For weeks I've been telling myself, I wish there was a logistics request template thing I could do to swap between Space Shit and Ground Shit for the Space Exploration mod.

This is exactly what I was looking for, thank you for making it!

One minor thing is that the tooltip for what the buttons do is covered by the name of the blueprint - for awhile I was trying to figure out what the buttons did because the blueprint name I had was covering it.

Also, still not super clear on what the buttons do - I was trying to update a current blueprint with a new set of instructions, but none of the buttons seemed to do that. I guess I have to create a new blueprint every time I make a change?

Hello Locane,

I am glad that you have found the mod helpful. My main motivation for the mod was to be able to easily blueprint the requests layout for subsequent game starts - although I have been playing with Space Exploration a bit as well. Another mod that you might want to have a look at is called Auto Trash - it provides templateing of requests plus some extras. It is a bit non-intuitive, although once you get used to it, it is quite a useful mod.

When it comes down to tooltips being covered, I've noticed that as well, and I don't think there's much I can do about it, unfortunately. I might need to improve the instructions a bit and show some inline images of particular buttons to make it clearer. When it comes down to buttons shown, it is roughly like this:

• If you hold an empty (non-library) blueprint, an export button is shown.
• If you hold a valid template blueprint, various import buttons are shown: replace (arrow up) / append + replace (circled plus) / increment (plus) /decrement (minus).
• If you hold a blank (non-library) deconstruction planner, buttons related to clearing all requests and setting-up trash requests (min=max=0) are shown.

Some of the icons are perhaps unnecessary/too confusing, but we'll see how it goes. If it's hard to understand what the buttons do based on mod description, let me know what confused you the most. I still haven't restarted playing Factorio with these news mods (I want to implement a couple more QoL ones before strarting again), so probably don't have a good picture myself on what buttons are really useful or not (things kinda change once you start actively using the mod).

As for updating the blueprint, that has been left currently unimplemented somewhat on purpose - the main problem is really that modding API does not let you update blueprints from the game/player library - you can only modify blueprints that are stored in player's inventory. There is quite a bit of a thread about it on forums. To keep it somewhat consistent, I decided to simply not support the operation, although I think I should probably revisit this and implement the feature even if it's just for inventory-held blueprints (I know how much I hate having to retype the blueprint title and assign the icons again...).

Oh, and one reason why I opted to implement this mod as opposed to using Auto Trash because I wanted something that's a bit more intuitive, and closer to vanilla - it really does not implement any new functionality beyond making it slightly more convenient to work with personal logistics requests. Plus I like the idea of having a blueprint in the library that could be used even without the mod itself - if nothing else but for reference purposes (since it's all vanilla entities).

Hm... Ok, I may have a workaround for overlapping tooltip - I could add a newline into the button tooltip itself, making it slightly taller (and ugly), but ensuring it is always readable. I might try doing that at the expense of some weirdness in how it looks like.

Hey thank you for responding at all!

That sucks about the mod support under the covers - as an engineer in my Real Life, I've poked around at hacking on existing Factorio mods, but haven't sat down to take the time to actually set up a dev environment and crank on the thing. The thing I was trying to mod was the size and damage of the Anti-matter bomb in Krastorio2; when played with Rampant, it's severely under-powered for how much effort it takes to get to, and I wanted to make it look bigger.

Anyway - glad to hear you might have a workaround for the tooltip - I worked around it myself by changing the name of my blueprint from "Space Logistics Requests" to "S" 😂 and "Ground Logistics Requests" to "G".

To be honest, I didn't read the instructions beyond the first few lines confirming that this was 100% the mod I was looking for; I have a huge passion for UI / UX, and believe that if instructions are necessary it's either too complicated or unintuitive - obviously there are exceptions to that, but I feel like we can make some changes here, if that's something that interests you to hear about?

If it were me, I'd use the universal save icon (the 3.25" floppy disk) instead of the up arrow as a way to communicate about the button that transfers your current personal logistics requests to the blueprint. You're saving current settings, to "file". If anything it's going down, since the logistics window is above where the buttons appear.

Next, I'd remove the "save" button entirely for an already-set-not-blank blueprint entity held by the player, since we can't overwrite what is already there, correct?

Finally, I'd use the universal "folder" icon with an arrow out to represent loading from blueprint to logistics requests. Or just the word "load", or "set logistics" or "set requests" might even be the most clear.

I personally don't think I have much of a use for an addition or subtraction button? Not sure how that would be useful, but I am not the only person using the mod so I get having functionality for other use cases. 🙂

First of all, don't get discouraged even if I might sound a bit defensive on certain points :)

If it were me, I'd use the universal save icon (the 3.25" floppy disk) instead of the up arrow as a way to communicate about the button that transfers your current personal logistics requests to the blueprint. You're saving current settings, to "file". If anything it's going down, since the logistics window is above where the buttons appear.

