Taleden's Inventory Manager

LATEST VERSION:

v1.6.4 (2017-04-03) See the "Change Notes" tab on the Workshop page for details.

DONATIONS

TIM is and always will be free; donations are not required, but if you like the script and would like to support my development of this and other tools, feel free to contribute:

OVERVIEW

TIM is an in-game script which can help to automate the management of your inventory and industry. It can sort items into various containers according to your prioritized preferences, make sure your Refineries are always focused on the Ore you need refined most urgently, and manage your Assemblers to keep a balanced supply of Components on hand at all times.

TIM combines and expands on the functionality of three main inspirations: the Automated Inventory Sorting mod and the Crafting Components Quotas and Refinery Manager scripts. TIM offers all of their basic features and more:

• Sort items into containers with priorities and target quantities just like AIS, but as an in-game script instead of a separate mod, and also with proportional allocation: if there aren't enough Uranium Ingots (for example) to meet every Reactor's target, they'll each get the same percentage of their target instead of allowing one to take more than its share and starve the others.

• Manage Refinery queues just like RM, but also with smart prioritization: the Ore whose Ingot is most under-quota will always be refined first, possibly by several refineries, to ensure you're never starved for one material while all your Refineries are blindly producing something else.

• Manage Assembler queues just like CCQ, but without the need for a dedicated Assembler per item and also with flexible, adaptive quotas: in addition to the flat minimum quantity, each item can also have a target percentage of items of that type; this allows the effective quotas to grow as you amass more total items without having to edit your quotas all the time. Plus, all of your blocks' item sorting requests (such as Reactors wanting Uranium, weapons wanting ammo, etc) count as implicit quotas, so if you build more Reactors and set their fuel requests, that will automatically cause your Refineries to prioritize Uranium as needed to keep all your Reactors fueled.

• Display summaries of your inventory on text Panels just like AIS and many LCD scripts, but also with knowledge of all the other parts of the unified system: progress bars are based on the item's "effective quota" which is the highest of its minimum, percentage and implicit quotas, and there's a column to show how many Refineries or Assemblers are currently assigned to that item.

• Configure everything with tags in block names, but also with greater convenience and compatibility: you can use abbreviations for any item type (as long as they're un-ambiguous), you can have TIM re-write your tags in standard format to help make clear which rules have been understood correctly and which need to be corrected, and you can use a unique prefix to identify the tags TIM should parse, to avoid conflicting with any other mods that also require tags in block names.

INSTALLATION

Simply load the script into a Programmable Block, set it to run every few seconds, and away you go! If you're not sure how to do that, follow these steps:

• Build a Programmable Block and a Timer Block and make sure they're powered and owned by you.

• Open the Terminal, select the Programmable Block and click "Edit" to open the Code Editor.

• Click "Browse Workshop", select "Taleden's Inventory Manager", and click "OK". You can also just copy the entire script onto your clipboard and paste it into the Code Editor.

• Click "Check code" which should result in "Compilation successful."

• Click "Remember & Exit".

• On the Timer Block, click "Setup actions", drag the Programmable Block to the first slot and choose "Run with default argument". Then drag the Timer Block to the second slot and choose "Start".

• Set the Timer Block's Delay slider to a modest value (I use 5 seconds).

• Click "Start".

FOR USERS OF THE "Automated Inventory Sorting" MOD

If you're currently using the Automated Inventory Sorting mod, you probably already have dozens of tags set up on all your containers. To give TIM a trial run without having to change any of those tags, simply put "norewrite prefix=" (without the quotes) in the Argument field of the Programmable Block. This will disable TIM's tag prefix so that it recognizes your existing AIS tags (i.e. "[Ingot]" instead of "[TIM Ingot]"), and it will disable TIM's tag rewriting feature so that your tags will be left as-is in case you decide to switch back to AIS. Just remember to disable AIS while you're testing TIM, so they don't fight each other over where to put your stuff.

If you decide to make the switch to TIM, then you'll at least want to remove the "norewrite" argument so that you can benefit from TIM's tag rewriting to let you know when a tag wasn't understood. It is also strongly recommended to re-enable tag prefixes (either by adding a prefix to the "prefix=" argument, or by removing the argument entirely to use the default prefix "TIM"). There are many other mods and scripts that rely on tags in block names, and prefixes are a great way to keep them all from interfering with each other. When you set the prefix you will have to go back and add it to the beginning of all of your existing tags, but in the long run it will be much better for compatibility.

USAGE

Unfortunately the Steam Workshop does not allow descriptions to be long enough to cover all of TIM's features in detail. Full instructions and documentation can be found in the User's Guide:

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=546909551