Factorio Forums

TL;DR

Color-coding the spoilage bar to indicate how fast something will spoil, in addition to showing the % progression.

What?

Make it obvious that some of these things will spoil in a matter of seconds while others have far longer remaining:
This could be done with a red bar if < 1 minute to spoiling, orange bar if < 5 minutes to spoiling, and yellow bar if < 15 minutes to spoiling.

Open to suggestion to ensure this is useful even with colorblindness.

Why?

New players are struggling to recognize the importance of the different spoilage timers on their production lines. If they saw that items with red, orange, or even yellow spoilage bars were the ones causing the greatest difficulty (needing shorter lead times) then they might learn faster.

Yes, this information is available on the tooltips, and can be obtained by combining the spoil time with the % indicator mentally, but this is an extra step.

This functionality would also help the learning of modded content even after the DLC is old hat.

Log scale instead perhaps? Have the bar indicate on a log scale remaining time where a full bar is some fixed time (1h? 30m?) so it's also obvious from the already shortened bar that an item is a quick spoiler as well.

Also, having the icon shift over time (perhaps through several variants) as it spoils would also be a neat addition, particularly for on belts where the bar would be hard to see.

Finally, there should also be the option to have the bar display vertically, since a horizontal bar is already used for items that have consumption attached, and notably one item (gleba packs) has both.

Log scale would just be confusing, I think.

The icon shifting over time could be cool, but it would have to be subtle. It wouldn't convey the same clarity of a belt heatmap like "these belts are full of items with red freshness bars, it's a critical section to optimize!" but it might look nice especially with alt mode off. I hadn't considered the (well-handled) conflict between belt variations and item/symbol icon consistency before, interesting.

The horizontal vs. vertical item overlay issue goes even deeper and affects clarity on belts for quality as well, with different belt orientations being affected differently. Horizontal vs. vertical belts, totally different effects...