How is the spidertron remote supposed to work? Every time I click the shortcut, it creates a new spidertron remote that must then be paired with a spidertron. No matter how many times I pair the remote with my spidertron, every click of the shortcut requires the new remote to be paired again. This is far less useful than having an already bound spidertron remote on shortcut.

Am I doing something wrong or is this working as intended?

This is working as intended. If you don’t like it you can disable the Spidertron shortcut in the startup settings. (You can also select if Spidertron remotes can be placed inside your inventory or will just vanish if you press Q)

It works this way for several reasons: Firstly I don’t know how to connect a Spidertron remote automatically to a Spidertron. Secondly I couldn’t even find a way how to differentiate between connected and unconnected remotes or tell which Spidertron a remote is connected to. And finally, even if I knew how to do all of this there is the issue that you can have multiple Spidertrons. I can’t make a shortcut for every Spidertron since they need to be created when the game is started. So which Spidertron should the remote from the shortcut be connected to? The one closest to you, the one farthest away, the one you are riding?

I am open to hear your opinion!

Just a few thoughts: you can connect a remote to a spidertron by setting the remote's connected_entity: https://lua-api.factorio.com/latest/LuaItemStack.html#LuaItemStack.connected_entity.

Of course knowing which spidertron to connect could be tricky. You could listen for on_player_configured_spider_remote, and save the most recently connected spidertron, and then when the player uses the shortcut you could immediately connect that spidertron. Ideally you would only save the information if the player was using the remote from the shortcut, but I don't think that it is possible to tell.

Thanks for the info! This is really helpful. I will consider changing this. It also requires a way to reassign a spidertron remote. But this should be possible with connected_entity as well.

I finally got around working on this. This is the solution I came up with:

• If you click the shortcut you always get an empty spidertron remote and all empty spidertron remotes you got in your inventory will get deleted.
• If you assign a spidertron remote all spidertron remotes in your inventory that are either assigned to the same spidertron or are empty will get deleted.

Feedback welcome :)

Edit: I know this doesn't really solve the issue the OP was having. Maybe I'll work on an option to automatically assign the spidertron remote some time later.