Factorio Forums

When searching in the crafting window, the search terms are only matched against the recipe titles. I would love to find recipes with matching ingredients, too.
Sometimes you want to know what those advanced circuits are needed for, to plan the layout of your factory...

I guess this is mainly a problem because I currently play with Bob's and Angel's mods and therefore have many more recipes than in a vanilla game, but it is a valid request for vanilla, too.

Another change I suggest would be to switch from "OR" to "AND" logic when multiple search terms are entered. When I enter "steel plate", I want to find, well, "steel plate" - so everything that has "steel" AND "plate" in it's name, not everything that has "steel" OR "plate in it's name.

Thank you very much for this great game, and sorry for any grammatical or spelling errors.

I would agree that the search function is pretty useless in its current state. Please include the ingredients.
Same goes for the research window. If it would include the effects in the search it would make way more sense.

There is a new mod called "What is it used for?" that kind of solves this problem, although ingame support would be superior and the mod does not adress research as DukeAI suggested.

Another suggestion for easy search for ingredients: When having an item at the mouse cursor and clicking the search icon of the crafting menu, it should directly search for recipes having that item as ingredient and recipes that produce given item.

I had an idea that the search function could be changed to search for more things, and display them a little differently.

I can only find objects by typing the name of them, but this doesn't really fit in to play with the reasons people might use a search engine.

I might try searching for green circuit boards to be able to select green circuit boards, but I could also be searching for any recipe that happens to include green circuit boards as a reagent.

Essentially, being able to use the in-game engine as an information resource rather than needing an external wiki. The research selection page already seems to have a great UI for this. Just mimicking the image of the object, and showing the images of the component objects.

I imagine this would be separated into two sections of a scrollable text section. The first section would be for the "these are the object names that you might be looking for" section, sorted by relevance as in search engines, and the second would be in the the "here are the objects that need this ingredient as a component in their makeup". It would help with planning factory layouts.

I realized that the search function for recipes only matches the recipe names. For vanilla this may sound like a non-issue because all the recipes are named after their products, right? Wrong!

Especially the chemical recipes in the oil processing pipeline have multiple products, and names that do not (always) reflect all their products.
This is becoming very confusing (for new players) who up to this point may have always looked for the product icon, or searched for the product name. Up until oil processing this method works, but oil processing is the first where this intuition about how the recipes work indeed breaks.

Below is an example of a late game state where I search for heavy oil among my recipes.
From searching for heavy oil, it is not clear how to produce it. In contrast, you can search for pretty much any other item or fluid and you will find a recipe for it. Either because the recipe name is the item name, or because the product name is explicitly mentioned in the recipe name. While I am aware that the next update of the icons will deal with the oil processing icons, the current icons are not very informative about the products for oil processing: But I think the current state of vanilla translates very well over to modded games. Overhaul mod packs like Angel's & Bob's or Pyanodon's have rather complicated recipes. And their names or icons do not always reflect their products.

In Angel's, several recipes list all products in the recipe name string just to have the search function find the recipe when players search for a product. However, the tooltips for the recipes already list all of the ingredients and all of the product so listing it again in the recipe name is really just a workaround for the search algorithm.

Currently most people playing heavily modded games rely on third party mods like FNEI just to find out how to craft a specific item. Considering that vanilla has a search function for the recipes, this sounds redundant.

I would like the recipe search in vanilla to search for products in addition to recipe names. Maybe just match primary products (which I believe may be defined internally for the different recipes). If other people think this makes searching obnoxious, maybe have this as an additional option next to fuzzy search. And if this becomes an option in the settings, maybe make an additional option to match ingredients, too.

Furthermore, this change would make it more in line with the current search function for technologies which already searches through the stuff that is unlocked and not only the technology names, see here:

It is quite frustrating to try and learn the build heirarchy in reverse. It is good to be able to search for a thing. It is also equally helpful to be able to search for the stuff a thing can be crafted into. And that regardless if you have the ingredients and/or technology for it, so you can plan better.

Also a similar previous suggestion, albeit only requesting the search to include recipe products : viewtopic.php?f=6&t=85218

This is pretty cool. I think it has everything you want.

https://factoriocheatsheet.com/

I think that this issue is manageable in vanilla. When you play overhaul mods that add unreasonableinteresting levels of complexity, you can always add one of

• FNEI
• Blueprintbook
• What is it really used for?

Or go all in and plan entire production chains with

• Helmod
• Factory Planner

Am i the only one that remembers that "Recipe explorer" was once a drafted feature? I thought it was also briefly described somewhere but i can't find anything.

https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-277
https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-282

I found a mod with that keywords:
https://mods.factorio.com/mod/RecExplo
viewtopic.php?t=56456

And
http://peter.hozak.info/recipe_explorer/

valneq wrote: ↑

Sat Oct 17, 2020 3:11 pm

I think that this issue is manageable in vanilla. When you play overhaul mods that add unreasonableinteresting levels of complexity, you can always add one of

• FNEI
• Blueprintbook
• What is it really used for?

Or go all in and plan entire production chains with

• Helmod
• Factory Planner

Don’t forget “Recipe book”:
https://mods.factorio.com/mod/RecipeBook

AmericanPatriot wrote: ↑

Sun Oct 18, 2020 5:41 pm

valneq wrote: ↑

Sat Oct 17, 2020 3:11 pm

I think that this issue is manageable in vanilla. When you play overhaul mods that add unreasonableinteresting levels of complexity, you can always add one of

• FNEI
• Blueprintbook
• What is it really used for?

Or go all in and plan entire production chains with

• Helmod
• Factory Planner

Don’t forget “Recipe book”:
https://mods.factorio.com/mod/RecipeBook

Damnit, I did it again! I meant Recipebook and I wrote Blueprintbook.

I am in necro mood today.

This is the same suggestion as 33669

A similar suggestion but not the same: 48078
It’s about searching the ingredients as well.

This is the same idea as this one: 33669