Marker for Drills w/ No Resources

[xjohnson]

Electric mining drill has run out of resources. A small marker to indicate this visually.

[Harkonnen604]

That will kill your love for your drills. Right now when you see some drill is stationary (already a clue), you check the belt before it - is it full. If it's not, you hover your drill and see if it has resources. That brings your attention to your drill and your drill is happy. If you put a marker, the drill will be treated like a mechanism - no mark you're ok, mark - you're dismantled. In my latest games I stick to keep my mining farms to operate for like forever. Only when every drill is depleted, I dismantle the whole outpost, but not before. Why dismantle them after all? - if you don't carry 100 drils on your toolbelt, you're not worthy

[OdinYggd]

Its pretty easy to check.

Look to see if the drill is moving. If it isn't mouse over it to see what resources it has left. Can even do it while holding the deconstruction planner, so that miners that don't have anything left to retrieve are marked for the construction bots to pick up.

Its really easy to remove used up miners this way when I happen to be near a dig site. Of course a miner with no resources just sits there anyway, so there isn't really any big advantage to removing them at all unless you want to reclaim the space for other things.

[mattj256]

Is this what you want?

Auto Deconstruct mod
"This mod marks drills that have no more resources to mine for deconstruction."
https://mods.factorio.com/mods/mindmix/AutoDeconstruct

I think it would be great if this functionality were in vanilla.

[Radioactive Pretzels]

I agree with mattj.. auto-deconstruct flagging when exhausted (like the mod) would be nice in vanilla. Mostly for late-late game when you're going through the grinding part of maintaining dozens of fields to keep your megafactory supplied.

Make it a researchable feature. (I'm always in favor of adding more tech to research, especially optional tech like this)

[Engimage]

I think a special kind of a marker is a great idea. While AutoDeconstruct is a nice thing too having a marker is already a boost.

To extend the idea I would propose to use the same marker on assemblers that are missing resources for construction for some time (to prevent blinking). This would help monitoring status of your factory.
To extend this even further you might introduce a special kind of alert for such cases which could be moused over to see what buildings are in this state and show them on map/minimap as well.