Factorio Forums

TL;DR

Make it easier to manually send unrequested items from one space platform to another.

What

A simple button to manually send all unrequested items to another platform (or the planet).
You would click the button and see a dropdown menu for available receivers (the planet + any other ship in orbit with enough storage space).

The feature would only fire once per click; it would not be an ever-present automatic push like an active provider chest or the familiar "trash unrequested".

Context

The new inter-platform logistics make it possible to clean out a platform hub without sending the unwanted items down to the planet.
You do this by having another platform import the unwanted items (from Platforms).

This strongly promotes having a "storage platform" in orbit to provide excess building material for the next platform, which will save rocket parts and ease up rocket launch congestion.

Why

The problem is if you have many many unwanted items (e.g. you just finished building/redecorating a platform):

You have to hop back and forth between the two platforms and enter a unique request for potentially hundreds of items — every time having to click "import from Platforms" and move the slider all the way up.

This is really cumbersome for the player. I've done this perhaps 20 times in my current run and i keep thinking "there has to be a better way" or "should I just give up trying to save rockets at this point?".

Also

You could take this one step further and have the button open a gui for selecting one specific item and a slider for how many units you want to send.
But that might be overkill?

I am currently using a combination of combinators to cycle through each item in the game (with local exceptions) and request each one of them for a couple of ticks on the platform where everything should converge.

I hate this solution and would LOVE something like this.

The main reason why my current solution is bad is because I cannot differentiate between request from platforms/planet/all when setting requests on platform hubs.

This would be much less necessary if there was an easier way to specify where circuit requests are supposed to come from, i.e. by being able to hook up cargo bays to the circuit network and allowing more customization.

But I still think this is a very valid request.

+1