Factorio Forums

A vary small addition that may add more of a shed of realism to the whole game. machines placed for a long time on grass or sand will begin to show around machines. And if they are removed a noticlable putline or "footprint" can be seen that will also fade over time.The whole why is solely because it adds more realism to the game and it is a basic aesthetic

Tl;DR: Machines blend into the environment the longer they are there

Everything about writing this game is efficiency. In the latest FFF discussion they said they don't want to put in a check for overlapping rails to reduce CPU use.

Yes I agree it would be neat but I doubt it's going to even be considered.

Why not? It's basically same game-machanic with the desease of the forrest-trees under pollution.
The most afford goes into the graphics and in the end I doubt, that most players will recognise this little changes.

This could even be helpful gameplay-wise:
1) As visual indicator, how long ago something was placed/removed.
2) During modifying factory, to see where buildings were before.

I suppose as a graphics option that can be disabled with a checkbox.

Grass and leaves are torture testing for most graphics capabilities, and with factorio already pushing the limits in many areas something like this would have to be an optional feature for people who had enough computing power to use it.

Trees are built into the pollution mechanic and are most likely done per chunk. This suggestion would be adding ticks to every machine (as they have to be calculated separately) so major difference.

Most players would probably notice after removing a bunch of old assemblers and think "oh that's neat!" then mostly forget about the feature. Yes it would be a neat feature but IMO not worth the development or processing time.

I don't think it would be as much processing time. The process would be slow, so it don't need to be calculated every tick. I think that one update per 15 seconds would be enough. In this case 1/900 of all buildings would be calculating in every tick. This is nothing, compared to transport belts or inserters.