Here is a bit of background on design choices for the icons:

• Provided icons must be somewhat readable in rather low resolutions - the icons are provided in 16x16 and 32x32 variants. This does make it hard to do more complex graphics in such limited space while still making it legible. Just take into account that is the size for entire icon, including the arrow.
• They denote the direction of operation. So arrow up (pointing into window) imports, arrow down exports.
• The icons denote import/export operations, not load/save. Slightly different semantics.
• Decision on using the arrows has been made to mimic two things - the Import String button of vanilla game, and the export/import buttons of Quickbar Templates mod. So think in terms of consistency with the rest of the game. In fact, if you look around the game, you will struggle to find the floppy/folder icons (which is, actually, pretty impressive when I think about it).
• My graphics drawing skill generally suck. So in this case I've mostly reused whatever is available under some liberal license, or that is part of the game. Ideally I would have liked to have the arrows angled and looking similar to what's been done with Import String button of vanilla game, but I gave up after a couple of tries to make an inverted version of that arrow.
• I have another templating-related mod for container filter blueprints, and another one in works for equipment grid blueprints, and I would like to keep the iconography thematically as similar as possible.

With that being said, if you can come up with concrete better icon designs that are released under MIT (or eventually based off of the vanilla game), and that can be somewhat easily reused for the other two mods I'm working on (I just replace the logistic bot icon with other things), pull requests are welcome :)

Heck, even if you are able to create me decent looking arrows that fit with game style and can also be fit into those small icons, that would be welcome. As I wrote - the idea was to make the arrows point into/out of the logistic bot icon.

Next, I'd remove the "save" button entirely for an already-set-not-blank blueprint entity held by the player, since we can't overwrite what is already there, correct?

Save button is not shown for an already-set-not-blank blueprint already. Maybe you have mixed-up the import button with the export one? I was pondering on perhaps making the button positions a bit more predictable/obvious to player by showing all the buttons in any valid mode, and simply having them greyed-out.

I personally don't think I have much of a use for an addition or subtraction button? Not sure how that would be useful, but I am not the only person using the mod so I get having functionality for other use cases.

The idea behind these two were to make it possible to easily add some items for some temporary building or maybe biter extermination, and then as easily remove them from existing configuration. But as I mentioned, some of these modes of import might get dropped to simplify things - I still have to play around with the mod extensively myself as well in order to get a better idea.

Ahh, thanks for the background that makes a lot more sense now. Honestly the UI in Factorio is pretty bad in general (in my opinion), so staying with the conventions from other aspects of the game makes sense from a consistency standpoint but personally something I would pioneer changing.

You're absolutely right about me mixing up the icons - they are REALLY similar 😅. I approach UI from a visual and kind of "naturalness" context - I feel like a lot of ADHD people don't read things and just try to go off of pictures and what feels intuitive or not. I've found a lot of success in going with my gut on what feels right or not in UI things, but that doesn't necessarily mean what I personally like is the most universal or best understood.

If you're open to it, I could try my hand at icon work, sure, why not? I might screw with it and see what I can come up with.

Can you help me understand the difference between set requests and import requests? I see in the description it says "adding new" and overwriting, but what new things is it adding? Item changes? Does importing a template not add entries where necessary if missing in the logistics grid? I just assumed it did, but maybe that's wrong too.

Ahh, thanks for the background that makes a lot more sense now. Honestly the UI in Factorio is pretty bad in general (in my opinion), so staying with the conventions from other aspects of the game makes sense from a consistency standpoint but personally something I would pioneer changing.

Hm... Interesting enough, I find the Factorio UI/UX to be working quite well within the game, although I must admit it probably is not the most intuitive thing coming from, say, usual desktop experience. But once you get into the flow, it's quite consistent (for the better or worse). There is a number of things I don't like, but a mod here and there has fixed it for me.

You're absolutely right about me mixing up the icons - they are REALLY similar 😅.

I actually thought it's an issue as well that the two icons are showing-up in same spot and are only very slightly different. Perhaps I could try having the import arrow show top-right instead (pointing downwards), similar to what quickbar templates does. Although it'd be hard to align the bot icon to remain in same spot (relative to button) in that case. One thing that could help would be if I'd be able to increase ratio of icon size to button perhaps, but not 100% how easy/possible that is.

If you're open to it, I could try my hand at icon work, sure, why not? I might screw with it and see what I can come up with.

I'm open at getting new icons, but I'd probably advise to not go overboard with it before asking for feedback - I'd hate it for someone to spend a lot of time on something that maybe won't get accepted. Just please pay attention to licensing, I try to ensure things are properly handled on that front :)

Can you help me understand the difference between set requests and import requests?

Import held template means that your current request config is cleared and replaced with the held blueprint.

Set requests using held template will not clear the existing request config. It will instead locate existing requests, set the min/max values to be same as the ones specified via blueprint, and append (without preserving layout of held blueprint) new requests at the very end.

The main use-case for append/set/increment/decrement is for players that want to have some form of modular template set-up. Instead of importing request config as a whole, you have one blueprint template for belts in early/mid/late game, one for inserters in early/mid/late game etc. But as I said - it may needlessly complicate things with all the options. Although, I think that some form of set requests mode could be useful for people that do not care much about the layouts.

Btw, if you haven't read the docs, don't forget to check out what happens if you hold blank deconstruction planner :)