Factorio Forums

Early game, I often sit there counting out units of Coal to add to my Burner Inserters. One, two, three, four, five.

I have to do that, when Coal is scarce, because the game interface gives me limited options. I can take the while stack, or half the stack, and when I'm holding the stack (so that the stack becomes my cursor) I can deposit one item from the stack or the entire stack.

There's really a need for an in-between solution, between "take one" and "take half of stack": Any one of "take 5", "take 7", "take 8", "take 10" or "take 1/7 of whatever max stack size is for this type of item". I'm in favour of the later. Since for me it's happening with Coal, early game, 1/7 of max stack size would round to 7 units of Coal, with one click, which would suit me just fine. But really, any of the ones I've mentioned would be fine, except "take 10" which I think it a bit too large for the early game Coal situation. "Take 8" haas a nice "pseudo-binary" feel to it, and is simpler than anything that varies based on the max stack size of the type of item you're handling.

I propose Left Alt+LMB or Ctrl+LMB to achieve this. I don't think those are in use already.

Factorio is a game that's obsessed with automation and efficiency, with saving the player from drugery and boring repetetive work. But doling out my scarce lumps of Coal, early game, is a LOT more work than it ought to be, and if the game gets a "take few" mouse click option, the early game would be a lot sweeter and smoother, sparing me the mindnumbingly boring clickclickclickclickclickclickclickclickclickclick to fuel my early machines.

Use your toolbelt to store a half stack and pick up half again, repeat as needed.

I add this, cause I don't like to make complicated stack shuffling to get just some. I would prefer 5 as "few".

pick up stack
right click slot to insert one item
repeat last step as needed

Clickclickclickclickclickclickclick...

I'm not a machine.

I think a good solution would be the same behavior as used for keyboards. Define an initial delay and a repeat-rate and just keep the mouse button pressed till you have enough items.

Or pressing the mouse and then move it and it counts up, dependend on that movement, like scrolling.

Here's an idea: use the scroll wheel. Scroll up to dump an item into the thing you're mousing over, scroll down to pick up an item of the type you are holding.

Yea, would work for many. Scrolling like so is on Mac ... Difficult. And it is used for zooming the map.

ssilk wrote:Yea, would work for many. Scrolling like so is on Mac ... Difficult. And it is used for zooming the map.

My mouse has a semi-faulty scroll wheel. It kinda works, but is useless for precision things. Then again, the whole "add few" thing is meant to be in-between the option of "add 1" and "add all". Precision isn't needed.

But still, the idea is to save time, and increase player efficiency, and reduce player frustration, and with my particular faulty scroll wheel, that might not be the result.

In general, I think some sort of keypress combined with mous button, such as Left Alt or Control or Shift, whichever one of those isn't already used, is the optimal implemetation of the "add/take few" idea.