Changelog

Version: 1.2.0
Date: 2026-09-09
  Changes:
    - Holding ammo in hand pauses refills of the players empty ammo slots so you can remove your guns.
      Refills resume after you put the ammo away and the delay expires. Occupied ammo slots keep topping
      up normally. This feature enables easier removal of guns so you can travel on the space ship.
  Features:
    - Added a per-player ammo refill delay setting, defaulting to 10 seconds.

Version: 1.1.4
Date: 2026-08-18
  Graphics:
    - Auto-Loader chest has its own circuit connector image now.

Version: 1.1.3
Date: 2026-08-17
  Graphics:
    - The mod portal thumbnail is now the Auto-Loader chest icon.

Version: 1.1.2
Date: 2026-08-17
  Bugfixes:
    - Fixed a startup crash when a mod such as AAI Containers & Warehouses reskins the steel chest with a layered icon.
  Graphics:
    - The Auto-Loader chest now has its own artwork: a blue-steel supply crate with a hazard-striped loading intake on the lid and twin status lamps on the front.
  Info:
    - Thanks to Schaeberlej for reporting the issue!

Version: 1.1.1
Date: 2026-08-06
  Bugfixes:
    - Fixed character ammo refills treating the whole ammo bar as one shared ammo pool. Picking up a stack of ammo no longer causes the refill to land in the wrong slot.
    - Ammo slots whose gun slot is empty are no longer filled.

Version: 1.1.0
Date: 2026-07-30
  Features:
    - Character ammo refills now respect personal logistic requests. Once a force unlocks logistic requests, gun slots are only topped up with ammo types the player is actively requesting - remove or zero the request (or pause personal logistics) and refilling stops, so you can unload your ammo and board a space platform without it being instantly replaced.
    - Before logistic requests are unlocked, characters are filled as before, so the chest still supplies players in the early game.

Version: 1.0.0
Date: 2026-07-19
  Info:
    - First public release. The Auto-Loader chest pools one shared inventory per surface and automatically keeps turrets and burner-powered machines topped up with ammunition and fuel.
    - The 0.x entries below are development history and were never publicly released. They are kept as a record of how the mod was designed.
  Changes:
    - Improved labeling, naming, and layout of settings
    - The chest cost tiers are Easy, Medium, Hard, and Extra hard, defaulting to Medium: 1 steel chest and 3 electronic circuits.

Version: 0.16.0
Date: 2026-07-19
  Features:
    - Added a startup setting to choose the chest recipe cost: Inexpensive (1 iron plate), Default (steel chest + electronic circuits), Expensive (adds advanced circuits), or Very expensive (adds processing units).
    - Added an inventory compression startup setting: the stack size multiplier for chest inventory slots (1-100000, default 10).

Version: 0.15.1
Date: 2026-07-03
  Info:
    - Updated for Factorio 2.1.

Version: 0.15.0
Date: 2026-06-08
  Features:
    - Added a startup setting for the chest slot count (1-1000, default 48).
  Changes:
    - Raised the maximum for the entities-per-tick setting to 10000 for very large bases.

Version: 0.14.1
Date: 2026-06-01
  Optimizations:
    - Simplified the fillable entity registry to use swap-and-pop removal, so the sweep no longer needs a separate compaction pass.

Version: 0.14.0
Date: 2026-06-01
  Features:
    - Rebuilt automatic filling on top of the supply chest: a registry of fillable entities and a bounded round-robin sweep that pulls from the shared per-surface inventory into turrets and burners.
    - Added the runtime setting "entities per tick" to control how much work the sweep does each tick.
  Changes:
    - Fuel is topped up to a fixed target instead of filling every consumer to the brim, so one locomotive can no longer drain the surface supply.

Version: 0.13.0
Date: 2026-05-31
  Major Features:
    - Reset the mod to its supply foundation. The chest is now a plain linked container that pools one shared inventory per surface, keyed by surface index, and is craftable from the start with no technology gate.
  Changes:
    - The chest is now based on the vanilla linked chest.
    - Removed the fill loop, the virtual storage ledger, the circuit signal combinator, the priority GUI, and all mod settings. These were rebuilt on a cleaner foundation in later releases.
    - Existing saves keep the pooled supply chest but lose all automatic filling behavior and settings.

Version: 0.12.0
Date: 2026-05-30
  Changes:
    - Renamed the mod from "AmmoLoader+=1" to "Auto-Loader". A migration rehashes each surface's shared pool so pooled contents are not orphaned by the rename.
    - Fuel is now inserted only into the first slot of locomotive and vehicle fuel inventories, leaving the remaining slots for manual management.
  Gui:
    - Extracted the priority GUI into its own module.
    - Switched the reorder buttons to standard Factorio arrow sprites.
    - Strategy tooltips now name the item category they apply to.

Version: 0.11.0
Date: 2026-05-01
  Bugfixes:
    - Fixed the hidden constant combinator failing to wire itself to the chest. Circuit output now works reliably.
  Gui:
    - Added "move to top" and "move to bottom" buttons to the priority list.

