Factorio Forums

TL;DR

Add colors such as Orange or Purple to the signal network and to the colors implemented by lamps.

What ?

Currently there are 9 color signals: red pink blue cyan green yellow white grey black. However, the last two are not recognized at all by lamps. Furthermore, white has a significantly different behavior than the other 6 colors. White casts a large diffuse light (standard lamp behavior) and the other six colors have a much smaller, much more intense circle of light.

Effectively this means that color coding things visually with lights only has 6 colors to use. More colors would allow for more options. It would also allow for more color depth if you go crazy and start converting images to giant arrays of lamps.

A baseline would be to implement white and grey to behave similarly to the other 6 colors. Black would also be neat, although it's not at all clear how a lamp would project a small circle of blackness.

A further extension would be to add signals such as Orange (255, 128, 0) and Purple (128, 0, 255). Even more options could be made available with dimmer versions of the existing colors, such as signal-dark-green in addition to signal-green.

The ultimate solution would be adding another mode to the lamps such that the color displayed is the actual RGB color based off the Red, Green, and Blue signals coming in.

Why ?

Added color signals would allow for better control of the circuit networks. Being able to color lamps with more colors would make factories look prettier and show more information when using lamps as visual indicators. Neither is particularly important, but it should also be pretty simple to implement.

Does https://mods.factorio.com/mod/color-coding do what you want?

It might also be relatively easy to change https://mods.factorio.com/mods/Klonan/E ... olor_Lamps to support 0.17, or you can ask the mod author if an update is planned.

That second one is perfect, actually! Would love to see that in the base game.

In fact, it was just updated. Thanks for pointing it out to me.

Dectorio also has a lamp color option

I know I'm Necroing, but this should seriously get more attention. It feels like a forgotten detail at this point, but I think it would add more to the game than the work required to implement it is.

Please add more colours to lamps, and maybe let us choose whether the light reach is near or far.

A bit late to the party, but Klonan's Expanded Color Lamps approach is pretty simple and could easily be adapted for 1.1.
Although RPG colored lamps sounds interesting for those in-factorio-displays...

I believe (of course) my colour system (see screenshots) is optimal. Only orange is missing (and violet instead of pink), further every colour signal should also have a light colour. - This should be "vanilla". Maybe someone even wants brown lights and I might see "some use" for pink... THAT's a job for mods...