Alright. You've got something solid here. I even have my own take on this concept that I threw into Claude (The free desktop version that took about 5 days) and spit out a Completely Vibe-Coded Abomination in the form of Pneumatic-Transport-Pipes by CapnSudz (Thats me). It's published and online for Factorio 2.1, if you want any separate takes on what you're going for.
ANYWAY, enough self shilling -- Time for some Meat and Potatoes.
You have an amazing mod, but It feels a little clunky to work with the user interfaces -- Especially Crafting Requests. My suggestion would be to cache the available recipes that a network -can- autocraft, and bring up only those in the menu, perhaps with a -"Click Once for single craft, Shift Click for 10"- kinda thing. Also, putting the AutoCrafting availability in the storage Terminal (Like where you pull items out of the network by hand) would make it SO much better. It would also be cool to recursively track how many of the smaller items can craft into the larger items so you can see how many of big ticket stuff you can actually make with available resources, like the handcrafting menu does.
The other thing I would recommend about that is that there is just Too much user interface. Keep it simple and straight forward, otherwise the user will have to learn your dictionary before interfacing with anything in the mod, and that scares people away. I would recommend putting all that in some kind of Debug Menu for the crazy people who want all that info ( ^.^ <- me )... now that I know how it works. When I first booted up your mod, I did not want all that Gui in my face! Too much!!
I have a few other suggestions too -- First, Autocrafting with a single machine attached is Really Really slow. It COULD insert another batch of items into the crafter before it finishes it's current craft, but doesn't. Idk how you handle that in code, but it feels a little annoying that it's not utilizing the machine to it's fullest (100% uptime for large batches). Second, Autocrafting doesn't work for Furnaces...? It should be relatively easy to set up for furnace-type crafting machines, just have it detect the last used recipe -- that's what I got my thing to do (then again, idk how it works bc AI did it, but I know it's possible at least). Third, it would be nice to have different Sort options for the Storage Terminal. Fourth, The Default Crafting Recipe selection feels... weird. It fills up fast, and is hard to search through. Some kind of search/sort would be nice. Finally, I get why, but the existence of the Pattern encoder just feels contrived to fit in with the ME/AE system from minecraft. I don't like it, and don't think you should need it.
Aaaaaanyway -- Great mod, good graphics, good coding, Keep it up!
