Factorio Forums

it's been a debate before how colour indicates the tier of an object, but doesn't line up.

science packs go red, green, blue, purple yellow...
assembling machines go grey, blue, yellow, purple, red, green...
and belts go white, yellow, blue, green, purple (and inserters follow that too, but start with black for burner)

I'm thinking the official order of colours in my mod should be...
Yellow, Red, Blue (Like inserters and belts) purple, green. (since all my colour coded crafting machines end in green)

There's no real reason to change which colours are used, just their order, even science packs have all 5 of those colours, and can easily be swapped in order.

I would want blue, green, yellow, red, purple. That is how I would increase it because the intensity of the color increases with the tiers.

bobingabout wrote:it's been a debate before how colour indicates the tier of an object, but doesn't line up.

science packs go red, green, blue, purple yellow...
assembling machines go grey, blue, yellow, purple, red, green...
and belts go white, yellow, blue, green, purple (and inserters follow that too, but start with black for burner)

I'm thinking the official order of colours in my mod should be...
Yellow, Red, Blue (Like inserters and belts) purple, green. (since all my colour coded crafting machines end in green)

There's no real reason to change the colours, just their order, even science packs have all 5 of those colours, and can easily be swapped in order.

I'm with you.
What happens to your white belt? Does it go yellow or grey? Grey would fit the burner inserter but AM 1 must go yellow.

steinio wrote:I'm with you.
What happens to your white belt? Does it go yellow or grey? Grey would fit the burner inserter but AM 1 must go yellow.

This lists 5 tiers, some things have 6 tiers, so the extra tier (burner inserter, assembling machine 1, basic belt etc) would be grey (or black)
and in science that's the other way around, because the top tier is white.

I think it should go cool to warm. This makes some intrinsic sense in that we automatically equate red to fast and blue to slow. This would ofcourse require ignoring the history of the game.

So my vote would be:
Blue, Green, Yellow, Red, Purple.

Purple is troublesome on this spectrum, and should likely be replaced by orange to make it easy to understand the cool to warm transition.

My 2c.

Pothrekr wrote:Purple is troublesome on this spectrum, and should likely be replaced by orange to make it easy to understand the cool to warm transition.

unfortunately the inserter we typically call yellow actually borderlines on orange. (also my screen really messes with colours to try and make them more vibrant)
the part of the spectrum between green and red actually has quite the large range of colours in it, yellow and orange being fairly typical ones, yet you go the other way around to blue, and, well, green to blue... blue to red has purple in the middle.

Although not impossible, it wouldn't be easy to do, and would definitely be harder to tell at a glance if you have an orange vs yellow or red, than if you had purple.

You're not the first person to suggest a spectrum or "Rainbow" pattern in the colours though. red, yellow, green, blue, purple has been suggested a few times. it's hard to tell from the silent voters, but yellow, red, blue as the first 3 are the most popular, due to belts. in fact, there's only been 3 votes not to use these 3 at the start, 1 for "Science pack" order, and the other two not to change things... so far.

bobingabout wrote:Although not impossible, it wouldn't be easy to do, and would definitely be harder to tell at a glance if you have an orange vs yellow or red, than if you had purple

Yes readability is paramount, which is why I left purple in placed it at the top of the spectrum.

Personally from a graphics/contrast perspective in a situation where it could all be done from scratch like this...
I'd try to make the last tier have as much contrast as possible with the terrain. Because ultimately factories will end up only using the highest tier. This would mean that the last tier can't be green (grass) or yellow/orange (desert). Hm. Are non-solid colors on the table :P? Some sort of counter-markings like on vanilla modules could be nice in that case.

Though as an afterthought, is unifying all the colors of everything really that desirable? I can see the idea sounding nice from a "desire-to-unify-all-the-things" perspective. But it also implies that if you use the same tier of machines all over the factory then all things have the same color, which makes things a lot more difficult to read. For example an endgame vanilla factory is blue (belt) / green (inserter) / yellow (assembler), and making all three the same color would result in a massive drop in contrast and thus readability. And also colorful things look nicer.

Going along with Eradicator on this. It's nice how the belts, inserters, and assemblers in the base game are different colors since it aids the player in reading what's going on.

And perhaps the color shift should continue. If the vanilla endgame is blue belt to green inserter to yellow assembler then the next step is green belt to yellow inserter to orange assembler, and so on.

Science color order is irrelevant, as grey/blue purple/yellow often goes independently in my games. Actually, in my current game (with many mods, as this anyway applied to modded games) i have red, blue, yellow, purple, gray science packs, but not green and white yet. Green require uranium.

Purple and red inserters in vanilla means not tiers, but different way of operation.

Colors doesn't matter much for me, but i prefer that they match to vanilla for lower tiers. Colors help to distinguish items in inventory, in filters, and in craft menu.
There is better ways to highlight performance(tiers) than colors. Stripes or numbers on sides. Different sprites (e.g adding more pipes/gears to animation), making inserters looks differently.

And if other modders are using different colors, then it doesn't matter at all, as colors will never match.

Other games seem to be converging on a grey -> white -> green -> blue -> purple -> orange/yellow scheme for tiers, and it might be nice for new players (like me...) to already know the progression. what do y'all think of that?

(also, something something first post hello)

hoylemd wrote:Other games seem to be converging on a grey -> white -> green -> blue -> purple -> orange/yellow scheme for tiers, and it might be nice for new players (like me...) to already know the progression. what do y'all think of that?

(also, something something first post hello)

I think that sounds like world of warcraft.
I play Startrek Online, that goes white -> green -> blue -> purple -> Prismatic voilet/purple/magenta -> Orange.
There's also white -> blue -> yellow for games like Diablo. (Wait, that's the assembling machine order)


In any case, I've already started to move things towards the grey -> yellow -> red -> blue -> purple -> green -> white order... or yellow -> red -> blue -> grey/purple/pink -> green -> white for science.

Why don't the science pack have the same colours?

gaelyte wrote:Why don't the science pack have the same colours?

Not everything starts at grey, most things will start at Yellow. So the science packs start at yellow. It just so happens that there is also a grey science pack for Warfare that would be paired with Production in the T4 slot, and Logistics is pink. I could in theory recolour the warfare science pack to some sort of purple, but that will only really serve to make them harder to distinguish from each other.

Science packs are one of the ones that are already done though.