Planner buttons unavailable due to “construction robotics” technology requirement

[Hawk777]

Describe the issue When I open the menu of which buttons to show in the little box to the right of the inventory quick bars, Undo, Copy, Cut, Paste, Import string, Blueprint, Blueprint book, Deconstruction planner, and Upgrade planner are all greyed out and unselectable. If I hover over one of them, a tooltip says “This shortcut requires the Construction robotics technology.” I initially thought that maybe I needed more research, but there is no technology of that name, and I just recently obtained Industrial Roboports, so I figure it should be available by now.

I can use the keyboard shortcuts to create these planners, so this is not a huge problem, but it is a bit confusing and misleading.

Factorio version, IR version Factorio: 1.1.87 IR initially: 3.0.18 IR upgraded today and problem still appears: 3.1.4

Other mods installed

• Black rubber belts 1.0.3
• Factorio library 0.12.9
• Larger lamps 1.5.1
• Recipe book 3.5.5
• Train control signals 1.0.6

[Deadlock989]

It shouldn't be possible to get into this state. The "Construction robotics" tech is not available in IR3, but the unlock state for these buttons is per player (not per game), so if you have unlocked them in any vanilla game or any other mod, they should also be unlocked in IR3. They are also automatically unlocked for every player that joins an IR3 game. I'm also surprised that you are apparently able to use these functions with the keyboard shortcuts but not the shortcut buttons - as far as I know, that also shouldn't be possible.

I can't advise further without reproduction steps or more context for your set-up. But this is unlikely to be a bug in IR3 as this bit of code hasn't changed for 3 years and no-one else has ever reported issues like this.

[Deadlock989]

Edited to add: by simply creating a new game, the shortcuts should be unlocked for you. Does that happen?

Edited again to add: never mind - there is an indeed an issue with this very old code, but it's so rare for a player to have never unlocked the shortcuts already that it's never been encountered.

[Deadlock989]

In future versions of IR3, these planner-related shortcuts will simply have their unlocking technology requirement stripped from the prototypes, so they will always be unlocked as long as IR3 is installed. For players who never played vanilla long enough to unlock them (permanently across all games) by researching the unlocking techs, or who have reinstalled the game from scratch, or who have deleted their player-data.json for whatever reason, I'm not sure if the unlock is permanent or if it will revert once IR3 is disabled. There is no other way I can think of to handle this, given that:

• They can't be soft-unlocked by script because it turns out that only "custom" shortcuts (i.e. those with a Lua action) can have their unlock state changed by script, and these shortcuts are not that type
• They can't have the unlocking tech changed to an IR3 tech because there are multiple unconnected techs that need them to be unlocked and the prototype can only specify a singular unlocking tech

It's a weird set-up to be honest - I don't really get why they are locked at all, or why unlocking them is permanent across all games for that installation of Factorio, or why the unlocking trigger isn't a technology effect rather than a property of the shortcut itself, or why the keyboard shortcuts are completely unaffected by all of these shenanigans, but that's all moot.

[Hawk777]

You’re right that, in effect, I haven’t played enough vanilla to unlock those buttons. I use a separate mutable state directory for each modpack so that I don’t have to go mucking around turning mods on and off each time I load a save file; I just start Factorio from a separate shortcut for each modpack instead. Thus, within my IR3 install directory, I haven’t played any vanilla. So that explains it.