Factorio Forums

Science packs have colors associated with them, so much so that we usually just say "yellow science" instead of "chemical science pack."

When you go into the production statistics screen and search "science," it's less readable than it could be, because the colors assigned to each science pack do not necessarily match with the science pack color.

There are many many colors available in the production screen, and just from a glance it looks like all of the science pack colors except black can be assigned to items.

My suggestion is: when a user filters the production statistics screen in a way where only science packs are listed, have each statistics color match the item color (except black science, which could use some unused color like orange). This makes the information more readable, since the user doesn't need to keep track of which color is being used for which science.

It could be argued that this would open a box of worms wherein other item statistics colors would be expected to match their in-game colors, but I believe the science packs are a special case since the community almost exclusively refers to these items by their colors ("red science") instead of their proper names ("automation science pack"), which is not so uniformly the case with other items.

Green circuits
Red circuits
Blue circuits


But I do like your suggestion

Neat on the paper, but I fear this would be opening pandora's box, especially, as mentioned by wobbycarly, there are quite a number of items that people may identify by their color :
- belts
- inserters
- ammo clips
- circuits
- science packs

... and that's only for vanilla. Fear the modded games with zillions of tiered items with their respective colors.

See also Science as a tabsheet.

They could implement it for the most obvious things and let modders do the rest. I think the graph is in general too convoluted so that most of the time you need to customise what it displays in order to make it readable. It however lacks a lot of options for that. Mainly custom presets, scaling and colors.

It's technically possible; but it's not worth it in my opinion. It would add a ton of complexity to an already complex piece of code (the production statistics GUI) for something that's purely cosmetic. It would then have to be maintained for the rest of time; adding mental burden to anyone who needs to work with the code and slow down any future work that might need to be done with the GUI.

Agreed. What I would change instead is, that each item has a consistent color/look all over the game. Because I think that’s the most irritating thing of all.

The combination of color and different staggered lines or other things would give any item a unique look.

ssilk wrote: ↑

Wed Aug 17, 2022 4:12 am

Agreed. What I would change instead is, that each item has a consistent color/look all over the game. Because I think that’s the most irritating thing of all.

The combination of color and different staggered lines or other things would give any item a unique look.

Yeah I was about to post a similar suggestion : that each item has a statistics color calculated on load from the dominant color of the item (alterations coming from the rest of its icon pixels), byt I couldn't decide if the result would be overall better or overall worse than what it is now. What I'm sure, it's that it would raise new issues while solving others, so well ... dropped the idea.

I found, that I made a similar suggestion here viewtopic.php?p=495581#p495581

Koub wrote: ↑

Wed Aug 17, 2022 5:40 am

ssilk wrote: ↑

Wed Aug 17, 2022 4:12 am

Agreed. What I would change instead is, that each item has a consistent color/look all over the game. Because I think that’s the most irritating thing of all.

The combination of color and different staggered lines or other things would give any item a unique look.

Yeah I was about to post a similar suggestion : that each item has a statistics color calculated on load from the dominant color of the item (alterations coming from the rest of its icon pixels), byt I couldn't decide if the result would be overall better or overall worse than what it is now. What I'm sure, it's that it would raise new issues while solving others, so well ... dropped the idea.

Letting the player choose the color would be the best solution imo. Players couldn’t complain about the colors chosen by the devs or an algorithm. And once it’s implemented there would be no further maintenance needed.

That could be the next step. And could be only done, if this is implemented. First it’s more important, that the item color doesn’t change over time. That’s needs some kind of mapping item-type <-> color-table-entry that doesn’t change over time and with mods.

And I shouldn’t say color-table, because we don’t have enough distinctive colors to give every item one color. We should call it a style-table, because the items should have also a line-style, e.g. different staggering, different line thickness, maybe two colors.

And that style table could then be changed. But in my opinion there should be such a good default, that this isn’t needed.