Color Coded Orders & Builds

[genboom]

@Drotten

Buildings always choose to craft the items, not to maintain them (your mock shows the items as being maintained, which is why I brought up this point).

good point.

@Drotten

When adding new items to be crafted (whether it’s done by the player or when starting a build), the item to be crafted is always added to the bottom of the crafting order queue.

right. the idea is to further merge items so that the list is not so long for those single craft items. the maintain item should definitely remain separate.

@Drotten

Meaning that, if a crafter should craft 3 of item A and 10 of item B (in that order), and then, when starting a build, it is required that the crafter will craft 10 more of item A, these will be crafted after 10 items of B has been made.

If you want to have something similar to your mock, then you either have to change the order in which the items will be crafted (so that the crafter will make all items of A before continuing with B, as it will be shown on the order queue), or make it more clear to the player that item A will have 3 crafted now, and then 10 more after all B’s have been crafted.

as far as crafting order goes, yeah I can see it being a problem when you craft 3 of an item while there are 5 more of that item requested in another build, but those first 3 were taken and installed into the wrong building so the order for that building would be pointless if you went from one set of building orders to another, rather than just ordering the items like vanilla does 1 item type at a time in the queue list. in other words, the order that the single item type is crafted in is not important. what is important is tracking if the building has need of that item in the queue anymore or not and updating it accordingly to ensure that the color group for each build is active in the queue while it is still requesting the item. now to do that means the items that have just been crafted need to be assigned to a build immediately. if there is an item available in storage then the crafter would need to subtract the number of unassigned items in storage and wait to see if they will be used or not, and if the number of items in storage is lower than the required number, then it will craft what is needed to fill the build order. assigning items that have just been crafted to a build makes sense for items that are not maintained, but causes problems for items you are building just for trade.

it may be simpler to introduce a new ui element that is specifically for choosing what you intend to do with the item you are crafting so that the path for the items is much more linear. this way you can choose whether the item will be used in a build, be maintained, go to storage, or be used in trade.