Factorio Forums

TLDR: Upgrade planner option to "Only upgrade items not already marked for upgrade"

I've made upgrade planners for modules that follow the upgrade chain up for productivity/speed/efficiency/quality according to actual numbers (3x tiers x 5x qualities, 15 levels); BUT, if you, say drag this over your lab setup and *don't* yet have enough of each to upgrade your entire setup, you end up with mixed upgraded and not-upgraded.

When you then want to upgrade to the next tier, it's a building-by-building hunt for which is updated, and which is not.

If we simply had a toggle for "only upgrade items not already marked for upgrade", one could simply drag the upgrader over the setup multiple times as more modules are created!

That's probably my most annoying manual task currently, and this extends into late pre-megabase territory, as L3 Q5 productivity and speed modules take a while to mass produce.

- qzjul

qzjul wrote: Thu Sep 10, 2026 7:26 pm When you then want to upgrade to the next tier, it's a building-by-building hunt for which is updated, and which is not.

So, in this case... what exactly is it that you want to happen?

Let's say that you have uncommon prod module 1s in a bunch of machines. And you upgrade them to rare prod 1s. But you don't have enough. So half of them become rare prod 1s and the other half become "to be rare prod 1s but still uncommon prod 1s."

Now, you want to upgrade them to epic prod 1s. So you wipe your upgrade planner over them.

The way it works now is that they become either "epic prod 1s" or "to be epic prod 1s but still currently uncommon prod 1s."

Do you want them to be either "epic prod 1s" or "to be rare prod 1s but still uncommon prod 1s"? That is, it should just leave them alone forever? They should just stay rare, no matter what, even though you clearly wanted them to be epic?

I don't know, it just seems weird that you want an upgrade planer to not upgrade the things it says to upgrade. I could understand having it retain the entire chain of upgrades. That is, "to be rare prod 1s then to be epic prod 1s, but right now still uncommon prod 1s." But ignoring the upgrade entirely doesn't really make sense.

Especially if you just increase production of epic prod 1s or whatever.

I hear you with it being slightly weird perhaps, and I like your "retain the chain" idea better than what I proposed -- however I would assume building a chain of things would be more complicated than simply ignoring changes.

In your example, what I want (after the half upgrade from uncommon -> rare prod 1s) is for the half that are marked to upgrade to rare stay as marked to be rare, yes, and the half that are rare to be marked for upgrade to epic. My assumption is that generally as you upgrade things they are generally *more* scarce.

Thus when you come back some time later, and once again swipe the same upgrade print, the say additional 1/4 that filled in from uncommon -> rare will mark for epic, and say the 1/8th that will have filled in with epic *will have filled in some of the rares* as they were replaced.

Sure, in an ideal world I'd just save the full upgrade chain on my labs so it automatically upgrades to something with better stats all the way from normal prod1 to legendary prod 3, but that seems like an unlikely implementation.