Factorio Forums

I was standing in my nuclear power plant and noticed that there's no clear way to tell if my heat exchangers were actually working. I have a large steam buffer, and one of my custom alarms warned me that it was running low. In a panic I checked the heat exchangers and saw 1.7 steam in each of them, which seemed wrong. Only after checking the water level and temperature could I be sure that they were working and not bugged. (I know bugs are rare in Factorio, but I hadn't played in a few months, so the possibility of edge-case bugs due save migration is in the back of my mind.)

So I think some visual indicator (maybe a little glow like in the item icon) when the heat exchanger is producing steam would be good.

The other part of this suggestion is to add an ambient sound effect to the nuclear reactor. I don't know what real nuclear reactors sound like, but I think you could come up with something cool to match the ominous visuals. It just seems a bit weird to me that all of those pipes and compartments are completely silent.

your nuke might sound like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IrtGp8hv-0Y

And have you tried mods? there's one called bottleneck that lets you see at a glance with the same thing on all constructions if a machine is working (with a green light), if it has no output (and is filled and can't do any more work in yellow) or if it has no input (with a red light indicating not enough ingredients)

Currently it can be quite annoying to see whether a heat exchanger is working or not. You have to mouseover to see the temperature, and at exactly 500 degrees I have the feeling it is sometimes not working (maybe because it is 499.9 and rounded up in display?) -- but that might just be me. I often isolate the output pipes and check if steam is produced, but obviously that's a lot of work per exchanger.

Suggestion: add a visual clue to active heat exchangers. Make them glow, have some steam exchange, or something like that.

Alternative/additional: make heat exchangers output their steam production to the circuit network, then we can build our own activity LEDs if we really want

Additional suggestion: make heat pipes flow when at >500 degrees. That would be really useful (and cool) to see the spread of heat from the reactor, and it is at least as realistic as uranium ore glowing green

JohnyDL wrote:your nuke might sound like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IrtGp8hv-0Y

And have you tried mods? there's one called bottleneck that lets you see at a glance with the same thing on all constructions if a machine is working (with a green light), if it has no output (and is filled and can't do any more work in yellow) or if it has no input (with a red light indicating not enough ingredients)

I use bottleneck, but AFAIK it doesn't work on heat exchangers. I think the problem is that the mod works by checking assembler inventory: no input -> red, (input and) full output -> yellow, input and empty output -> green. Heat exchangers have no inventory so can't be checked that way. Maybe bottleneck can be adjusted to include heat exchangers (and turbines) by relying on some other mechanism, but I have no idea whether it is possible at all for a mod.

Edit: I've added a feature request: https://mods.factorio.com/mods/trold/Bo ... sion/20136

We have warning icons for when an entity doesn't have fuel or electricity, but we don't have one for heat. Something like this maybe?