Recognized by Council Limit factory production

[aceface]

The main purpose of this suggestion: To eliminate the tedious part of ship building of turning off / on factories to manage them to not overflow and use up all your ores at the same time get what you need from them, which takes up so so so so SO much time.

This is a very important suggestion that if implemented would make people rely a lot more on factories for producing their ships.

The suggestion is basically one thing: a simple limit to set on factory production. A value that you input into a factory that when there are this many of the products in the factory inventory, it will stop producing, and that when this many products is lowered, it will attempt to replace them by making more products until it has got the desired limit.

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Example: My frigate requires 10000 shield caps. I hook up my adv factory into the shipyard, and set the limit to 10000. Now, when I mine stuff, I place the ores in my factory, leave the shield capacitor factory on without worrying of it sucking up all my ore, since it will stop producing when it has 10000 shield caps. When I want to produce my frigate I turn on the shipyard, and it produces the ship.

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[nightwalker_007]

I'd like to see this too. It would be handy esp. when a factory is hooked up to a ton of factory enhancers... Currently I'll use multiple factories to produce 1, 10, 100, xxx blocks. With this I won't need as many, and can attach a factory to storage, let it run, and not worry about checking up on it again for some time.

 

[aceface]

I'd like to see this too. It would be handy esp. when a factory is hooked up to a ton of factory enhancers... Currently I'll use multiple factories to produce 1, 10, 100, xxx blocks. With this I won't need as many, and can attach a factory to storage, let it run, and not worry about checking up on it again for some time.

I mean seriously it would be so awesome.

 

[whooplaah]

I think there is an upcoming feature where there will be stack limits to blocks. I read about it a loooong time ago, so I'm not sure where it is in the developer's priorities. At that point factories will have a limit based upon inventory space.

I would like to see this feature. It would be great. HOWEVER, I think that it might be better if implemented in a different way.

If factories could be attached to a new Cargo Block, then we could set the min/max capacity of factories using logic. I have a factory attached to 9 Factory Enhancers and 9 Cargo Blocks. It then produces 10 blocks per tick until it has made 1,000 blocks (100 default + 100 per cargo block). But then I can use logic to turn 5 Cargo Blocks off, and the factory now stops at 500 blocks produced.

The same block could be used for pulling items into chests, and multiple factories/chests can use the same set of Cargo Blocks making controlling the limits for groups of factories even easier. I can just push one button to turn on/off Cargo Blocks rather than having to go to each individual factory and changing their limits through GUI.

This would be much more user friendly, I think. Another bonus is that this approach could still be useful after a stack-limits are introduced (with each Cargo Block expanding a factory/chest's inventory space).

 

[Andir]

I'm with whooplah on this. There definitely needs to be cargo system (and ship to ship cargo transfer) work and I think putting in a (albeit simple) bandage to the problem could be detrimental (IE: people will use it, learn it and get upset if/when it was removed for a different system.)

I think overall there are a few good recommendations floating around and some kind of ratio based cargo space is high on my list (to make cargo ships a thing ... come on the trade guild should be ferrying large ships that get attacked by pirates!) and I'd rather have an upcoming update include a "cargo system" overhaul of sorts to facilitate these and other concerns. (IE: factories, mining, processing stations, piracy priority [leaving behind lower value goods to be picked up by others...], etc.) I really like the ideas presented around designating cargo space that is populated by tiles as goods are collected and is a visual representation of your capacity at any given time. Storage blocks themselves could be interfaces to these cargo spaces like computers are to weapons/effects.

 

[spunkiethefirst]

Have the factories maintain a "job list":
-Individual jobs can be entered into the factory and set for "one off"(which builds only the amount entered), or "maintain" (which keeps the amount entered in its inventory).
-Linked shipyards will automatically provide job lists to the factory when a ship build order is entered.
-If resources are lacking for a particular job it goes into delayed status and the next job is worked on.
-If a shop is linked to the factory the job can be set to "maintain shop" (the amount is kept in the factory but shop can access it for sales).