How does "order" work?

[metzyn]

I am very much confused on order, "a-b-c", when extending items. How does this work?

And thank you everyone for responding to all my questions. To be honest, the wiki is very weak at explaining the modding portion of the game (although, this is very understandable as the focus is to work on the game full-steam).

[metzyn]

Nevermind... I figured it out.

[SilverWarior]

It is good that you figured it out but it would be even better if you can share this as someone else might have the same dilema as you have.

[metzyn]

Oops... you are correct, sir.

As far as my understanding from using the existing "base" data of Factorio, "order" is used as a way to order items in inventory when auto-sorting is on (something I personally like). You can order items by setting the order to anything in the following format: "a-b-c"... but this can be as short as "a" to "a-b-c-d-e-f-g" or longer. Taking an existing item's order "h-h-b", if I want items to follow I would set their order to either "h-h-c" or "h-h-b-a".

[kovarex]

Oops... you are correct, sir.

As far as my understanding from using the existing "base" data of Factorio, "order" is used as a way to order items in inventory when auto-sorting is on (something I personally like). You can order items by setting the order to anything in the following format: "a-b-c"... but this can be as short as "a" to "a-b-c-d-e-f-g" or longer. Taking an existing item's order "h-h-b", if I want items to follow I would set their order to either "h-h-c" or "h-h-b-a".

The order can be basically any string.
We use the first letter for the type of item (resource, machine, tool etc), the second for sub-time (inserter, assembling machine) and the third for the version (burner inserter, inserter, fast inserter etc).

[metzyn]

I'm glad I was able to figure out how it worked and am very happy that you explained why you guys decided on the particular ordering convention. And for that convention's sake, I'm going to keep to it in my current and future mods.