Friday Facts #400 - Chart search and Pins

[ignatio]

This is great. The alert overview will have a Ctrl-F search like everywhere else, right? Right?

It's one of the things that bothered me most in 1.x - I tend to have lots of alerts for all kinds of conditions - item high/low, mine out of ore, train late, etc. So if something is seriously off then I often get an "alert storm" and the list would instantly be taller than the screen. Often the "root cause" alert wouldn't even be visible, which was kind of a problem since I didn't know where to go to fix it.

[Rebmes]

Very cool, real improvements, fleshing it out nicely. Love it.

[Ghulmeister]

this is true quality of life, meant for people who play the game. none of those feels like a feature that was intentionally left out during gamedevelopment, only to implement it later as dlc. truly heartfelt optimizations based on realtime experience gained while playing the game.

kudos guys

[TPRJones]

We could consider to add more to the search, like the locations of logistic chests containing some item, but we decided to not go down this rabbit hole for now.

Of course, there might be some good ideas of other things we could make searchable, you can let us know!

My first instinct was to make items searchable by logistics network. Like you get to know that power armor is available in network X. And then it is up to the player to go to that network and request that power armor they want.

I was thinking maybe instead of searching by chest contents, search by logistics chests with a filter for the item? That may be a useful middle ground that isn't as messy as trying to search all items, but could still come up with the locations most likely to contain that item.

[Delen22]

Kind of unrelated, but legendary spidertrons with legendary legs seem to have a 'braking problem' so they just overshoot by massive distances, I was just wondering if this is going to be adressed in the new version

I'm curious on how would you know that ? Early access ?

[quaatal]

Please give a way to mute/ignore alert types we don't care about. I play with alerts muted because endless minor damage alerts seriously trigger me.

Not to say a mute for these wouldn't be good, but at what point to you is "minor" damage no longer minor? When things start getting destroyed? When certain entities are getting damaged or destroyed? It strikes me that for something like that to really work well, it may have to have a very complex customization system.

You can already mute specific alerts by using /alerts in the console https://wiki.factorio.com/Console

[soldans]

An idea for searchable chests would be if there was a toggle per chest with the options [off / on / circuit network]

[FuryoftheStars]

Please give a way to mute/ignore alert types we don't care about. I play with alerts muted because endless minor damage alerts seriously trigger me.

Not to say a mute for these wouldn't be good, but at what point to you is "minor" damage no longer minor? When things start getting destroyed? When certain entities are getting damaged or destroyed? It strikes me that for something like that to really work well, it may have to have a very complex customization system.

You can already mute specific alerts by using /alerts in the console https://wiki.factorio.com/Console

Yes, though these are fairly limited in scope. In terms of attacks that actually play a sound, there's entity_destroyed and entity_under_attack (being damaged). I can only speak for myself, but knowing about a wall segment or two taking damage doesn't concern me. Even a wall segment or two being destroyed isn't that big of a concern (past early game). But a dozen or more wall segments being destroyed along with multiple turrets taking damage and possibly some destroyed? I would be concerned about that.

[Koub]

One detail that would really help on the weekly update would just to tell us at the start when these changes are implemented. Like is this in the latest update or a future update?

Pretty much everything in the FFF since they reinstantiated them will come when the expansion will come out, which will be at the same time as 2.0. Last guesstimate was around summer 2024, but guesstimates are just that, so I wouldn't be that surprised if there were delays.

[Danjen]

Milestone #400 FFF and there's almost no fanfare? For shame!
I am hoping that the tech tree gets an overhaul as well. Especially for big mods like seablock, it'd be nice to be able to have a list view of techs, which you can then sort, search, and group. For example, I might want to filter by all the red/green research, and then select 8 or 10 that I want to pin or prioritize, but not necessarily putting them in a research queue. Being able to say "Oh! I need to work towards this"

[Acid_Burn9]

Since we don't expect a crazy amount of pins to exist,

Oh, you poor naive souls...

[BlackKnight]

Much needed/appreciated additions all around! And I don't often comment but following every FFF and comments and thrilled with the expansion news every Friday am! Thank you Devs for your love and commitment to this game!

Map Annotation Overlay

On the subject of map pins and such, I am reminded of a often ignored "feature" in Victoria 2. It would let you draw little arrows and text on the map and they could be visible to players you shared it with. You could even save and load different plans. Now, the arrows themselves did absolutely nothing at all, but it might be nice to have something like this in Factorio. Random markers only get you so far.

42960_20240301135229_1.png

It could be nice to be able to draw over the map and share it with others. We could draw sketches of factory plans this way and cooperate more easily. We could even plan the shape of factory ahead on single, which would be nice.

