Factorio Forums

A feature of the game for over two years, since April 2018, 2 major releases ago, has been the ability to use item sprites as parts of string text in the game. Station names, chat messages, and various modded entities all benefit from this.

However, not only due to 90% of players not know about it, those that do regularly don't use it because to do so is extremely cumbersome. Even more so with mods, where the sprite path is either difficult or impossible to deduce, and there's usually not a wiki with it listed.

I propose a button (and shortcut) that causes a popup like the Windows Emoji keyboard. Pressing Winkey+[period] on Windows 10 brings up a popup with a search box. The popup in Factorio could be arranged exactly as the inventory/crafting screen. A search box which should get focus on opening should let them type names of the sprite path (optionally the "item name" itself too, as they sometimes differ significantly), and optionally arrow keys to navigate the options presented.

Clicking or highlighting with arrows and then pressing enter, places the sprite or it's [RICH TEXT EQUIVALENT] into the current chat cursor location.

Anything is better than what we have now. I like the idea of being able to do it all with the keyboard.

maybe as soon as you type the "[" the "emoji window" pops up and you can then tab to the search box.

Maybe make it even simpler, for example in telegram you can write ":+1" (without ") and it will let you choose to write along or to select the thumbs up emoji.

Shouldn't be too hard to make a mod that does this in a popup menu.

I love all of these suggestions, whether it's style or [ to open. Both good.

As for mods, I don't think mods are allowed much access to the chat box.