Status tooltip for ghost entities
Posted: Tue Mar 12, 2019 9:36 am
TL;DR
A way of seeing the construction logistic status for ghostsWhat ?
Since 0.17 the new status tooltip was introduced for inserters and assembly machines that shows what it is doing. For example, "Waiting for source items", "Working", and "Item ingredient shortage". I propose that this same status be added to ghost entities to show their construction status,"Not in logistic network"
"Worker en route [n] tiles away"
"No robots available"
"No [x] available within network"
Why ?
The addition of status as a quality of life feature has already sped up system fault fault finding for me as you can see at a glance why a machine is not working. You know when it says "shortage" to check for the classic inserter the wrong way problem. Adding this to ghosts would help make it clear why a building is not being constructed. A classic problem there is a robot stuck in an infinite charge loop over water, so the ghost will never build. That's sometimes the hardest one to prove - giving the player a numerical indicator of distance would let them see a loop. Sometimes you think a ghost is covered but it's in an isolated network.Adding this status won't tell the player the root cause problem nor will it hold their hand fixing it, but will point them in the right direction of things to check, just like the inserter status.
Hope you take this on board!
(ps. I'd really like if you could patch infinite worker loops over water out of the game, they're really really really silly and shouldn't be allowed to happen with no alert to the player that something is wrong until they notice half their blueprint isn't constructed 60 minutes later. But I know this would be quite a big logic rework for the network stuff)
