Factorio Forums

I have no idea why nobody yet propose that or I'm just bad at looking for stuff

1. Idea
Placeable "sign"/"monitor" that will display amount of items in currently connected network.

1a. How would it work
You place a monitor on ground, near pole for electricity. Then you connect a green or red wire (only one of them). Then you press on monitor to choose what item should be displayed on a monitor form interface. Voila. Now you have display of a selected item on ground.

2. Why would I need that?
- So right now you are pretty straight forward. You place a tons of logistics chests with tons of diffrent items on them, you connect them together and you hover over that chest and you have a item count on little popup. 30 if i recall correctly. Cool, but if you need to know amount of 31th item you have a problem. There are still methods to look for amount of this item in the system, but not so simple and would require some time.
- Lets say that you are building gigantic logistics network that would do neat stuff with lamps but something broke and you have insane amount of separate networks and even more combinators. You could simply debug that by looking at certain numbers in certain logic network but now you have to run and look for place where the correct number is stored. With display you could simply predict that place, put a monitor and watch the number from outside of complicated mess of wires and combinators.
- Imagine that you place a monitor next to every array of asembly machines that are specified to do one item. Wouldnt that look great when you can run your factory and watch how numbers grow and decrease without touching a mouse?
- I think i could give out a few other examples of where i would put such monitors, and i gaurantee you that i would have a lot of them

3. Extra posibilites?
Monitors with numbers in a game that is driven by efficiency would be aswome. But what if you could programm such monitor to display letters? Even more awsome!!! I'm aware of this could create a numerus amount of design problems with UI implementation but i'm sure that devs will find out some good way to implement that

If you have any further ideas or sugestions or words of criticism please point them out

Hm. This is not a "vote what comes into the game"-forum.

And your suggestion has many predecessors and similar stuff, mainly things about getting more information from the game (this goes from more debug-info to placeable graphical displays).

I put this one on my todo-list to make it an entry here: https://forums.factorio.com/forum/viewforum.php?f=80 but I wont be bad with anybody, if he is faster.

I would be up for this. It would make for some interesting base layouts and calculator displays.
Can I guess that you are grabbing the idea from modded Minecraft ME mod?

Muchaszewski wrote:I have no idea why nobody yet propose that or I'm just bad at looking for stuff

The Nixue Tubes mod already does that, although with numbers only, each tube being 2 tiles tall and 1 wide and displaying 1 digit (in a nice retro style) and costing 8 kW of power to run.

It's one of my favourite mods, but I'd like to have some kind of letter-showing ability too. If nothing else then just to label the Nixie figures.

TuckJohn wrote:Can I guess that you are grabbing the idea from modded Minecraft ME mod?

Not realy. Just looking at all that stuff that appear in 0.12.x and i had feeling there is something that is missing!

ssilk wrote:Hm. This is not a "vote what comes into the game"-forum.

I was guided by your post

ssilk wrote:If the developers find your suggestion good, they will use it.
If not, you have to convince the forum members. Not the devs!

And the pool is the best thing to find out if forum members are intrested in stuff without spammin post with "this is great" kinda posts

Muchaszewski wrote: I was guided by your post

Uhm? Which one?

And the pool is the best thing to find out if forum members are intrested in stuff without spammin post with "this is great" kinda posts

Sorry, no. Most forum members make the poll and then also write some comments in the thread, why they polled like so.
And if everyone would make a poll out of his suggestion this board doesn't make sense any more: There is no democratic game development. Never!

The way to go is to read the suggestion carefully for a while and then make new own. You will get very soon feedback, if you made a good or not so good suggestion.

In my opinion, some sort of indicator in the world that displays an icon of an item, with a number along with it, would be useful. How useful? indeed.

This is not how the game development normally works.

The devs just don't say "Let's see, what is the most voted suggestion". Or "Ok, I have now time...." (hahaha), "I will look which one is the most answered suggestion in the forum".

The truth is, that it works more like "Ok, what do we need to reach the next steps of our plan to finish the game?"

Then they have a list of TODO's. Each point in this list is a big sublist of tasks. One of the task is for example "Add more information views for the player". The developer (or better the product-owner) will look then - among other sources - in the forum. And then they find this topic. If the product owner then says "Oh, yes, a monitor on ground makes much sense, cause that fits with out goals..." this will be implemented.

There are of course exceptions on this way. But this off-topic discussion was about the polls and I wanted to explain, why they don't make sense here: They are in most cases just ignored.

bobingabout wrote:In my opinion, some sort of indicator in the world that displays an icon of an item, with a number along with it, would be useful. How useful? indeed.

Agreed. Yes please!

Also, ssilik, You are completely right.