Increase color contrast for agricultural tower overlay

[valneq]

Please increase the color contrast for the overlay that appears when trying to place an agricultural tower.

I am not quite color blind, but strongly impaired when it comes to the color perception of green specifically.

I just landed on Gleba and I have a serious issue with the way the agricultural tower overlay tries to communicate the properties of tiles to me:

Bildschirmfoto vom 2024-10-29 16-04-25.png (2.79 MiB) Viewed 1582 times

From what I could extract from a conversation on discord, this screenshot is supposed to show three different colors for the squares around the agricultural tower
Green for "this is the correct biome and the correct type of soil"
Yellow for "this is the correct biome but the wrong type of soil"
Orange for "this is the incorrect biome and placing soil will not help"
Additionally, the tower itself is shaded red because there is something blocking the square it's on.

With all the additional decoratives and shadows around, this is absolutely not clear to me. The green and the yellow appear almost the same for me. The orange tiles have a much darker color which makes it easier to tell them apart from yellow.
The fact that there is a kind of a grid pattern separating the squares actually makes it harder to tell the colors apart.

In comparison, this shows the overlay of a roboport at the same location

10-29-2024, 16-22-17.png (2.89 MiB) Viewed 1582 times

This is much easier for me to tell apart because the different colors are touching, enhancing the contrast in hue by proximity.

My suggestion is therefore to change the coloration of the agricultural tower overlay, emphasizing contrast.
Someone on discord even made the suggestion to show small symbols in addition. Maybe checkmarks ✔, crosses ✘, circles O for the three different types of squares, or triangles, squares, and circles. Something to not rely on subtle hue differences in a busy biome.

[valneq]

I was reminded of the colorblindness color filters in the graphics settings.
This is with the deuteranopia filter which works much better for me.

10-29-2024, 17-13-32.png (2.9 MiB) Viewed 1556 times

[WeirdConstructor]

Now that I landed on Gleba, I understand this topic now. There really is not much contrast in the graphics on Gleba. Vulcanus and Nauvis got quite a lot of contrast regarding color lightness. Fulgora is a little less contrast in color, but the contrast in lightness is okay. Coming to Gelba from Vulcanus is quite a drop regarding this.

I am not colorblind (as far as I know). My problems with Gleba are:

• Tell the plants apart from the ground.
• Tell wet/non buildable ground from buildable ground, because the plants grow basically everywhere.
• Tell fertile ground to grow stuff on from regular ground. Plants seem to grow everywhere, recognizing Jellystem was hard.
• Tell fertile ground from normal ground with the planter overlay.
• Recognize water.
• Seeing the small enemies.

It might be partially because I am not used to Gleba, but in comparison: I immediately learnt the visual cues of Fulgora, Vulcanus and Nauvis. It takes much longer on Gleba. This is of course also because the planet is so "alien".

It actually also comes down a lot to the monitor I use. I tried 3 different monitors, and only one shows the color differences well enough for me. There are tons of different monitors out there and settings, and I get that you can't accommodate every out there. It's like mixing music for listening in a variety of situations: car, concert, in ear phones, ...

So my ideas to this are:

• A very little more lightness/value contrast between water/marsh tiles and buildable ground.
• Make plants a little bit more saturated in colors, to give them some contrast from the ground. This works okay for Yumako plants, but not for Jellynut.

It is not fun for me to figure out which tiles I can build belts on and which not. Of course I can just force build with a lot of landfill in my inventory, and that is what I am doing now as a "work around". I am not sure if this is intended. It could be fun to find the most optimal route without landfill - if the player could see the differences more quickly.

The map view and mini map are really helping a lot recognizing the actually important features of the world. Also, the ground tiles seem kind of inconsistent? When I alt+click on the ground, I get "natural jellynut soil", but I clicked on something that looks quite gray to me:

10-30-2024, 16-31-33.png (827.45 KiB) Viewed 1519 times

It's also hard to visually make out the Jellynut stems against the ground, eg. in these situations:

10-30-2024, 16-33-44.png (1.83 MiB) Viewed 1519 times

It's easier to make out the reddish Yumako trees against their green ground:

10-30-2024, 16-36-41.png (1.24 MiB) Viewed 1519 times

Here are two pictures, try to find the Jellynut trees from a glance... and then look on the map view colors....

10-30-2024, 16-44-08.png (1.11 MiB) Viewed 1519 times

[Dipiks]

Hello everyone!

After a solid dose of machining on Vulcanus and Fulgora, I’m finally arriving at Gleba. A beautiful planet, but unfortunately one that presents major challenges for me. I am colorblind (Deuteranomaly), and I cannot distinguish between the yellow and green of the fertility zones in the agricultural tower. This makes the Gleba experience really difficult for me, and since I want to play my first space age game without any mods to preserve achievements, I feel completely stuck with this issue. Could an option to change the color code of the fertility zones be considered?

[valneq]

[…]
I am not colorblind (as far as I know). My problems with Gleba are:
[…]

It's kind of reassuring to see that also non-colorblind people have issues with Gleba, plainly based on the fact that too many things are communicated via color alone.

