Factorio Forums

Steps to reproduce:

1. Enable "Entity tooltip on the side" in interface settings (same issue might occur with tooltips at cursor but I have not tested that).
2. Build a rocket silo and rocket. For best (worst?) results build the silo to the south of a large factory such as a NS-aligned main bus, but really any dense complex of entities to the north of the silo will suffice.
3. Select "Travel to space platform" and select any platform in orbit.

Expected results:

A majestic flight to space, watching the factory descend until it's well below the clouds.

Actual results:

A majestic flight to space, with an epilepsy-inducing flurry of tooltips constantly popping up on the right side of the screen as the mouse happens to hover over various entities to the north of the silo. This continues well above the cloud layer until the active surface finally switches to the platform.

This is entirely a cosmetic issue but hopefully also an easy one to fix. Can the engine be updated to ignore entity mouseovers when the player is not in control?

Just move your mouse to the edge of the screen? How is this a bug?

Tooltips appearing for elements that aren't even visible on the screen are generally bugs in the UI.

Also: it turns out mouseovers remain active at the very edge of the screen in fullscreen mode. So that suggestion does not seem to work.

There are many pieces of the Factorio UI which do not generate tooltips on mouse over, including the chrome around the Armor/Character (bottom-left); any empty space on the Quickbar, or the textboxes near the map. It is a basic part of the game to have Tooltips under the mouse, why should it change for this corner case?

If you don’t like full screen / not being able to “put your mouse out of bounds”, then don’t do that? Factorio works great in Maximized Window mode too.

This is not an Epilepsy inducing photosensitive “flashing”, please do not make false callouts to diseases because you don’t like something. There is no Accessibility or screen reader problem here either. It makes it much harder for folks who have actual Disabilities to get attention on their problems.

Thank you for reading.

It is not a false callout, a friend had a seizure during gameplay going up to space, though I will grant you that correlation is not causation, there are many possible causes for a given seizure, and the flickering (which was noticeable to me several feet away) was made worse by a bright display in a dark room (which I have since learned is a bad idea for people with epilepsy). That is why I considered this worth reporting, but I also grant everyone is ultimately responsible for their own medical health and taking reasonable precautions. I didn't want to draw too much attention to that in the report out of respect but I see now I should have explained the circumstances.

You raise a good point on HUD elements; I confirmed that hovering over the quickbar or minimap does not trigger mouseovers. That is a viable workaround.

The Powers That Be have deemed this a feature so I am not interested in arguing the merits of this as a bug any further. Your point is taken; in the future I will make sure if I'm raising a medical concern to cite specific circumstances.

There are interface settings to give tooltips a delay, or require holding a button down to show them, or make them go to the side of the screen.
So these could help here.

Thank you IsaacOscar, I have my "Tooltip delay" set fairly high but somehow I never noticed there's a separate control for "Entity tooltip display", even though the settings are right next to each other. You are correct, even a fairly small setting there eliminates this issue completely. I honestly don't know how I missed that option for all these years.