality, and, as of 2.0.66, will honour that quality setting by only affecting items of that quality.

Currently, these signals default to 'normal' quality. They should instead default to 'Any' quality.

Additionally, when these signals are set to 'normal' quality, they should explicitly display the one-grey-dot 'Normal' icon, rather than hiding it as normal-quality items normally do.

Why?

These signals defaulting to 'Normal' quality means they only affect items of normal quality. This is strongly counterintuitive, because these signals, rather than representing specific items, already represent whole classes of them; an 'Item on Ground' deconstruction planner will happily target everything from iron plates to ammo to unbuilt buildings, so it feels weird and arbitrary for it to ignore uncommon iron plates.

For example, I recently had an issue where too much stuff was delivered to a space platform, resulting in items spilling on the ground. These items were automatically marked for deconstruction, but the first thing I did was cancel that with a blank deconstruction planner and shift-click so that they wouldn't get picked up while I was sorting out the mess and making space in the hub. Once I had made space, I pulled out my trusty 'Item on Ground' deconstruction planner to clean them up - and nothing happened; it did not register the items as valid targets. Eventually I had to create a deconstruction planner set to blacklist and add every building my space platform used to it so that it would, by process of elimination, target only the spilled items.

The problem, of course, was that the spilled items were Epic steel plates, and my deconstruction planner used the normal-quality 'Item on Ground' signal, but it wasn't until I came here planning to report the issue as a bug and found this thread that I realized that. It had never even occurred to me that 'Item on Ground' signal could even have a quality, let alone that it could actually filter by it.

Now, I'm not arguing that 'Item on Ground' shouldn't filter by quality; while it never occurred to me, @Malikoth gave a good example of its utility in that thread. But having 'Item on Ground' apply only to normal-quality items by default is not what most people selecting that signal would expect or want. Having it default to the 'Any' quality would allow it to apply to all items on the ground, as one would expect, while still allowing players to explicitly set it to only affect normal-quality items if they actually need that behaviour.

Of course, that only affects new deconstruction planners. Many players will already have 'Item on Ground' or 'Ghost' deconstruction planners in their hotbars or libraries, which will have those signals at their old default of normal. Having these signals' icons explicitly display the one-grey-dot 'Normal' icon will help communicate that these signals have a quality in the first place, which will help cue players that they can and do filter by quality.