Factorio Forums

Concept: Either a Mk2 radar dish or tech-tree-expanded functionality that allows radars to point out resources in the unexplored wilds.

Details: While perusing the Facebook group, I've noticed a lot of people showing maps that seem to have little or no resources of a certain type - usually oil or stone - and everyone always seems to suggest that the player simply needs to explore farther afield. But why not have some kind of ability within the radar dishes that can point out new resource patches, or at least show an arrow so that the player knows which direction to explore?

I'm thinking of a radar that has a menu pop-up where the player can select a resource, then set the radar to scan. I imagine it taking a while, like a regular radar sweep, but showing position if the patch is in range of that radar, or an arrow pointing toward the nearest patch if it's outside of the scanning range.

There's no shortcuts to generating the map unfortunately, it's completely random so the only way this could work is when plopping down the mk2 it rapidly generates a huge area of map until it finds what you're looking for which if your settings are bad (like water only in starting area and you land filled it) then that could cause a lot of problems