CraftPriority

Overview

How CraftPriority orders the queue, and what stays vanilla.

ASA crafts strictly first come, first served. Queue 1,000 rifle bullets in a tribe Fabricator and the next player who needs one chestpiece, or a repair, waits for every bullet. CraftPriority runs the smallest job first instead.

How the order works

Whenever a station starts its next job, it picks the smallest one waiting. A job's size is the total number of that item queued at that station. A repair counts as one. Jobs of the same size keep their queue order.
A big job finishes the unit it is working on, lets the smaller job through, then carries on where it left off. Nothing restarts and no progress is lost.
A job keeps its size while it runs. A 1,000-unit job with five left still counts as 1,000, so a new 10-unit job still goes first.
It doesn't matter who queued what. Normal station access still applies.

Example: queue 1,000 bullets, then 100 polymer, then 5 electronics, then one armour repair. They run repair, electronics, polymer, bullets.

What stays exactly like vanilla

CraftPriority only changes the order of the queue. Costs, Cancel Queue, switching a station off, losing power, the queue limit and merging the same item into one job all behave as they do in unmodified ASA. The plugin never creates, removes or refunds an item or material.

Server restarts

ASA keeps the job that is currently crafting through a restart but drops every job still waiting, and a big job paused for a smaller one counts as waiting. Its unstarted units were never paid for, so no materials are lost; the player just queues the rest again.

Tested on the Fabricator, Tek Replicator and Smithy. Modded stations have not been tested.

Next: Installation and Configuration.