Factorio Forums

1) Make sure you have a personal roboport equipped
2) Place a big blueprint with lots of items
3) Place a Roboport close to it, or in the centre so that it can be built automatically
4) Place Yellow chests next to it
5) Equip it with 10 Construction Robots
6) Power the roboport

It will take a while to calculate but soon you'll see the total count of items missing materials, and items missing construction robots.
2 things are happening here:
1) The count is out, it is as if it is capped at a certain amount, you would require say 300 concrete units, go fetch it, place it in the chest only to discover you need 200 more
2) Your personal roboport duplicates the count. You can see the count change when you turn your personal roboport on and off

Thanks for the report however you aren't understanding that those are not counters; those are just alerts.

There is no counter for "you need this many items to build all the stuff waiting to be built". There are just alerts for "the game tried to do X, and this many failed."

This is really confusing, as the alert says "### Entities are missing material for construction"

See example:


Not sure why the link isn't working. https://imgur.com/ZoPWHRA

I would recommend changing this alert to show the total number of missing materials, not the number of alerts. The number of alerts is an artifact of how long alerts persist for, as I understand, and so it maxes out at 600, even if more than 600 materials are missing. This 600 number isn't useful to the player - better to have it count missing entities.

GhostPirate wrote: ↑Thu Aug 27, 2020 11:38 pm I would recommend changing this alert to show the total number of missing materials, not the number of alerts. The number of alerts is an artifact of how long alerts persist for, as I understand, and so it maxes out at 600, even if more than 600 materials are missing. This 600 number isn't useful to the player - better to have it count missing entities.

The game does not know that information so it can't show it. Additionally computing that information is incredibly expensive and so isn't going to be included.

I understand. Could the game "fake it" ? For example: Would it be possible to store the alerts generated each tic in a list and report that list to the user, with a 1 second expiration or something? 1 second of tracking at 600 bot alerts per tic is 36000 missing items you could "report". This doesn't add any computation steps to the way the engine parses the list of ghosts (as far as I understand it), and while it's not really real-time, it's probably good enough that most people wouldn't complain.

GhostPirate wrote: ↑Fri Aug 28, 2020 7:29 am I understand. Could the game "fake it" ? For example: Would it be possible to store the alerts generated each tic in a list and report that list to the user, with a 1 second expiration or something? 1 second of tracking at 600 bot alerts per tic is 36000 missing items you could "report". This doesn't add any computation steps to the way the engine parses the list of ghosts (as far as I understand it), and while it's not really real-time, it's probably good enough that most people wouldn't complain.

The alerts is the 'faked' version.