Factorio Forums

TL;DR

I would like to suggest an addition of warning icons (badges) for drills which has depleted their mineable resources.

What ?

Here is an illustration of the situation:

As you can see, it is very hard to tell which drills no longer have resources to mine (and therefore could be deconstructed as they are no longer needed) from drills which just have clogged output (but still has plenty resources to mine).
Just a small badge or any other visual distinction would dramatically improve the player's experience in my opinion.

Why ?

Because it is often so tedious to visually distinguish drills with depleted resources from drills which still have resources to mine but their output is just clogged at the moment.


Thank you very much for considering this.

Note: There are mods for that that even deconstruct the drill for you.

See also viewtopic.php?f=6&t=959

Thanks guys for addition to this. The other topic I overlooked.

Personally, I would't require the automatic deconstruction of such drill.
For me just the icon would be enough (if there is icon for not powered drill why not for depleted one?).

I am bumping this up, since this is the ideal improvement of quality of life which if got to 0.17 it would result to unparalleled increase of user gameplay experience.
I believe that adding a single icon to depleted mines should not be so much difficult to do.

Fingers crossed, please devs.

+1

The warning can also indicate missing sulfuric acid on uranium ore.

Sure there are mods for these things, but wouldnt it not be awesome if this was implemented into the game
I have this YARM mod where you have to put a beacon to the ores you are mining then it tells you % and time left until ore is depleted.

Sure this is a fantastic mod but it would be better if it was originally in the game.

These MODS adds pretty complex mechanisms to the game.

My proposal is much humbler and simpler. Just adding an icon for depleted resource for drill in the same manner as there already is icon for drill without power.

Nothing more, nothing less.

It can be done in 0.17

I'm surprised that something like this hasn't been implemented yet. It would make it much easier to identify which miners in a field are out of accessible resources without mousing over each one.

Dyson Sphere Program has this and it's very nice for identifying which miners have run dry. Well, it also does it for when a miner is running low on resources, but it's most helpful for identifying which miners have *no* resources.

Check the lights on the new drill graphics.

We can also wire our drills, and set up warning lights (and toolbar warnings) when the patch they're on is under a certain amount of resources.

I literally can't tell the difference.

It's something I like doing actually early game: walking to the drills and cleaning up the drills with red lights to reuse elsewhere. It's quite visible in my opinion.
On larger patches late game it doesn't matter, you clean it everything at once by deconstruction-plannering.

Can you tell at a glance how many mining drills are out of resources?

I can see 2, but poles may hide some red lights.

It's not super obvious, but there is already an icon for missing module and missing power that would/could overlap with the proposition.

The bottleneck mod, or other mod marking for deconstruction depleted mining drill may be of some use here if that doesn't make it into base game.

We already have red light on miners as many had noticed. Additionaly there will be new alert icon that probably show depleted ore on miners as part of update 2.0