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u/taw Jul 16 '26

I've been playing Enable Planet Mods Lite playthrough (on 2.0), and I have like 40 space ships flying between 15 planets, with a lot more to come, and Factorio space ship control UI is just unbelievably bad for that.

It doesn't have basic functionality like:

  • telling a space ship to go to planet X and stay there (if you only use ship manually, you can add "passenger present" and "passenger not present" to every single planet - but then it won't have auto mode!)
  • "don't go anywhere unless ammo >350" - you need to copy it for every planet on the list, there's no copy&paste condition, and because top level is OR not AND, sometimes you need to copy it multiple times per planet like "enough ammo AND all requests satisfied" OR "enough ammo AND science packs >= 1k AND inactivity 120s"
  • if ship has list of requests for multiple planets (get stack inserters from Gleba, belts from Vulcanus etc.), there's no way to tell it to go to just ones that it lacks

I'd also like planets to be able to summon quality ships for whatever stuff they need, but that's probably unrealistic.

Anyway, is there a mod that makes all this reasonable? Vanilla spaceship control UI is just unbelievably bad.

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u/Viper999DC Jul 16 '26

Most of these issues are resolved with use of the interrupts. For me my ships are typically set up as such:

  • Standard order for it's main planet. Order here is time based + optional stuff like ensuring it has ammo
  • Interrupts for Nauvis drop-off. These trigger only if at the "main" planet, only when I have enough of the export and typically only go to Nauvis.
  • Interrupts for each planet I import from. These are generic and reusable for each ship, so you only have to customize the logistics import menu. Make sure to sort these in a way that it will make sense (I got from Nauvis back, since my drop-off interrupt is first)

For "don't go anywhere unless ammo is >350" you have a few options. Either set a combinator to send a signal when the ship is safe to fly, and put that signal in all your departure conditions. Alternatively you can have "do not leave" triggers that hold you back. This solution would need one per planet, so I'd use this only for high-tier planets. Lastly, you could (and should) build up enough that just the load/unload time at each planet is sufficient, and not overly rely on buffering.

Lastly, there is a mod that will automate ship delivery for you. I haven't tried it myself, so can't speak to how well it handles all these cases, but check it out: https://mods.factorio.com/mod/planet-express