Workshop Regex Filtering for Crafting Chains
As players progress and encounter quests with increasingly complex crafting requirements, tracking full crafting chains becomes a significant headache. The current Workshop search is useful for finding individual items, but it does not provide an effective way to display all the items involved in a larger crafting chain at once.
The most practical workaround on the browser version is to open multiple tabs, with separate tabs for exploring locations, required materials, intermediate items, and the final item being crafted. This is already -blam!-bersome, and navigating between items using a mouse’s browser back button can behave inconsistently. However, the Steam version does not support multiple tabs at all, making complex crafting chains considerably harder to manage. Although I would prefer to continue playing through Steam, it is difficult to justify doing so when the browser version offers such a major usability advantage.
Adding optional regex support to the Workshop search would significantly improve this experience. In particular, regex alternation using the | operator would allow players to enter every relevant item in a crafting chain into a single search. For example:
Item A|Item B|Item C|Final Item
This would allow the Workshop to display only the materials, intermediate items, and final products relevant to the player’s current crafting goal. Instead of opening several tabs and repeatedly navigating between item pages, players could create a focused Workshop view containing the entire crafting chain.
Regex would also address the decreasing usefulness of the current Workshop search. In the past, ordinary text filtering reduced the item list to a manageable size. As the item pool has expanded, however, many groups of items now share overlapping names. The addition of orange, yellow, black, white, and brown dyes, along with their associated crafted items, is a good example. Searching for one of these terms can produce so many partially matching results that the filtered list is still difficult to use.
This feature could be implemented as an optional advanced search mode, leaving the existing search behavior unchanged for newer players who don't need it. Players who do not need regex would experience no added complexity, while advanced players would gain much greater control over how Workshop items are displayed.
Submitted by eziur on Jul 18th 2026
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