Factorio Forums

What I want

Configuration options to control the alerting system. I want to be able to say "siren," "flashing" or "no alert" to events like "turret(s) engaged."


Why?

Late in the freeplay campaign, I have so many outposts, solar arrays and such a large base that my borders are pretty much constantly probed. I'm not exaggerating when I say that a siren goes off several times per minute. It's starting to drive me crazy. Almost all of these alerts are just "one of your turrets is engaged" or, on occasion, "a turret or unit of wall took (minor) damage."


My proposal

There are endless possibilities here, but my proposal has trivial logic and enough flexibility to meet most needs.

I propose five categories of alerts, each of which allows you to choose from three levels of alerting.

Categories:

• Turret engaged
• Fixed placement damaged
• Fixed placement destroyed
• Robot damaged
• Robot destroyed

Alert levels:

• Flashing icon plus siren
• Flashing icon
• None (or mouseover only)

I separate robots from fixed placements because I commonly have robots from my personal roboport destroyed while I'm out raiding a spawn point. I often raid in a tank with construction bots to keep me repaired and destroyer capsules to boost the damage. I know these robots are getting damaged or destroyed: I carried them with me into battle. It might be fine to have a single category for "robot damaged or destroyed".


More Background

I love this game, but these constant sirens and flashing lights are annoying me to the point that I'm on the forums instead of playing right now. The siren goes off so often that my only recourse at this point is to turn off the sound altogether.

The general rule of alerting in user interfaces is that you shouldn't raise an alert unless it's something for which the user is likely to want to take immediate action. That a laser fired is simply not in this category.

Early on in the game, damage to one of my turrets is something for which I'd very much like an alert. Later on, I have robots to deal with minor damage and a couple hundred laser turrets precisely so I won't have to respond just because a few biters came near one of my solar panels.

I'm sure that someone will say that this is not a big deal and to just ignore it. However, sirens are intentionally designed to be maximally distracting so they will get your attention. When said attention isn't actually needed, that's almost the dictionary definition of "annoying." If the sirens don't bother you, that's fantastic. This simple improvement would dramatically improve my quality of life while in game, and I would bet I'm not the only one who would love this simple capability.

Thanks so much for your fantastic game and for your consideration of my suggestion. I've started looking for a mod to do this: if anybody knows of one I would very much welcome a pointer.

Hi,

Hou can find here a few similar suggestions

More specifically :
viewtopic.php?f=80&t=16566 (link collection)
viewtopic.php?f=6&t=12357
viewtopic.php?f=6&t=5453
viewtopic.php?f=6&t=5947
viewtopic.php?f=6&t=9394

I do agree however, but I think your suggestion doesn't push the idea far enough.The alert system could use a total overhaul.

Hello,

Steam says I have almost 16,000 hours of play time, haha. My biggest world runs 24/7 when I'm not doing something else on Steam, and can go weeks without intervention, but the FPS/UPS is only about 7.0. And so I've taken all my incredible (for me) blueprints and started a new world with 60/60 FPS/UPS on a brand new killer computer. But I digress.

I also support configurable alerts because I would either disable flashing lights entirely because it is so difficult to see what is going on in my factory. All my BPs have modules in them, and I'm doing a world with extremely scarce resources, so it takes absolutely forever to build these modules... so everywhere in my factory is just a mass of flashing lights and so difficult to see anything in map view. I have migraine sensitivity and flashing lights can set it off. Over the years I have learned to play through it... I simply enjoy it too much to quit.

Now you could say, Dude, you're playing this wrong. And maybe that's true. But the ongoing joy of this game is to continually be improving my BPs for efficient deployment in existing and new worlds, so I don't just want to pull all my modules out of the BPs... And yes, I could imagine building two exact sets off BPs, one with modules and one without... but I don't want to do all that monotonous work on hundreds of BPs.

Personally I would just shut off all Alerts in late game. But I support the notion of configurable alerts. It would be great to allow people to shut off all alerts - except manually added/programmed alerts. There are lots of requests for improvements / changes to Alerts and I definitely agree. I also like the element of "unintended consequences" of shutting off all alerts. How many times have we done something to a factory that seemed great at the time and later we are... "Oh... fuuuuuuu.....". I'm pretty sure that something bad will happen to my factory some day after shutting off alerts... that's part of the fun too... figuring out what went wrong, fixing it, avoiding it from happening in the future, then build the solution into automation... and on and on... Because the factory must grow right?

Thanks for the best game ever.

https://mods.factorio.com/mod/alert-center
https://mods.factorio.com/mod/silence-your-alerts-skye

Yeah, with the player on Nauvis only the vanilla system was (barely) acceptable,
but now with Gleba added (and the player potentially on neither of these two planets), it just isn't any more :

In my case
(DeathWorld Marathon, 93% Evolution on Nauvis)
I don't care at all about walls and conbots getting destroyed on Nauvis (which happens every minute or so by now).
Wake me up when they actually breach the wall enough to manage to destroy a turret !
(Which so far basically meant that a Behemoth worm is besieging me, and has only happened 3 times since I set up The Wall.)

Meanwhile since I landed on Gleba (and left and came back, and...), I am much more worried about ignoring the alerts, at least while that base is much less advanced.
So I keep getting stressed by the sounds and waste my time to check them only for them to be the relatively harmless Nauvis ones yet again.

(With an extra complication : I don't care about But at least they never trigger the «entity destroyed» sound.) (The new alert segregation per surface is very welcome, but still far short of what is now needed.)

So the suggested alert configuration would probably also need to be per surface now.

P.S.: : Oh, and I forgot about asteroids vs space platforms too !

A cool sound effect for configurable alerts lategame might be akin to a soft Geiger counter for damaged entities (maybe only damaged walls ?) (or even only destroyed walls, if late game enough ?)

Not sure if this is something that a mod could achieve though, there might be complexities in programming a sound like this ?