I watched a streamer with protanopia color vision impairment the other day. They had a terrible time on Gleba. They tried the protanopia filter, too. Alas, it did not help them at all. So I guess this is indeed an issue for several people, not just me.

[Koub]

Isn't the "color blind" option of any help for you (Graphics settings > Color filter drop down)? Sincerely asking, because as a non color blind, it's extremely hard to really get what color blind people actually perceive.
In this post, you have an example with the Deuteranopia filter, to give you an idea.

[ncc1702]

TL;DR

When Alt view is on the Agriculture Tower should display symbols in addition to the colour to help aid with visibility

What?

When attempting to select a place to put the agriculture tower, additional visual information should be provided to aid the player when using alt view

11-02-2024, 19-39-34.png (674.7 KiB) Viewed 1463 times

A quick MS Paint mockup showing can be converted to allow growth, support growth, or do not support growth

Why?

At present, it is very challenging to discern the colour differences and symbols would help aid with the communication of information

[Obbi]

If we are at paint mockups

11-03-2024, 00-49-06.png (116.23 KiB) Viewed 1453 times

might be useful to have an alt mode or included in the above display to
a) show the detailed tile information
b) show what seeds can be placed

especially for colorblind people this might help a lot.

[bMiquelin]

Totally agree! I've seen lots of people on Discord struggle with the yellow/greenish colors – symbols would make it way clearer for everyone

[teneksi]

A change is greatly needed for colorblind players, as all of the information is delivered in shades of red and green.



I put this screenshot through the simulator "Coblis" to approximate how it looks with protanopia.



The color filter is doing very little here:

[Koub]

[Koub] Merged several threads with suggestions around agriculture tower terrain overlay & color blindness

[rycieos]

Alternatively, make the tints (green, yellow, orange) customizable like other radius visualization pictures are. The API exposes this for the agricultural tower (https://lua-api.factorio.com/stable/pro ... on_picture), but this sprite is used for the base, and all the colors are tinted on top of this, and those values are hard coded.

[Néomorphos]

Hello,
I am not color blind but I also have the issue on Gleba, the planet is globally hard to read with its many many plants all sharing very close tints. Happily the map is much more contrasted but both should read

[LCStark]

Fully agree. The colour filter option helps a little bit, but it still requires me to squint really hard to see any difference between agri tower tiles. With some plants I've just resigned myself to having to consult the minimap & filtered decon planner for now.

[jpowell]

Just started trying to farm. It's impossible for me to see the difference between green and yellow even with the filters. A tile indicator icon as suggested would improve this. I'm having to ask my wife to help me position things.

[Saevon]

I've been looking over the FFF and the color contrast for the soil FFF-413 used to be so much better? the lichens and mosses made things nearly GLOW.

Looking over the video I can actually see where pathways, waterways, and such are. But right now I constantly bump into things, even the cliffs are harder to see in the current version…

Not only is it way more obvious what the plantable soil is (tho I think more needs to be done for the tower (post a second reply about that). But its much more visually striking and lovely to me! Right now its SO DRAB,,, which for a lichen/jungle planet is sad

[Saevon]

Tower highlight has a few problems:

(a) it uses 3x3 blocks, but needs exact tile positioning as you can shift the tower between 3 alignments:

• So the tower (or some UI element) should display condition of individual tiles

(b) When placing farm soil, I WANT to know:

1. where I can place it
2. where its already farmable

Its very unlike placing landfill, because its there specifically for FARMING purposes. So if it enables a colourful overlay here it would fix a lot of my problems

(c) When placing the tower, which overall place would be best (for now, AND for future expansions:

1. Unplaceable tile
2. Unfarmable tile
3. farmable tile
4. Soil upgrade 1 (future)
5. Soil Upgrade 2 (future)

All that to say I agree with @WeirdConstructor.

+1 for using the actual seed symbol to indicate farmable land
+1 for using "circle / cross" to help colourblindness. Usually the fix isn't changing colours, but adding secondary queues
+1 for showing the individual tiles rather then the 3x3 blocks only. The symbols should be for the "current tower alignment" but the colours should show granularity

[Arxos]

Just gonna pile on this and say that there's a desperate need for more clarity here.
Just to give a baseline, I'm aware that my color vision isn't 100%, but it's good enough that I've not had any official diagnosis.

Gleba in general is kind of a mess of colors when compared to prior planets, but when placing agricultural towers everything just combines to make it a horrible experience:
- The green and yellow tints are not really super distinct.
- The orange is more distinct, but should really be even more distinct given the prevalence of green and yellow in the overall environment.
- If you're in ghost mode, the green and orange of roboports gets overlayed with those of the towers, further blending things together.
- Adjacent tower grids aren't shown, which makes it difficult to align them. I've opted to make a 2x2 tower blueprint to get around this issue, but that just means even more colors are now being plastered on my screen.

To add to all of this frustration, it doesn't help that you need to wipe every trace of other plants, then have the tower itself point out to you which areas you can claim using artificial soil. The obstacles that block the artificial soil like "red coral marsh" I can really only identify by just looking at where I can't place the artificial soil. The boundaries are impossible to tell apart by looking at them normally:

[Khazul]

+1 to pretty much any of these suggestions.

I am not color blind, but it can still be a bit frustrating to distinguish ground tiles.