Factorio Forums

I am in love with the new machine animations, but due to alt mode practically being a requirement I almost never get to see the animations unless I stop what I am doing and turn off alt mode briefly to appreciate them.

I would love the option for an "Unobtrusive" alt mode where recipe icons are less... well.. obtrusive. What I image as being the most practical is displaying a smaller recipe icon and moving it to one of the corners. I considered transparency as well but I figure any level of transparency that allows you to see what is going on underneath would probably obfuscate the icon too much to be useful.

Seconded! The overlay for alt-mode on machines, especially larger ones now, often ends up covering the entire, cool animation. Same goes for the 'frozen' alerts -- I would rather not see these on, say, Aquilo if I don't want to -- it makes it impossible to enjoy the snowy atmosphere when im being told 'THIS IS WRONG!! MAKE WARM' so brazenly. And at the same time, it's hard to feel like the factory is complete WITHOUT alt-mode. Nearly the entire time I play IS in alt mode, and while I don't know how others use it, it'd be nice if the icon I see 99% of the time didn't obstruct the amazing models for the machines.

I feel this could be accomplished by making Alt mode deeply customizable, and perhaps even allow a couple presets being toggleable with separate keybinds, each of which can have certain elements shown/hidden.

After some experimentation I found that generally a center aligned bottom icon looks best on most machines and compared to a left or right align just "feels right". I found this does create some issues with input overlap for fluid machines with input in the middle though I found for these models you can still see them pretty clearly with just a smaller centered icon. I'm not sure if there is a reasonable way to set the icon location programmatically accounting for inputs, and no clue how modules would slot in either yet.
Transparency would be interesting to play with as well though it seems like that is unsupported currently.