I have always wanted this feature and have looked for an embed solution multiple times in the past. Last time I checked no currently updated mods supported this - from my memory, due to limitations on map draw+overlay access. Supporting this officially/(or unofficially even for mods to develop), would allow a player to co/solo very easily extrapolate on future expansion plans - such as prototyping sections of factories, outposts, expansion borders etc. Over the years my usual go to lack-of-a-better-option solution is screenshot + photoshop - which I overlay plans on the snapshot, though becomes outdated quickly -eg rectangles/outlines for factories, arrows for expansion directions and circles for artillery range estimates and snap to grid/grid overlay for chunk alignment/proportion reference. I have also blueprinted long sections of straight and diagonal rail solely to able to place in map view for denoting future borders in an overlay-ish real-time solution (only visible after radar rescans). A built in solution would be so much better though.

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Search Operators

...
I'll be happy to have, even a tiny change like this:

• mod: awesome mod name   to find all of option/shortcut related to this mod
• "exact match"   to ignore fuzzy search

I agree completely. In my latest game I have over 100 active mods enabled. Finding a shortcut/setting is both irritating when I want to find shortcuts/settings for ONLY 'that' mod! Thus - eg an info box tooltip in search that reminds you of possible Search Operators that you can use - eg by mod name with prefixed 'mod:'~contains/'-mod:'(doesnt contain) would be a great fit. Could also be useful for leveraging finding modded entities in game/or other items of a type elsewhere in the game (eg 'type:defense' for any built defense entity) with the addition of search operators and operator logic--honestly a perfect fit for Factorio!

edit:
Of late I have been using Obsidian(.md) (very flexible and awesome I might add, local markdown note/writing app) and it has great implementation of this. Actually, something I have seriously been craving in Factorio since I was introduced to it in Obsidian (but exists in VS Code etc) as well, is the the command palette. This would realllly make searching for/accessing commands (especially ones not used often), super useful. Comment next to each command also notes its hotkey too. Would fit Factorio so well, now thinking about it again, I think most players couldnt live without it if added (hand+glove result).

Thank you and please consider!

[DanGio]

Great !

There's two things I'd like to see in the final version :
- Being able to reorder pins list by mousedragging. I'm the kind who deletes all the pins to redo them in the right order...
- Getting the circuit network speaker alerts a proper grouping like other alerts : same icon > same group ; different icon > different group (the 2 icons are displayed next to each other in the bottom)

[meganothing]

Milestone #400 FFF and there's almost no fanfare? For shame!

For programmers only #256 and #512 are fanfare-worthy milestones.

[floven1]

On the subject of map pins and such, I am reminded of a often ignored "feature" in Victoria 2. It would let you draw little arrows and text on the map and they could be visible to players you shared it with. You could even save and load different plans. Now, the arrows themselves did absolutely nothing at all, but it might be nice to have something like this in Factorio. Random markers only get you so far.

42960_20240301135229_1.png

sadly not an option to report a post for being too awesome, so I shall simply say:

this /\

[spiral_power]

I would like the ability to search for stations in the train UI. I'm talking about maintenance trains, there were about 20 in Bob and SE, but after doing half of pY, there are already 100 maintenance stations. It takes a lot of memorization and patience to find the desired station by sight.

1.png (1.21 MiB) Viewed 2424 times

[protocol_1903]

For programmers only #256 and #512 are fanfare-worthy milestones.

Actually, i like 255 and 511 myself :)

[sarcolopter]

why is one of the pins pixelated?

[Digitalis]

We could consider to add more to the search, like the locations of logistic chests containing some item, but we decided to not go down this rabbit hole for now.

Of course, there might be some good ideas of other things we could make searchable, you can let us know!

My first instinct was to make items searchable by logistics network. Like you get to know that power armor is available in network X. And then it is up to the player to go to that network and request that power armor they want.

I was planning to suggest this myself. I think a lot of the time "Hey, where do we make X please?" is a question about where to obtain the item, and "It is in the/a logistics network, so just request it" is the correct answer. Since logistics networks already collect a list of the "logistic system storage", searching the networks themselves instead of individual chests seems like a compromise that is sufficiently far from searching individual storages, while still telling you where to get the item you searched for.

I also find that when a logistic system gets particularly full, the "logistic system storage" panel when mousing over a logistic chest can fall off the bottom of the screen, and this addition to the search could be a useful way to see exactly how many of each item you have in a given network (e.g. have you brought enough machines to the new outpost for the robots to build all the production lines you have planned).

[FuryoftheStars]

why is one of the pins pixelated?

Because they blurred it to avoid spoilers.