Version: 0.10.1
Date: 2026-04-30
  Optimizations:
    - Circuit signals are now recomputed only when a surface's stored contents change, instead of rescanning every surface on a timer. Idle surfaces cost nothing.

Version: 0.10.0
Date: 2026-04-30
  Circuit Network:
    - Auto-loader chests now emit one circuit signal per item and quality pair held in storage, for fuel and ammunition. Signals are shared across all chests on a surface and isolated between surfaces.

Version: 0.9.1
Date: 2026-04-30
  Bugfixes:
    - The priority GUI no longer jumps back to the top when it refreshes.

Version: 0.9.0
Date: 2026-04-30
  Gui:
    - Added tabs to switch between the fuel and ammunition priority lists, remembered per player.
    - Replaced the strategy dropdowns with compact cycling buttons showing an indicator such as "Q down", with explanatory tooltips.
    - Clicking an item slot now takes a stack of the highest available quality into the cursor.

Version: 0.8.0
Date: 2026-04-30
  Major Features:
    - Replaced slot-filter priorities with a priority GUI that opens beside the chest. Items are swept out of the chest into a per-surface store and shown as an ordered list with reorder controls.
    - Added a per-item quality strategy: highest or lowest quality first, or highest or lowest count first, with runtime settings for the defaults applied to newly seen fuel and ammunition.
  Optimizations:
    - Reworked the tick loop around a per-surface inventory snapshot, bulk content reads, cached quality strings, and a deferred commit phase, cutting the per-consumer cost in bases with many consumers.
    - Entity lifecycle handling now tracks unit numbers directly and shares one metadata record across registration, filling, and cleanup.
    - Fuel and ammunition classification moved to static sets built at startup, removing per-tick prototype lookups.
  Changes:
    - Removed per-item fill overrides in favor of one uniform maximum, with stack size limiting low-stack items naturally.
    - Removed fair-share distribution. Every consumer is filled to the same maximum regardless of how many others are waiting.

Version: 0.7.0
Date: 2026-04-30
  Features:
    - Consumption now draws from earlier chest slots first, so slot filters set the priority order. Put uranium rounds in slot 1 and piercing rounds in slot 2 and turrets prefer uranium while it lasts.

Version: 0.6.0
Date: 2026-04-30
  Features:
    - Added fair-share distribution: when supply is scarce, per-fill amounts are capped by the number of waiting consumers so no single turret hoards the pool.
    - Newly placed consumers are filled immediately instead of waiting for their turn in the sweep.

Version: 0.5.0
Date: 2026-04-30
  Features:
    - Recipe cost and technology unlock are configurable again through the "cost" and "availability" startup settings. The default recipe is a steel chest, 3 electronic circuits, and 1 advanced circuit, unlocked with construction robotics.
  Optimizations:
    - Cached the shared chest per surface for constant-time inventory access in the hot path.
  Changes:
    - Removed the old standalone chest prototype and its migration now that only the linked chest remains.

Version: 0.4.0
Date: 2026-04-30
  Major Features:
    - The chest is now a linked container that shares one inventory across every auto-loader chest on the same surface, grouped by a deterministic per-surface link. Filling dropped from checking every chest against every consumer to a single pass, a large performance win in bases with many chests.
  Changes:
    - Existing chests are converted automatically on load and their contents merged into the shared surface pool.
    - Removed the /al-inspect and /al-status debug commands, which no longer applied to the shared inventory model.
    - Removed the refill trigger setting. Consumers below the maximum fill are now topped up unconditionally.

Version: 0.3.1
Date: 2026-04-30
  Optimizations:
    - Consumer removal is now constant time via swap-and-pop instead of compacting the whole queue.

Version: 0.3.0
Date: 2026-04-30
  Features:
    - Added the /al-inspect and /al-status commands for inventory dumps, dry-run fill traces, and system statistics.
    - The last fill tick is now tracked per consumer to help diagnose entities that are not being served.

Version: 0.2.1
Date: 2026-04-29
  Bugfixes:
    - Fixed the rescan looping forever when no surface held any entities, and guaranteed forward progress on both rescanning and filling.

Version: 0.2.0
Date: 2026-04-29
  Changes:
    - Replaced the hardcoded list of supported entity types with a periodic rescan, so consumers are picked up even when they appear without a build event, such as from scripts or editor pasting. Rescanning and filling split a shared work budget to keep the cost bounded.

Version: 0.1.0
Date: 2026-04-28
  Major Features:
    - Adds the auto-loader chest, which automatically distributes ammunition and fuel to turrets, vehicles, locomotives, and burner-powered machines on the same surface. Chests aggregate their contents per surface and serve consumers round-robin on a configurable batch size and tick interval.
  Features:
    - Added the "maximum fill" setting, capping how much of an item is inserted per inventory.
    - Turrets with an automated ammunition count in their prototype use that value as their cap instead of the global default.
  Changes:
    - The chest is based on the steel chest for better mod compatibility.