TL;DR
Give a more detailed overview of which processes are consuming a specific item in what amount, similar to the pollution consumption graph. This would make it much easier to analyse bottlenecks and understand where all items are going.What ?
2.0 will already come with some nice changes in the production statistics. However, there is still 1 feature that is missing, in my opinion. It is currently not possible to track which process consumes what amount of a product. With one notable exception: pollution. In my opinion, it should be possible to get a consumption graph similar to the graph for pollution for every other item in Factorio. So you don't only know how much iron/copper/... you are consuming, but also what is consuming all your iron/copper...It could be shown as a new production screen that looks exactly like the pollution screen: the left shows all the processes creating a product, and the right shows all the processes consuming a product. Another way to visualise it is using flow charts, such as in the Kirkmcdonald app (https://kirkmcdonald.github.io/, visualise tab). However, this might be difficult to integrate when the statistics are changing over time.
Optionally, it would be amazing if we could 'chain' these productions: e.g., I'm not just interested in how many legendary circuits I needed for my legendary modules, but how much basic iron ore did it cost to create them? These chains would probably need to be estimated in case of stochastic productions for performance reasons (as you don't want to store the complete history of each item), which is fine.
Why ?
In my opinion, this feature would be useful from early game to megabases, for both beginners and experts. There a several examples below, most of which are related to understanding bottlenecks, analysing shortages and checking efficiencies:- Early on, the balance between science production and factory building rapidly changes (in both directions). It would be helpful for new players to understand that balance. And understand that they really should scale up.
- It helps to understand whether a shortage is temporary or problematic: e.g., did you just waste all your iron and copper on a legendary power armor mk 2 (not a problem, only a temporary spike in demand), or is there a fundamental shortage for science production?
- It helps when scaling a base for science, modules and quality infrastructure, as it is easier to estimate what fraction of your production goes where. Do you need a significant amount of additional production for your infrastructure? Or is science devouring already all your items.
- It enables more strategic planning where to put the highest quality modules, the best beacons etc first.
- It would play well with spoilage (or the trash byproducts common in overhaul mods), as it is currently impossible to see post hoc what spoiled in what amount (as far as I know).
- It helps to notice unwanted train biases in larger train bases (mostly a new problem for 2.0): did you accidentally set up your train station priority such that all the iron gets delivered to the same station (e.g. the quality sink instead of producing actual science)?
- It helps to notice 'oopsies' on an interplanetary scale: are you accidentally voiding a lot of 1 material on 1 planet, while it would be super useful to tackle a shortage on another planet (looking at you, Space Exploration).
- It makes the statistics much more meaningful. You can immediately see how many rails you built (which is currently dwarfed by production science), where all the electronic circuits go... Overall, it would be a very satisfying thing to dive into when the factory is hard at work for math nerds like me, as it enables you to visualise the entire flow of goods over time.
There have been other proposals to improve the production graph, such as
viewtopic.php?p=610787#p610787 (compare actual consumption to desired consumption)
viewtopic.php?f=6&t=52326 (equalise the axes of production and consumption).
But I felt it was sufficiently different to warrant its own discussion.
Let me know what you think!
