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Project Announcement: Factorio Item Browser

Posted: Sun Feb 11, 2018 5:53 pm
by BluePsyduck
After programming on it for some time now, today I want to present you my project:
Factorio Item Browser: https://www.factorio-item-browser.com/
This website lists all items and recipes of the most-used mods of Factorio right in your browser, and offering a search over all of them. Choose the mods you are using and you are ready to go. (On you first visit, only the base mod will be enabled.)

Ever wondered how to get cobalt oxide in Bob's mods or for what transistors are needed? The browser will help you find out. (So yeah, basically NEI in a browser :D )
Screenshots
Backstory:
When I tried to get into modded Factorio some time ago with Bob's mods I always was overwhelmed from the huge number of items and recipes needed to craft a certain item. I eventually gave up somewhere making the third science pack. What I wanted to that time was an easy way to browse all the items and recipes, to be able to better plan the future of the factory: If I know that a certain item is used in many recipes, I tend to isulate its production and create a little module for this item. But ingame you do not see all the recipes, because you are limited by your researched techn technologies.

To that time, neither NEI nor the mod portal itself existed, so finding a mod providing this information was difficult. It was back then where I thought about creating a website with that kind of information on it.

Why a website? I agree that a mod like NEI is very useful ingame (especially knowing JEI from modded Minecraft), but I liked the idea to have the data available even when Factorio is not, for example at work or during the daily commute. (And as a web developer, it of course had to be a website, because this is where I'm best at :D )
Features:
  • Currently supports 182 mods with about 4500 items and 10000 unique recipes. The number of mods will increase as soon as I automate the steps of data gathering. (Currently all mods with 10000 downloads or more and compatible to 0.16 have been imported.)
  • Lets you freely choose your mods you are using, and tries its best to show all the items and recipes of your mods. Simply upload your mod-list.json and all available mods are selected for you.
  • Shows both normal recipes and expensive recipes.
  • Supports all locales as long as the mods deliver them. No need to remember the English ones, if you are using another language. (The page itself is available in English and German, regarding the few words not coming from the game.)
  • Pin items and recipes to the sidebar to quickly navigate between them, e.g. to remember what you still need to automate for the next science pack.
  • Access it from everywhere. No need to have the game or the mods installed. (Be careful when using mobile data though, as the browser downloads all icons of the enabled mods. This may be several MB of data to load.)
Planned features:
I already have a list of features I am planning on adding, but I did not want to delay the release of the project any further because of them (it already took long enough).
  • Add technologies which unlock the recipes.
  • Add the machines able to craft the recipes.
  • Display the mod from which the item or recipe originates from.
  • Support mod packs to eliminate mismatched or wrong data for popular mod combinations (like Bob&Angel or Seablock).
  • Increase performance. The current version is kinda raw and not really optimized, and page speed can be increased at some places. So maybe be a little patient right now, especially when many mods are enabled :D
Limitations:
There are of course some limitations of what the browser can do, and what not.
  • It cannot magically detect which mods depend on which. If a mod A is not listed as dependency in the info.json of mod B, the combination of A and B will not be checked. Both will be seen as independent mods, which may result in wrong information. (It is impossible to check all combinations of mods.)
  • It does always use the default configuration provided by the mods. I do not alter any configuration to enable or disable features of any mod. (Again, this would be way too much to handle.) So if alien artifacts are disabled by default, they will not appear in the browser.
What the browser does not want to be:
  • A ratio calculator. Although the browser has the required data (once machines get added), I currently have not planned to make it to a full calculator for crafting ratios.


So if you have any feedback for the project -- be it questions, encountering any problems, ideas on how to further improve the browser, or your general opinion about it -- feel free to write them down. And please don't break it :D

Crosspost: /r/factorio

Re: Project Announcement: Factorio Item Browser

Posted: Sun Feb 11, 2018 6:59 pm
by Gergely
You know... it would be really nice to have something like this offline. I think I saw enough website based Factorio tools for a lifetime, but no offline tools other than mods which hinder achievement progress.

Actually, this tool is really nice. I would use this if I could. But then again... not really usefull because I am offline 80% of the time when I play.

Re: Project Announcement: Factorio Item Browser

Posted: Mon Feb 12, 2018 3:57 pm
by mrtux
That is cool!

Can you extend this with a json view, so other tools can use the data, e.g. for crafting/balancing calculations?
Is this on github or somewhere, so others can contribute?

Keep on the nice work!

Re: Project Announcement: Factorio Item Browser

Posted: Mon Feb 12, 2018 8:22 pm
by BluePsyduck
mrtux wrote:Can you extend this with a json view, so other tools can use the data, e.g. for crafting/balancing calculations?
Is this on github or somewhere, so others can contribute?
I did indeed plan to publish an API at some point, so that other projects can use the data. The current version of the project does not allow external access to the data though, I have to refactor it and separate the data access from the view logic. May take some time, but it will come ;)

I also thought about making it open source, but not with the current codebase. The project is a big monolith with exporting from the game, importing into the database and the actual website mixed together, and it is kind of a mess. My next big step is to seperate this into three independent projects: The website, only reading data through the API, the API itself (including import into the database), and the export part which runs locally because Factorio itself is needed for it. This will take longer (months), but I may publish the parts already refactored to github one after another. I think the first one will most likely be the API :P

Re: Project Announcement: Factorio Item Browser

Posted: Fri Mar 06, 2020 3:33 pm
by Marconos
What is the best way to get a mod added to the ones you have in the system? Pyanodon's Alien Life has been released and would be great to have that in here.

Re: Project Announcement: Factorio Item Browser

Posted: Mon Mar 09, 2020 10:35 am
by Bauer
Thank you very much!!!
This is awesome. Will use.

Re: Project Announcement: Factorio Item Browser

Posted: Tue Mar 17, 2020 1:36 am
by shihsaikwok
That is exactly what i want for a long long time! This can help to plan our factory all day!
Thank you!

EDIT: I tried for some B+A recipe, and got the "something went wrong" item, I think it is something missing in between, or I did not select the correct mod?

Re: Project Announcement: Factorio Item Browser

Posted: Thu Apr 02, 2020 8:29 am
by Bauer
shihsaikwok wrote:
Tue Mar 17, 2020 1:36 am
That is exactly what i want for a long long time! This can help to plan our factory all day!
Thank you!

EDIT: I tried for some B+A recipe, and got the "something went wrong" item, I think it is something missing in between, or I did not select the correct mod?
Same here. If you select Angel's refining and Bob's ores, the chunk+chunk into ore receipts all "go wrong".
If you activate Bob's greenhouse and Angel's Bioprocessing, Angel's tree->wood receipts don't show up.
There are more problems.

Re: Project Announcement: Factorio Item Browser

Posted: Sun Apr 05, 2020 9:22 am
by ssilk
How do you scan the code? Will you make the source available?